Talar Chahinian’s new book, Stateless: The Politics of the Armenian Language in Exile, focuses on two key moments and places of Western Armenian literary history, post-WWI Paris and post-WW II Beirut, to examine how a stateless language sustained itself in a diasporic setting. In it, by analyzing the public debates, critical writings, and the creative works of writers gathered around the journal Menk and writers gathered around the Writers’ Association of Syria and Lebanon (WASL), she comparatively interrogates competing models of literary production and their intersection with Western Armenian’s prolonged linguistic vitality.
This presentation works backward and takes the 1991 establishment of the Republic of Armenia as a departure point to ask: What is the politics of language that emerged as a result of Eastern Armenian being sanctioned by a state? In examining the cultural impact of independence on an exilic, post-genocide linguistic form, it traces language standardization efforts in the Middle East, where intellectuals and writers positioned Western Armenian against Soviet Armenia and developed a national rubric for language and literature in exile. Chahinian argues that while the adoption of the “national” category as the organizing logic of literary production had short-term generative effects, it proved detrimental to the long-term survival of this stateless language, for it ignored the multifarious composition of diaspora communities.

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 (Syracuse University Press, 2023) 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). She co-edits Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies and contributes regularly to the literary magazine Pakin.