Dr. Chahinian Introduces Her New Book on Western Armenian

Ani Sargsyan
Staff Writer

On Friday, February 7, 2025, the Armenian Studies Program welcomed guest speaker Dr. Talar Chahinian for her lecture “Language Politics and Literary Creation in the Armenian Diaspora’s Formative Years.” Dr. Chahinian spoke about her recent book, Stateless: The Politics of Armenian Language in Exile, which focuses on two key moments and locations of Western Armenian literary history: one is post-World War I Paris, and the other is post-World War II Beirut. She examines how a stateless language sustained itself in a diasporic setting. In her book, Dr. Chahinian interrogates “competing models of literary production and their intersection with Western Armenian prolonged linguistic vitality.”

Talar Chahinian holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UCLA and lectures in the Program for Armenian Studies at UC Irvine, where she is also Visiting Faculty in the Department of Comparative Literature. She is the author of the award-winning Stateless: The Politics of the Armenian Language in Exile and co-editor, along with Tsolin Nalbantian and Sossie Kasbarian, of The Armenian Diaspora and Stateless Power: Collective Identity in the Transnational 20th Century (Bloomsbury Press, 2023).

Dr. Chahinian began the lecture by working backwards to introduce the key moments that informed her book’s retrospective line of inquiry. She began with some questions that she clarified were not the topics of her book, however they informed the lens through which she examined the process of molding literary belonging in a language in exile in the absence of state institutions. These questions included, “How do we think of Armenian culture, literature and language differently since 1991? What is the politics of language that emerges because of Eastern Armenian being sanctioned by a state? What happens to the status and future of Western Armenian?”

The other approach of her research on this topic, is the status of Western Armenian today – an endangered language. In 2010, UNESCO qualified Western Armenian as “definitely endangered” in its six scale categorization. This implies that children no longer learn their mother tongue in their home. Dr. Chahinian discussed the Western Armenian presence in the print world, and how the violent origins of dispersion affected the development of literature and language.

Dr. Chahinian explored how the aesthetic development and ideological framework of literature changed. She especially emphasized that in the years following World War I, the Paris-based “Menk” writers imagined the new Western Armenian world as consisting of a “pluralistic transnational network of communities,” and the post-World War II writers who gathered in the Middle East adopted a “homogenous national model” centralized in Beirut.

Dr. Chahinian gave several examples examples of vocabulary transformation. The word genocide, used to have different terminology to express this experience that “language would fail in expressing,” resulting in a plurality of terms. The same is for the case of the word diaspora.

This group of Armenians were first referred to as Trkahayutyun (Turkish Armenians), then it became more common to describe them with phrases like “Dispersed Armenians,” “Community Armenians,” “Migrant Armenians,” “Armenians Abroad,” before finally being referred to as the Diaspora.

Dr. Chahinian briefly talked about the competing models – post-World War I Paris, and the post-World War II years based in Beirut. “On one hand, we have a model that grounds its narratives in the host nation’s locale.” stated Dr. Chahinian, “It uses Western Armenian as a medium to represent the experience of exile. On the other hand, we have a model that evades the host nation’s locale and rather grounds itself in the language.”

Dr. Talar Chahinian explored more about her book in the lecture, bringing the competing models to light and reflecting the influence they had on the Western Armenian language.