Talar Chahinian offers an excellent and timely reassessment of 20th-century Western Armenian literary history along a political axis in Stateless: The Politics of the Armenian Language in Exile. She does this by shedding light on two pivotal literary movements that developed out of the wake of different world wars. The first movement, known as Menk (We), was established in Paris by a loose cohort of male novelists who were, in many cases, orphaned literally and figuratively by genocide. These figures, including luminaries such as Shahan Shahnur, Zareh Vorpuni, Hrach Zartarian, and Nigoghos Sarafian, loosely tracked the modernist call to usher “newness” into literary production by rejecting the aesthetics, subjects, and literary forms of the past. Although this cohort’s efforts as a unified collective were short-lived, beginning formally with the publication of the journal Menk‘ in 1931 and ending after a literary scandal that took place roughly a year later, its afterlives would play an outsized role in discussions on the purpose of Armenian literature—and by extension, the Western Armenian language—during the following two decades. Fittingly, then, the book’s second case study examines a reaction both to Menk and to the politics of literary production in Soviet Armenia. This more reactionary literary movement cast post–World War II Beirut as the new center of Western Armenian literary production, advocating for more straightforward narratives about Armenian history, a diasporic politics of “return” to a real or imagined homeland, and finally a new hayets‘i (productively translated by Chahinian as “Armenian-oriented”) grounding for novels and poetry, which adopted national themes and nationalist concerns. Chahinian’s fundamental contention is that this shift “mandated that literature be produced within a centered ‘national’ category rather than a decentered ‘transnational’ one” (p. 5), hobbling Armenian literary production by subordinating it to a new politics of the diaspora that tended to valorize unity and homogeneity over the previous generation’s insistence on dispersion and, to a limited extent, diversity.

Crucially, as Chahinian posits, this shift heralded not only an aesthetic and political sea change, but also a gradual linguistic transformation as it spurred another wave of standardizing and teaching Western Armenian across the diaspora. It also continued to bind Western Armenian to the expectation that languages should be correlated with nation–states, and thereby further politicized the production of Western Armenian literature within a dialectic of diaspora and homeland. Of course, Western Armenian, which was first standardized (or “modernized,” in Chahinian’s terms) in the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century, has never been the language of any nation–state; therefore, what it is “exiled” from is not a form of statehood but rather a territory and a set of historical circumstances that could be called a way of life. In the most provocative argument of the book, Chahinian argues that the literary and political shift from Paris to Beirut also was limiting for Western Armenian more broadly. Specifically, this shift located the natural resting place of Western Armenian in the nation-form, instead of allowing it to develop in a more decentralized manner, alongside its literature. In this telling, the uses of Western Armenian were gradually constrained and politicized, seemingly for the benefit of a state that did not quite exist.

Stateless is divided into two parts—dedicated to post–World War I Paris and post–World War II Beirut—each comprising three chapters. Within this narrative arc, the book makes a number of localized arguments by engaging with the fields of trauma studies, diaspora studies, and world literature. In the first part, Chahinian situates the generation of the Menk novelists against the historical backdrop of other literary movements in early 20th-century Paris, as well as in dialogue with the previous generation of Western Armenian writers. This historicization is accompanied by masterful close readings of various Menk novelists, in particular Vorpuni, Zartarian, Sarafian, and Shahnur (whose reception in Beirut also is the focal point of Chapter 4). Contrary to the hayets‘i literature of post–World War II Beirut, the Menk writers chose not to disclose the historical facts of the Armenian genocide directly. Instead, as Chahinian demonstrates, they focused on the experiences of living in France as refugees, frequently adopting themes such as the breakdown of kinship structures, the loss of (and unsuccessful attempts to revive) patriarchy, and incest between siblings. Through these veiled narratives, the Menk novelists strove to depict the experience of past traumas indexically, Chahinian writes, and almost never directly in mimetic terms. Paradoxically, as she argues, the space of exile was generative for these male writers, who made room in a limited capacity for the “Other” (frequently, French women, whose bodies became contested sites of desire and loathing in such novels), even while their protagonists suffered from unspoken tragedies that could never be resolved. Perhaps the keenest insight of this section is that these writers tended most of all to be concerned with ruptures in time, in the aftermath of World War I, rather than ruptures of place as one might expect from a community of basically stateless refugees. In other words, what they attempted to mourn was not the loss of a homeland but rather a historical and genealogical continuity that could give their present meaning. The elusiveness of meaning haunts these novels, thematized through different ambivalent and often disturbing sexual encounters with “Others,” which further serve to disarticulate their protagonists from an Armenian past and conjoin them to the presents and futures of “foreigners.”

The drive to repair historical continuity reasserts itself in the second part of Stateless, which focuses on later (mis)readings of Shahnur during a period of aesthetic and political change—that is, another moment of rejecting the aesthetic values of the past, and in this case, those of Menk in particular. These chapters revolve around the 1946 Congress of the Soviet Writers’ Union in Soviet Armenia, which included for the first time representatives from the diaspora, and the 1948 Conference of Middle Eastern Armenian Writers, which was a direct response to Soviet ideology. First, the 1946 Soviet conference sought to account for Western Armenian literature by more or less declaring it dead on arrival, insisting that Western Armenian authors must unify with Soviet Armenia and reorient themselves around the idea of a homeland if they were to have any longevity or existential utility. In contrast, the 1948 Middle Eastern conference countered by proposing a more robust unity across the “diaspora,” now based in a kind of linguistic nationalism that would serve as proxy to an unavailable motherland. Literary production, which now sometimes privileged poetry over the novel, was to become fundamentally “Armenian oriented,” or reconnected to its glorious and distant past through contemporaneous efforts of fashioning a new literary canon and a language pedagogy in Lebanon and Syria. As Chahinian observes, this development led to an emphasis on “language purification and cleansing, rather than on development and dynamism” (p. 183), and therefore coalesced around somewhat reactionary and exclusionary terms. Rather than read this moment in time as another rebirth of the Western Armenian language and cultural production, as is more often done, Chahinian places it instead within a nuanced historical frame, moreover one that tends to consider the ideology of this movement part of a cautionary tale.

In this way, Stateless brings a new clarity to the politics of 20th-century Western Armenian literary production. It deserves to stand alongside other significant contributions to the field of modern Armenian literary history in recent decades, including studies by Marc Nichanian, Krikor Beledian, and Kevork Bardakjian. As its title generally implies, this is first and foremost the story of a political struggle over aesthetic uses of language, and as such Stateless skews more toward a history of the Western Armenian “literary” language in exile, or at least the Western Armenian novel in exile, than it does of language writ large, although they are certainly intertwined. Chahinian ends the book by gesturing toward a handful of contemporary examples of Western Armenian literary production around the globe, produced by dispersed writers, with different politics, who are not necessarily part of any movement save for being flag-bearers of a collective urgency after UNESCO’s “definitely endangered” classification of Armenian in 2010. These gestures conclude with a call to resist placing this literary history within the “centers” of the nation or the diaspora, as did the 1946 and 1948 conferences, and instead to explore what new political and literary assessments might be awaiting the relatively neglected corpus of Western Armenian literature, just off-map.

Such gestures, like the book itself, serve as a fruitful invitation to reimagine the contours of this story in additional ways, and it is on that invitation that I wish to linger briefly here. One of the secondary but potentially long-lasting contributions of Stateless may be to facilitate a reinvigorated conversation in the field on the capaciousness of the category of both the “political” and the “exile” in Western Armenian literature, and how disparate figures might help us understand this fraught territory in additional pluralistic and decentered ways. One wonders especially about the Western Armenian writers who were seemingly not part of the ideological conversation that emerged between 20th-century Paris and Beirut, or at least were more distant interlocutors within it. For instance, other renowned authors still experimented dynamically with “newness” in literature after World War II—such as, for example, the avant-garde poet Zahrad in Istanbul, whose Western Armenian verses strove to capture a flavor of the idiomatic and quotidian speech of his neighborhood, and yet whose status as a producer of “exilic” literature, to the extent that the category applies, points to radically different orientations of inclusion and exclusion within the Republic of Turkey. How, too, might the field better account for those writers who were never deemed significant enough to be incorporated into the canon of Western Armenian literature in the first place, including amateur and self-published authors in the 1940s and 1950s American Midwest, who did nothing so daring with their literary form, yet still captured diverse aspects of American life in their Western Armenian tongue? These authors also clearly found something generative in their contact with the “non-Armenian,” even though they did not figure otherness in the same way or in the same starkly binary terms as Menk writers in Paris.

This is, perhaps, a good thing: although Chahinian rightly holds up the Menk writers as a counterfactual for the kind of dynamism that Western Armenian literature might have possessed following World War II, and still is in the process of claiming, it seems difficult to recuperate Menk’s own highly gendered politics of figuring “otherness” for any aesthetic project today. Stateless ultimately asks us not to return to the politics of past, exactly, but rather to make room for other “little Armenias,” in the phrasing of Menk, wherever we find them. Perhaps unexpectedly, herein lies a message of hope. As Chahinian reminds us, the political life of the Western Armenian language is one whose ending has not yet been foretold, let alone written.