ARMENIAN INSTITUTE

LECTURE

ՕՐՕՐ ՄԱՅՐ ՀԱՅԱՍՏԱՆԻՆ

OROR MAYR HAYASDANIN: ON HOME, DISPLACEMENT AND THE ARMENIAN LULLABIES

By Melissa Bilal

Monday, 7 June 2010, at 7:30 pm

Khalili Lecture Theatre, SOAS, Russell Square, WC1H 0XG

(Tube: Russell Square)

Focusing on specific examples, Melissa Bilal will present ethnographic and historical accounts of Armenian lullabies becoming mediums of expressing gendered experiences of home as well as mapping, imagining, modernising, nationalising or mythologizing a homeland. She will consider these practices as performances of belonging to a space or a people. An Armenian lullaby in Turkey, she argues, is a metonym that functions on the margins of belonging and displacement, the speakable and the unspeakable, memory and the impossibility of memory, modernity and the end of modernity.

Melissa Bilal is a graduate student of ethnomusicology at the University of Chicago, Department of Music. She received her BA and MA from Boğaziçi University, Sociology Department. Her dissertation research focuses on the genealogy of Armenian lullabies from the late 19th century to the present. She is the co–editor (with Lerna Ekmekçioğlu, 2006) of Bir Adalet Feryadı: Osmanlı’dan Türkiye’ye Beş Ermeni Feminist Yazar 1862–1933 (A Cry for Justice: Five Armenian Feminist Writers from Ottomans to Turkey (1862–1933) and author of numerous articles and chapters in edited volumes.

MY DEAR BROTHER: ARMENIAN LIFE IN TURKEY 100 YEARS AGO

Project supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund

The Armenian Institute is grateful to the Heritage Lottery Fund for supporting this and other forthcoming events under the project: My Dear Brother: Armenian Life in Turkey 100 Years Ago.

The Armenian Institute is a London-based registered charity dedicated to making Armenian culture and history a living experience, through innovative programmes, educational resources, workshops, exhibits and performances. Its work is supported by friends, patrons and voluntary donations. For more information about the Armenian Institute or to find out about supporting the important work of the Institute, please visit our website at www.armenianinstitute.org.uk, contact us at info@armenianinstitute.org.uk or call 020 7978 9104. If you would like your email address to be removed from the list, please send an email with "remove" in the subject heading to info@armenianinstitute.org.uk.