1/3/2018 Decolonizing Armenia: Metropole and Periphery in the Era of Postsocialism | Feminism and Gender Democracy http://www.feminism-boell.org/en/2017/12/07/decolonizing-armenia-metropole-and-periphery-era-postsocialism 1/8 Decolonizing Armenia: Metropole and Periphery in the Era of Postsocialism Article in Armenian can be read 7. December 2017 by Creator: Hamlet Melkumyan. All rights reserved. At many protests in Armenia today, during clashes with the police or in chanting slogans aimed at the ruling Republican Party or governmental officials at large, there is a certain language that almost always, as if inevitably, arises: the language of accusation not formed through political claims necessarily, but through shame. Amot, Amot! ”Shame! Shame!), chant protesters. And sometimes these accusations of shame break off into smaller, more personal calls: Turk! You are Turks! Aren’t you ashamed of yourselves?! Turks, of course, are Armenians’ eternal enemies – the perpetrators of the 1915 Genocide. These calls of shame are a congealment of a widespread feeling in the postsocialist Republic - that today’s political and economic elite are a shameless mockery of what should have been an independent Armenian government in 1991. Over the past few years, there has been a decolonization project brewing within the grassroots of the country. Popular names of initiatives like Menq enq mer yerkiry ”ȊWe are our countryȋ) and Nor Hayasdan ”New Armenia) point to a process that, while not always referred to as decolonization through emic categories, looks a lot like it. These decolonizing projects can perhaps be traced back to February 2012, when activists occupied Mashtots Park in the central district of Yerevan. The Mashtots Park movement and occupation began when city officials removed boutiques that were previously on Abovyan St. in Central Yerevan, negotiating with the owners to move them, instead, to Aram St. on Mashtots Ave., the location of the park. The park, however, was a part of the public commons, and activists saw the placement of boutiques there as not only the destruction of another green zone in the city, but a violation of public space. Activists hindered the construction of the new market zone by creating a picket line to block the entrance of concrete-mixing trucks. The Mashtots Park movement began as a claim for the park to remain public commons. However, it quickly turned into a larger movement against the corruption and extra-legal moves by an oligarchy class that has come to power in the country’s post-Soviet era. In Wretched of the Earth Frantz Fanon – considered one of the founders of postcolonial thought – asks: ȊWhen can it be said that the situation is ripe for a national liberation movement? What should be the first line of action? Because decolonization comes in many shapes, reason wavers and abstains from declaring what is a true decolonization and what is notȋ ”2004: 21). Fanon – in his earlier work Black Skin, White Mask - was particularly interested in the pathology of colonization – the pathology that stemmed from centuries of the black man, or the colonized, being produced within the conditions of violence set forth by the colonizer. In other words, the pathology that stems from the asymmetrical relationship between the metropole and the periphery of the colonial situation ”2008). In this article, I take up this relationship in a quite different context – not that of the postcolonial, but of the postsocialist, and particularly in the postsocialist Republic of Armenia. Armenians have been colonized, recolonized and neo-colonized throughout their history. In a Fanonian vein, Armenia has been historically produced as colonized - although not precisely in the same ways as through the frameworks of Western imperialism – making up national identity and senses of being through the constant and looming threat of mightier armies. Armenia’s founding myth itself tells the story of the giant Hayk, who, through his particularly skilled use of the bow and arrow, was able to defeat Bel, also a giant and a warrior with a massive army who had taken all the lands and conquered all the peoples in the new world after the great flood. Despite this founding myth, Armenia has been a part of various empires – from the Persian, to the Mongolian, the Ottoman, and most recently the Soviet Union. The latter, however, was not felt as colonization necessarily. on this link. Tamar Shirinian