Nouer la liesse au massacre

This first section examines the enduring presence of the genocide in the public sphere of the 1930s. It challenges the widespread notion that the crime was relegated to silence following the founding of the Republic and only reemerged in public debate from the 1970s onward. In contrast to a historiography that privileges printed sources—particularly memoirs—an analysis of archival material produced by provincial actors fully embedded within the state-party apparatus reveals the material and immaterial persistence of the crime in interwar Turkey. Conceived as a mechanism linking the legal state to the population, the republican celebration offers, at the local level, a privileged site for observing such resurgences. The analysis proceeds in two parts: first, a reflection on the very category of the “post-genocidal,” as it has developed over the past fifteen years within the field of contemporary Turkish studies; second, a field-based inquiry centered on the People’s House of Gaziantep. The aim is to trace the continuities—particularly biographical—between extreme violence and the public staging of politics.