«The new hybrid : Armenian Language and literature in the digital age» - Talar Chahinian - Ghent

The Centre for Western Armenien Studies and Ghent Univesité are delighted to present this year’s Taniel Varouzhan Annual Lecture, which will be held at Ghent University. This lecture will. Over the last several decades, the increasingly layered and diverse Armenian communities, both in Armenia and in the diaspora, have produced new contact zones between the Armenian language’s Eastern and Western forms. By focusing on emergent online contact zones such as digital publication sites for literature and social media content dedicated to Armenian language arts, this presentation examines the Armenian language’s vitality in the digital domain.

It argues that this new proximity and intermingling of dialects and their literary standards have resulted in new creative works that imagine an audience of hybrid speakers. Further, in considering the Internet’s “democratizing” impetus in our transition from analog to digital cultural practices, it proposes that Western Armenian’s stateless condition was conducive to this transfer given the decentralized mode of diasporic institutional production, which in many ways mirrors the space of the networked, yet decentralized Internet. While this has engendered new forms of expression for Western Armenian, it has also reinstated an uneven field wherein Western Armenian must consolidate its identity against Eastern Armenian and reformed orthography.

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 coeditor, 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. Full program Welcoming remarks : Prof. Peter van Nuffelen Expression of thanks : Dr. Krikor Mosko an Speaker : Dr. Talar Chahinian