From Salvation to Struggle: Commemoration, Affect, and Agency in Cyprus

Abstract

This article explores the divisive commemoration of the battle of Erenköy, which has gained significance since the early 2000s in a resignifying of Turkish Cypriot history. Over time, the commemoration has shifted from a triumphalism symbolized in monuments to an act of mourning at the graves of the fallen. We show through this commemoration how actors have repurposed official narratives, deterritorializing them from the terrain of nationalist ideology and its countermemory and reterritorializing them in ways that look similar but are affectively quite different. We argue that this repurposing of the ritual produces an affect of agency among participants that is open-ended and future oriented.