Talar Chahinian, Sossie Kasbarian, and Tsolin Nalbantian (eds.), The Armenian Diaspora and Stateless Power: Collective Identity in the Transnational 20th Century (IB Tauris/Bloomsbury, 2023).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you edit this book?
Talar Chahinian, Sossie Kasbarian, and Tsolin Nalbantian (TC, SK, & TN): This project originated in the Society for Armenian Studies conference “‘Diaspora and Stateless Power’: Social Discipline and Identity Formation Across the Armenian Diaspora during the Long Twentieth Century” that was held at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), in October 2019 in honor of Khachig Tölölyan, a founding figure in diaspora and transnational studies. Tölölyan’s work has been a huge inspiration and influence on our own research and we were delighted to be invited to edit a collection emanating from the conference.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
TC, SK, & TN: The Armenian Diaspora and Stateless Power seeks to build on the discussions of Tölölyan’s work and its impact on various conceptualizations of the Armenian diaspora, in all its heterogeneity. Reproducing the multidisciplinary impetus of Tölölyan’s scholarship, the volume brings together historians, cultural theorists, literary critics, sociologists, political scientists, and anthropologists to explore how Armenian diaspora elites and their institutions emerged in the post-genocide period and used “stateless power” to practice forms of social discipline on collective identity, belonging, and loyalty among Armenians. Focusing on cultural, religious, political, and literary production, as well as community groups and leaders in such far-flung cities of the Armenian diaspora as Amsterdam, Addis Ababa, Aleppo, Beirut, Detroit, Istanbul, Jerusalem, Los Angeles, and Paris, the volume offers original insight and novel perspectives on the history and experience of the Armenian diaspora through the long twentieth century. More broadly, this collection shows how diasporic history and practice can help re-conceptualize and illuminate non-state forms of power and governmentality. It likewise builds upon Tölölyan’s insight that a diaspora’s statelessness can serve as evidence of its power and that, by wielding this “stateless power,” the diaspora can act as an alternative and a complement to the nation state.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
TC: Tölölyan’s concept of “stateless power,” defined through the inherent paradox of its flexible and prohibitive potential, has been central to my framing of Western Armenian as a stateless language. As such, the rich discussions of stateless power within this volume complement my previous work that examines the development of language and literature in the post-genocide years. My book Stateless: The Politics of the Armenian Language in Exile (Syracuse UP, 2023) comparatively examines the opposing transnational and national imaginings of literature in post-WWI Paris and post-WWII Beirut to discuss the clash between the language’s natural development in relation to each host state’s linguistic culture and the insistence of Armenian diasporic institutions on orienting the language toward a homeland.
SK: My work is situated in the intersection of diaspora studies, Middle East politics, Armenian studies, and refugee and migration studies, and therefore this book is very much connected to my research trajectory. I am editor (and contributor) with Anthony Gorman of Diasporas of the Modern Middle East – Contextualising Community (Edinburgh UP, 2015) and have written chapters on Armenian communities in several collections, including the recent Routledge Handbook on Middle Eastern Diasporas (edited by Dalia Abdelhady and Ramy Aly). Talar and I are also the editors of the pioneering journal in the field of diaspora studies, Diaspora - A Journal of Transnational Studies. The Armenian Diaspora and Stateless Power uses comparative analyses to offer insights into power dynamics between the local, national, and transnational.
TN: Working on this volume has partly built on my book Armenians Beyond Diaspora: Making Lebanon Their Own (Edinburgh UP, 2020). It focused on how, after the Genocide, Lebanon became a center of Armenian power. Moreover, my chapter in a volume I co-edited with Lara Deeb and Nadya Sbaiti, Practicing Sectarianism: Archival and Ethnographic Interventions on Lebanon (Stanford UP, 2022), demonstrated how sectarianism, moving through an Armenian network in Lebanon to the United States, in essence developed an American dimension. The Armenian Diaspora and Stateless Power continues to illustrate how the Armenian Genocide created new opportunities to claim power, while demonstrating Armenians as powerful actors capable of articulating their own agency in additional diasporic centers.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
TC, SK, & TN: Everyone! Just as Tölölyan’s work has inspired and informed those well beyond the field of diaspora studies, we hope that this volume continues in this vein to converse beyond the boundaries of case studies, discipline, and field.
While this book will be of particular interest to students of modern Armenian studies, diaspora studies, modern Middle East studies, and refugee and migration studies, its interdisciplinarity and comparative framework should appeal to a wide range of scholars from around the world. In covering the various experiences of the global Armenian diaspora, the chapters in this book trace the transnationally dispersed Armenian communities’ engagement and interaction with a number of host states. In other words, the diverse set of discussions within the book covers a large geographic expanse and invokes the twentieth-century policies and histories of many countries, including France, Germany, Ukraine, Ethiopia, the Netherlands, the United States, Lebanon, Syria, and Turkey.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
TC: My next project examines the Armenian language’s vitality in the digital domain, by focusing on the emergent online contact zones between the Armenian’s Eastern and Western forms produced by the increasingly layered and diverse Armenian communities in Armenia and in the diaspora.
SK: I am currently working on my monograph, The Armenian Middle East - Remnants, Resilience and Reconfigurations. This book approaches the Middle East through the prism of diaspora, focusing on one diaspora with longevity and endurance. This comparative study of contemporary Armenian life in the Middle East draws from extensive field research in Lebanon, Turkey, Egypt, and among Syrian refugees in Armenia. I am also part of a British Academy funded project with my Stirling and Yerevan State University colleagues that studies migration and belonging in Armenia—this will yield a number of publications in 2024.
TN: My next project uses the Armenian, Kurdish, and Palestinian diasporas to explore what happens when men and women with often considerable (social, educational, and/or financial) capital living in diasporic nodes temporarily relocate to, work for, and shape para-state institutions in the so-called “homeland.” I aim to show how the capital of these men and women—acquired in different diasporic nodes—help build these homeland institutions, which in turn mirror nation-building ones.
J: Can you provide a brief overview of the other contributions in the volume?
TC, SK, TN: The volume is organized into three parts, based on how the authors have drawn from and interpreted Khachig Tölölyan’s work: 1) “The logic of the sedentary:” Complicating notions of home and homelands; 2) “Diasporic social formation:” Leadership elites, institutions and transnational governmentality; and 3) “The social text of diaspora:” Diasporic becoming and legibility in diaspora’s semantic domain. The volume closes with an afterword by Tölölyan and an epilogue by Sebouh Aslanian, who reflects on the intersection of Tölölyan's personal and academic trajectory and highlights the impact of his figure and his work on (Armenian) diaspora studies.
In Part I, Boris Adjemian moves between Ethiopia, Jerusalem, and France to examine how sedentary approaches to diasporas contribute to our understanding of diaspora experiences and the historical transformation of their host societies. Gegham Mughnetsyan presents the little-known case of four thousand Soviet Armenian displaced persons who found post-war refuge at the Funkerkaserne camp in Germany and were eventually resettled in Montebello, California. Nare Galstyan analyses ethnic Armenian asylum seekers in the Dutch Armenian community fleeing the Syrian Civil War and situates them within contemporary migration studies.
In Part II, Hasmik Khalapyan explores the production of knowledge and the imposition of social discipline in an environment where the Armenian state and national institutions are absent. Vahe Sakahyan demonstrates how the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF), as the Armenian “government-in-exile” aspiring to become the “government of exiles,” used social discipline and exclusion to deal with dissenters and to consolidate the party’s ranks around the anti-Soviet discourse. Lilit Keshishyan explores the tension between the necessity of “leadership elites” and institutions and the constraints they impose on diasporic life through the works of three writers: Vahé Oshagan, Hakob Karapents, and Vahe Berberian. Christopher Sheklian shows how “ecclesial governmentality,” or a mode of power specific to the institution of the church, helps form a particular type of liturgical subject.
Finally, in Part III, Sylvia Angelique Alajaji focuses on the life and work of the Armenian composer and folklorist Komitas Vardapet (1869–1935) to ask what it means for diaspora “to articulate itself sonically.” Karen Jallatyan examines and revises the intersection of literary production, critical theory, and the politics of identity through Hagop Oshagan’s poetry. Talin Suciyan revisits the works of the Istanbul intellectuals Aram Pehlivanian and Zaven Biberyan to argue that Armenians were turned into a diaspora community within Turkey. Hrag Papazian tackles the question of the diasporicity of Istanbul Armenians head-on to bring the understandings of emic and etic fields of diaspora studies into conversation with one another.
In the afterword, Tölölyan calls on us to “recalibrate our thoughts about the past of the Armenian diaspora and its current practices” to engage with the challenging contexts it faces. This volume is our humble attempt to respond to this call.
Excerpt from the book (from Khachig Tölölyan’s Afterword)
What do diasporas have? They have no land of their own, though they sometimes have for a generation or three their sustained territorialization in places like Beirut’s Bourj Hammoud, Aleppo’s Nor Kyugh, Isfahan’s Nor Jugha, Istanbul’s Kurtulus and perhaps Hollywood’s Little Armenia. They do not live in one society or a single culture but in at least two. Diasporas also lack an economy they can call their own, even though many of their members may occupy an economic niche, be it as silk merchants in Persia in the seventeenth century or as the prominent artisans, machinists and mechanics of old Aleppo, who kept the tractors and trucks running during the crucial Jazira harvest. But niches do not add up, or measure up to a national economy. A few Swiss and Canadian scholars have attempted to explore the notion of a diaspora economy, but I am not aware of any strong results. When it comes to non-state law, despite Mkhitar Gosh’s Datastanagirk‘ and its importance in dispute settlement, the Armenian diaspora has generally lacked its own law courts. We might ask what can it possibly mean to speak of stateless power under such circumstances. Certainly, as one of the contributors in this volume, Vahe Sahakyan, has argued, ‘diasporas are inherently ungovernmental’. Yet some have existed and functioned with kinds of self-regulation and self-reproduction that invite us to think about what ungovernmental power might be. This requires a rethinking of power, especially in diasporic contexts. How does power work when diasporas are permitted to administer, supervise and even govern themselves to a large extent? And can diasporas exercise stateless power in the form of influencing the government of the state?
Over the past century, a heterogeneous lot of theorists have mused about the existence and efficacity of something other than the undisputed hard power exercised by nation-states. In international politics, they take into consideration the role of non-governmental organizations, ethical arguments, diasporas and transnational communities. In intrastate situations, they consider the soft challenge of minorities, corporations and lobbies that can redirect or moderate the exercise of state power. The emergence of “soft” power in its cultural dimension is a by-now familiar addition to the conceptual deliberation concerning what I have called “stateless” power. Of course, all concerned understand that sovereign power, the power to monopolize violence, to jail, to take life either by execution or by drafting young men (and perhaps women) to go and die for their country, the power to tax people, all still belong to certain hegemonic state elites and institutions. Decades ago, C. W. Mills invited passionate rebuttals by arguing that the United States was a sovereign power whose state was operated by a tiny percentage of the population, by elites whose varieties he detailed. That sovereign hard power of the state, he argued, could be subservient to the skillful exercise of the softer financial power of three or four kinds of elites who, if they did not control, certainly guided the state apparatus to serve their interests. State capture by bourgeois elites is an insight Marx already had by 1848. Mills was a professional sociologist, on the Left. He and Gramsci shared a vision of most modern industrial societies as ultimately ruled by hegemonic economic and cultural elites possessed of overt and covert – what we might now call hard and soft -- forms of power; the elites alter in composition over time but nevertheless perpetuate their hold on the state and civil society both. In various versions of his Who Rules America? (Oxford UP, 1967, 1983, 1998), William Domhoff updated and elaborated this version into a theory of overlapping elites (among which the economic predominates). Such formulations leave room for the possibility that socially consolidated, wealthy diasporic economic elites, including the Jewish in Europe, the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire and the Chinese in Southeast Asia, might attain some sort of influence if not direct power (and thus occasionally elicit persecution from national majorities).
Whether certain ‘middleman minority’ (Zenner) diasporas can ever attain state power remains questionable. But that they can acquire multiple softer forms of power in the economy, society and culture is demonstrable. Furthermore, that diasporic elites have in many times and places exercised mainly soft but sometimes even hard power within their own tightly bound communities is clear. Such power was exercised at certain moments by the church, the amira economic elite, the bourgeois authorities of Istanbul and Armenian political parties in Lebanon.
We know that at various times the heads of the Armenian church in the Ottoman Empire had the power to fine and even imprison dissenting and troublesome individuals, just as in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Jewish courts and councils of Venice and Amsterdam also could also do the same, even excommunicating, stripping away religious identity in a place and time when such identity was crucial. Elsewhere, diasporic Armenians have even been known to kill fellow Armenians when institutional power struggles opened up a space for interpersonal violence. But such displays of coercive power are the exception. Hitherto, the post-genocide modern Armenian diaspora has been sustained by elites, the institutions they controlled, and the loyalties of ordinary Armenians they attracted by their ability to mobilize the communalism of the survivor generation. While of course every survivor needed to earn a living, she or he also yearned for collective goods – a functioning church, school, social clubs, charitable organizations, medical care – social goods, often but not always identitarian in nature, that did not require hard power to sustain them. Soft power was the rule, largely directing individual aspirations so that they were effectively channeled through social institutions. As a result, what emerged in the post-Genocide Armenian Middle East for at least fifty years were communities that renewed themselves by recruiting new generations to dominant and elite-governed institutions that possessed the prerequisites of stateless power: links to state power, financial resources (meagre in many cases, substantial in others), a regulatory apparatus acknowledged by the community, social and cultural services, and resonating rhetoric that was able to reinvigorate popular consent for over two, sometimes three generations.
Such institutions never attracted the entire population of the displaced Armenians who were being organized as diasporic. In France, after the first generation, it’s doubtful if more than a quarter of the diaspora worked through diasporic institutions. By contrast, in Aleppo, when I was a child there in the 1950s, virtually the entire community was involved in the functioning of its institutions. My own sense that we were not just individuals but a collective, a people, was inculcated not just by the church and school and culture and the political party now referred to as the ARF, but by the Armenian boy scout movement and athletic competition managed by the HMEM. An event like the annual football championship game between the Beirut and Aleppo HMEM athletic organizations filled the municipal stadium of Aleppo with 25,000–35,000 Armenians, most of the adult male Armenian population of the town and unusually many women as well, screaming support for and advice at their team while cursing the opposition – often in Turkish and Arabic. I mention this not as a personal indulgence but because, at that place and time, the HMEM’s management of soccer exemplified soft power. Under the aegis of the ARF, it prospered without coercion, recruited on the basis of enabling both communal and individual achievement, and endowed us with a sense that we belonged to an entity that could organize and stage manageable, enticing athletic competition. Rival athletic organizations also functioned along similar lines. To play against is still and always to play with; in the end, certain kinds of competition sustain and bind the competitors to each other within the diasporic enclave. Armenian diaspora scholarship must acknowledge and explore the diverse forms of stateless, soft power that have functioned in such communities, where they have shaped diasporic subjectivity and achieved communal aims. It must also ask how such soft power is being challenged by the aspirational turn to individualism in recent public life.
The aspirational turn requires expansion here but above all in essays and scholarship to come. Until recently, stateless power was pursued within countries in the name of diasporas and other ethnic and cultural communities. But in the era of global capitalism and social media, at least in the West, serious communal political effort is proving less attractive to many in emerging generations; the very real idealism of recent social movements like Occupy in 2011 or the LGBTQ movement is nevertheless less institutional, more social and personal than was the case earlier, even during the protest marches of the Sixties. I am inclined to agree with Pankaj Mishra that the communal ideal – including the diasporic ideal – has weakened, and that what he calls ‘selfie individualism’ is taking its place. He argues that there has been ‘a massive and under- appreciated shift worldwide, [such that] people understand themselves in public life primarily as individuals’. If he is right that people paradoxically enter public life solely to further the claims of their private, individual concerns, often having to do with identity, then societies in general and diasporic social formations in particular face a double dilemma: stateless power will find it harder to elicit and maintain communal and institutional commitments as individuals either avoid public life or, when they become active in it, increasingly want to bend public life to their own personal aspirations and individual satisfaction. In such circumstances, stateless power exercised through communal institutions and organizations will be less effective than it has been.