Emotional maps of Shushi: Landscapes of traumatic memory in synchronic and diachronic perspective

Abstract

The urban folklore, explored through the prism of dozens of interviews, encompasses a vast layer of unwritten history - oral narratives shaped by the workings of (selective) memory - and is understood by the author as a complex of powerful expressive techniques emerging from below. In studying the mental maps of the city of Shushi through the eyes of its residents, the author examines the sense of local place, its ethnization, intertextuality, and indexed memory within the processuality of these overlapping phenomena, the workings of memory, and the construction of identities. Navigating through the ruptures of long-standing and epochal transformations of meanings and ethno-politics, the author observes the city’s quarters through various lenses: power relations and influence, (geo-)politics of memory, neighborhood, conflict, human rights, and policies of inclusion and exclusion. The study also focuses on the palimpsestic memory of ethnic confrontation in the city of Shushi/Shusha, Nagorno-Karabakh. The author proposes to examine the conceptual maps of the city through the prism of personal experiences of traumatic events in a comparative perspective from 1920 to 2020, as well as to compare the experiences of multiple episodes of violent displacement, massacres, and war through a combination of methods - mental mapping, in-depth interviews, and comparative analysis of individual biographies. Originally written in Russian, the text was later translated into Armenian and English and published in the bilingual volume Shushi: Mental Mapping (eds. Tigran Amiryan and Evia Karapetyan) in Yerevan in 2021. A second edition appeared in 2023. This marks the first publication of the original Russian-language version.