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Stateless 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), I comparatively interrogate competing models of literary production and their intersection with Western Armenian’s 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 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.
The event is co-sponsored by the Columbia University Armenian Center, the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS), and the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research NAASR).