Stateless: The Politics of the Armenian Language in Exile

by Talar Chahinian

Stateless: The Politics of the Armenian Language in Exile focuses on two centers of Western Armenian literary production following the Armenian genocide to examine the intersection of violence and art, displacement and language vitality. In looking at the work of a post WWI Paris-based, short-lived transnational literary movement called Menk [We], it explores how the politically violent origins of dispersion informed the aesthetic development of a new literature and the articulation of literary belonging in exile. In looking at the post WWII activities and publications of the Writers' Association of Syria and Lebanon, it traces how the Armenian diaspora's literature was nationalized in the absence of state institutions. It shows that when Beirut took over as the nucleus of the diaspora's literary activity and intellectuals began to construct a unified and coherent narrative of the diaspora, the city came to be positioned as the thread that connected the current activities to the pre-1915 literary tradition and the Menk generation was excluded from the modern Armenian literary canon due to its writers' attempts to understand diasporic experience as interrupted time. Ultimately, it argues that the adoption of the category of the "national" as the organizing logic of literary production in a diaspora setting limited the long-term vitality of this stateless language, for it ignored the multifarious composition of diaspora communities.

296 pages, Hardcover

First published February 20, 2023

Reviews

[Madison Y.]

Excellent literary consideration of the Armenian diaspora, validating the ways in which new creative models can thrive in conditions such as diaspora rather than seeing diaspora as a death sentence. This is especially pronounced in the treatment of the Մենք group out of France, whose way of representing the trauma of surviving and living beyond the genocide has long been neglected because it is not a direct representation of the event itself. I found the last section—on the tensions between Eastern Armenian and Western Armenian writers as manifest in literary organizations and conferences—to be especially fascinating. Overall, one of my favorite reads of 2023 and incredibly accessible for an academic text!

[Hayk]

Great dive into the literary history and general history of the diaspora. Although I agree that Armenians in the diaspora should 'embrace' their individual situations as diasporans, I think to detach themselves from any notion of an ancestral homeland would put them at risk of assimilation.

[Nara]

Truly amazing book! I’m honored to have been one of Tamar Chahinian’s students. This book grapples with the //state// of the endangered language of Western Armenian, and question what it means for it to represent a post-Genocide diaspora. Loved it