One Island, Many Histories:
Rethinking the Politics of the Past in Cyprus
PRIO Cyprus Centre 3rd Annual Conference
28-29 November 2008
One of the most divisive elements of the Cyprus conflict is the writing of Cyprus’ history. That history has been dominated by the two main communities, Greek and Turkish, who have written very different versions of the past five hundred years in the island. Those differing narrative strands have often come into conflict and have constituted one of the major impediments to reconciliation. At the same time, the dominance of these nationalist narratives has led to the exclusion of other groups, of other histories, and of other narrative possibilities. This conference aims to investigate how those narratives have emerged, how they are reproduced, and what questions we might ask about the production of those narratives that would help us reorient history writing from a form of division to a form of dialogue.
With this aim in mind, the conference is organized around a set of methodological and historiographical questions. Because the questions that historians ask shape the results that they find, this conference proposes that new questions are important for a new orientation. Through this historiographical approach, we seek to investigate the ways in which history is and has been written in the island, as well as what new ways of thinking about the past may be productive for the future.
Program: Friday 28 November 2008
9:30-10:00 Registration
10:00-10:30 Welcome
10:30-11:45 Keynote address (Ledra Palace with video link to Fulbright):
Engin Akarlı, Joukowsky Family Distinguished Professor of Modern Middle East History and Professor of History, Brown University
Trying to Make Global Sense of Particularities of Ottoman History
11:45-12:00 Break
12:00-14:00 Session 1 (Ledra Palace):
Constructing official histories
Discussant: Penelope Papailias, University of Thessaly
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Mete Hatay and Yiannis Papadakis:
A Comparison of Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot Historiography of Cyprus -- 1950s to the present
Out of the Frame: The Early 1960s Then and Now
Beyond the History Textbook Debate: Official Histories in Greek-Cypriot Geography and Civics Curricula
12:00-14:00 Session 2 (Fulbright Centre):
Concepts of belonging: Beyond dichotomous identities?
Discussant: Ayhan Aktar, Istanbul Bilgi University
Reconciliation through Remembrance
“Sense of Belonging to the Island” in Turkish Cypriot Novels and Memoirs
Re/producing Refugees in the Republic of Cyprus: The Case
of the Refugee Mothers Movement
12:00-14:00 Session 3 (Goethe Centre): Populist paradigms
Discussant: Gül İnanç, Eastern Mediterranean University
Conspiracy Theories and Cypriot History: The Comfort of Commonly Perceived Enemies
Conspiracy Theories and the Decolonization of Cyprus under the Weight of Historical Evidence
Friend or Foe – Post-1974 Immigrants to Northern Cyprus
14:00-15:30 Lunch break at Chateau Status
15:30-17:30 Session 4 (Ledra Palace):
Official vs. unofficial histories
Discussant: Erol Kaymak, Eastern Mediterranean University
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Evropi Chatzipanagiotidou:
The “Left-overs” of History: Anti-nationalist Discourses in
Cyprus and the Cypriot Diaspora
The Crossings since 2003: Cypriot Women's “Her-Stories”
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Charis Psaltis and Chara Makriyianni:
Collective Memory and Intergroup Trust, Contact and National Identities in the Past-Present-Future Transition
15:30-17:30 Session 5 (Fulbright Centre): Place and belonging
Discussant: Socrates Stratis, University of Cyprus
Colonialism as a Heterotopic Condition: Rethinking the
History of Colonial Politics in Cyprus
Divided Memory and Architecture in Nicosia
Agia Sophia as a Location of Peace
15:30-17:30 Session 6 (Goethe Centre):
Subalternities 1: Colonialism and difference
Discussant: Altay Nevzat, Eastern Mediterranean University
The Transition from the Dominant Ottoman “Millet” to the
Muslim Community of Cyprus and the Genesis of Turk -Cypriot
Nationalism, 1878-1922: The Role of the British Colonial
Administration.
The British "Gift": Ottoman Approaches to the British
Administration of Cyprus
Imperialism, Power and Identity in the Orthodox Cypriot Community from the Ottomans to the British
Program: Saturday 29 November 2008
10:00-11:15 Keynote address (Ledra Palace with video link to Fulbright):
Gyanendra Pandey
Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of History,
Emory University
The Contours of Violence: Ordinary, Extraordinary, and
Epistemic
11:15-11:30 Break
11:30-13:30 Session 7 (Ledra Palace): Between history and memory
Discussant: Leyla Neyzi, Sabancı University
An Anthropological Approach to the Politics of History and
Memory: Data and Dilemmas from a Cyprus Population, with
Wider Implications
Imagining Homelands: Poetics and Performance among Cypriot Armenians
Senses of Belonging and “Belongings” and Making “Home”
away from “Home”
The Fractures of a Struggle: Remembering and Forgetting Erenköy
11:30-13:30 Session 8 (Fulbright Centre): Other histories
and “others’” histories
Discussant: Rolandos Katsiaounis, Cyprus Research Centre
Gauging the Cypriot Cycles of Deviance: Panics of Normlessness and the Institutional Clustering of People—The Story of Ascending/Descending Classes in a Strange Modernity 1571-2010
Working Class Political Culture and Mechanisms Setting the Parameters of Permissible Public Discourse
Turkish Cypriot Perceptions of Turkish “Settlers” since 1974 – Reaction to Turkish Occupation or a Case of Westerncentric Racism?
13:30-15:00 Lunch break at Chateau Status
15:00-17:00 Session 9 (Ledra Palace): History, “truth,” and trauma
Discussant: Olga Demetriou, PRIO Cyprus Centre
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Paige Arthur and Virginia Ladisch:
Truth-telling and Public History: Possibilities for Cyprus?
Memory, Truth, and the Journey towards a New Past
Cyprus Virilities and (Un)anchored Secrets: Accumulations, Violence, and Ontological (In)securities
We Need to Belong to a Non-Cypriot History
15:00-17:00 Session 10 (Fulbright Centre): Subalternities 2:
Colonialism, “civilization,” and the subject
Discussant: Rebecca Bryant, George Mason University
The Framing of Empire: Cyprus and Cypriots through British Eyes, 1878-1960
The Many Faces of the Cypriot Colonial Civil Servant: The Strategic Value of “Identity”
«Είχον πάθει οι οφθαλμοί» / “For the Passion of my Eyes”:
The Teaching of English, Governmentality and the Neoliberal
Desires of Governmental Education in Cyprus, 1878-1901.
17:15-17:45 Concluding remarks (Ledra Palace)
18:30-19:30 Book launch (Ledra Palace):
Peter Loizos, Iron in the Soul: Displacement, Livelihood, and Health in Cyprus
Discussants: Yiannis Papadakis, University of Cyprus
Rebecca Bryant, George Mason University
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