Tölölyan and Chahinian rethink Armenian diaspora at UofT ASA online panel
TORONTOHYE—The University of Toronto (UofT) Armenian Students’ Association (ASA) hosted an online academic panel on Jan. 15 to examine Armenian diasporic history, identity, and future directions, bringing together two influential scholars for a wide-ranging discussion.
Moderated by ASA co-president Arina Asloian and vice-president Ani Astour, the event, titled “Armenian Diaspora Across Time: History, Identity, and Future Directions,” opened with a brief introduction to the Association’s work on the St. George campus. Asloian described ASA as a student-run club that aims to bring Armenian students and community members together to celebrate heritage and culture.
The moderated discussion began with a question on the historical conditions that shaped early diasporic identity in the Armenian case. Khachig Tölölyan, Emeritus Professor of English and Letters at Wesleyan University, offered a sweeping overview that challenged the tendency to locate the Armenian diaspora primarily in 1915. While acknowledging the centrality of the Armenian Genocide in modern Armenian diasporic consciousness, he emphasized that both coercion and economic pressure have shaped Armenian dispersal across many centuries.
Tölölyan traced early large-scale movements to the period around the collapse of the Bagratuni kingdom in the 11th century, when artisans and merchants began moving northward, including to the Crimea, and from there into Slavic and Balkan lands. He also pointed to the forced deportations of Armenians from Nakhichevan in 1603-1604 under Shah Abbas, which resulted in the establishment of a major Armenian community in Iran. He further highlighted the development of significant pre-Genocide Armenian communities in Tbilisi and Istanbul, noting that these, too, emerged through a mix of displacement, insecurity, and the search for relative stability.
Talar Chahinian, lecturer in the Program for Armenian Studies at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), and visiting faculty in Comparative Literature, built on that historical framing by interrogating the idea of 'origins' itself. In the Armenian case, she argued, the impulse to pinpoint a single starting point often collapses diverse formations into one dominant narrative. While 1915 remains a foundational reference for much of public discourse, she suggested that earlier and later configurations can be approached through different lenses: diaspora as lived experience on the ground, and diaspora as a scholarly concept used to study dispersed communities across time.
Tölölyan added a linguistic dimension to this point, noting that terms for diaspora and self-description evolve over time. The widespread Armenian-language use of spyurk (սփիւռք), he argued, becomes dominant relatively late, particularly after the mid-20th century, reflecting shifts not only in vocabulary but also in collective self-understanding.
One of the discussion’s most focused exchanges centred on Western Armenian literary history and the ways distinct diasporic centres produced different cultural responses to exile. Chahinian, drawing on her research, compared post-WWI Paris with post-WWII Beirut, emphasizing that the two environments shaped language politics and literary production in fundamentally different ways.
In the Paris of the late 1920s, she explained, Armenian-language periodical life was vibrant, but the community was scattered and readership limited. Language, in that context, often became a medium for literary experimentation and for articulating exile as a condition. In the Beirut of the postwar decades, by contrast, Armenians lived in closer proximity and benefited from dense community networks. Language there was more intentionally mobilized as a tool for institutional consolidation, with schools, cultural organizations, and literary projects contributing to a broader vision of sustaining a Western Armenian language community and a 'nation in exile.'
Tölölyan reinforced this contrast by arguing that Paris saw a literary 'flowering' alongside an awareness that the linguistic base was shrinking, while the Middle East—especially Beirut and Aleppo—played a decisive role in consolidating Western Armenian through education and communal life, even if its literary output was perceived as lagging behind Paris. Chahinian added a striking anecdote from the Parisian literary scene, illustrating the frustration of producing literature with a limited readership and capturing the paradox of creative vitality amid demographic and linguistic anxiety.
A later question turned to diaspora not only as a dispersed population, but as a political and institutional actor. Tölölyan urged the audience to think beyond a narrow definition of power as coercion. Diasporas, he suggested, rarely possess the ability to compel states in the way states compel others, but they can exercise influence through mobilization, institution-building, and the shaping of discourse. He pointed to the rapid post-genocide construction of community life in the Middle East—churches, schools, and organizations—as an example of diasporic capacity to build durable structures under difficult conditions. This was, in his framing, 'stateless power': the ability to marshal resources and create institutions that would not otherwise exist. He also stressed that cultural production should be understood as part of this ecosystem, arguing that even when literature is not the sole vehicle of intellectual life, non-fiction writing, essays, and journalism help sustain communal debate and identity formation.
Chahinian briefly followed up on the question of how diasporic writing is defined, and the exchange touched on the breadth of diaspora-related cultural production over the decades, including writing that reflects on diaspora as a lived community reality as well as diaspora as a concept.
Asked about Western Armenian’s precarity and the role of culture in sustaining diasporic identity, Chahinian approached the question carefully, warning against framing literature as valuable only insofar as it 'preserves' identity. That approach, she suggested, can become limiting. Still, she acknowledged that the modern recognition of Western Armenian as endangered has catalyzed new activity, including institutional initiatives and grassroots projects. She described what she sees as an energizing moment of experimentation, particularly among artists and writers who are playing with Western Armenian across dialects, vernaculars, hybrid forms, and digital spaces. Rather than treating language as fixed, she emphasized its living, adaptive qualities—especially in contact zones where different Armenian varieties and community histories intersect.
Tölölyan added that the contemporary digital landscape has also encouraged shorter forms of writing and new ambitions for public-facing cultural work, though he noted he felt less equipped to judge the long-term consequences of these shifts.
The final moderated question addressed the current relationship between diaspora and homeland, and where that relationship may be headed. Tölölyan described the moment as particularly fraught, emphasizing that there is no single diaspora position because the diaspora itself is made up of institutions, political organizations, churches, and individuals with distinct relationships to Armenia.
He argued that one central tension lies in questions of political legitimacy and participation: To what extent should diasporans weigh in on homeland politics, and to what extent should the homeland shape diaspora life? He suggested that these questions become even more complicated in a context where Armenian communities now include citizens of Armenia living abroad, diasporans who have acquired Armenian citizenship, and long-established diasporans with different historical relationships to the state.
Chahinian placed this tension within broader shifts in diaspora studies, noting that older models often centred on dispersion and a myth of return, whereas newer frameworks increasingly imagine diaspora as tied to a nation-state and its institutions, with states attempting to define and 'claim' their diasporas. In the Armenian case, she suggested, this evolving framework has become more visible in how diaspora engagement is discussed, structured, and contested.
The open Q&A broadened the discussion; participants asked about language development after Armenia’s independence, the growing presence of Western Armenian in Yerevan due to repatriation and migration, and whether this 'contact zone' is changing how Armenian is spoken and heard in Armenia today. One audience member noted that Western Armenian is now more audible in public life and media, while also questioning how quickly language shifts can occur across generations.
A separate set of questions focused on the Armenian Church, translation, and accessibility. One participant asked whether translating liturgy and teachings into English might strengthen religious engagement and outreach in diaspora contexts. The discussion acknowledged both the practical appeal of accessibility and the likely resistance from those who view liturgical language as central to continuity and tradition. Another audience member, speaking from personal experience, described the Church as a space where Armenian can still be heard consistently and where language learning can become intertwined with faith and community participation.
The final questions returned to the relationship between Eastern and Western Armenian. Asked whether merging the two would aid communication between the diaspora and Armenia, Chahinian argued for the value of plurality and rejected the notion that a single 'national standard' should determine the fate of distinct Armenian-language communities. Languages, she stressed, predate nation-states, and their integrity carries histories that deserve to continue. Tölölyan echoed the point pragmatically, emphasizing that mutual understanding is possible without enforced unification, and that educated speakers often communicate across standards more easily than assumed. The principle, as he framed it, is not uniformity, but coexistence and connection.
The two moderators concluded the evening by thanking both speakers, participants from the wider community, and supporters who have encouraged the ASA's academic panel series. ֎
