Dear Readers,
Welcome to the Fall 2021 volume of the Journal for the Society of Armenian Studies: Performance II. The invigorating studies in Performance I exposed to us how inherently intercultural the study of performance is, and how various Armenian artists around the world – Eliza Binemeciyan, Samuel Khachikian, Lara Sarkissian, William Saroyan, and others – through their involvement in theater, cinema, and the performing arts, engaged with the communities in which they lived, interweaving the experience of Armenians into global artistic creations and practices. Performance II builds on these themes of reticulated networks in the performing arts, while at the same time challenging the traditional models of how performance has been evaluated in the past. The contributions in this volume make intentional efforts to re-qualify the registers and frameworks in which the questions around performance and memory, identity, and the body – particularly the female body – have been previously analyzed.
It is with great honor that this volume opens with reflections on these questions by Canadian-Armenian-Lebanese artist and activist Arsinée Khanjian, whose conversation with Dr. Marie-Aude Baronian and Erica Biolchini, graces us with yet another impeccable performance, through the mode of an interview, helping us situate the significance of performance as a mode of daily life in and within the world we live in, and how this relates to the archive, the female Armenian body, and the place of Armenians in global society.
Arsinée Khanjian’s eloquent rumination on her own career and that of Aurora Mardiganian, beautifully directs us to yet another leading lady in the history of the Armenian people, our great foremother, Zabel Yesayan. In this volume, we share a selection of contributions analyzing her work, her activism, and the trajectory of her studied “place” in Armenian Studies. Dr. Talar Chahinian’s think-piece serves as a copious facilitator of these conversations, framing the two translations and the essay that follows it within larger conversations in translation studies, trauma theory, and the history of the study of Yesayan herself. Chahinian’s article considers: Dr. Meriam Belli’s English translation of the lecture delivered in French by Yesayan on January 17, 1920 in Paris, in which she recounts the gendered violence witnessed against women during the Armenian Genocide; Dr. Elyse Semerdjian’s English translation of a report-letter composed by Yesayan in French (on a typewriter in Paris), dated 1911, titled “La liberation des Femmes et Enfants Non-musulmans en Turquie,” which Yesayan presented to the head of the Armenian National Delegation, Boghos Nubar Pasha, on March 18, 1919 for submission at the Paris Peace Conference; and a thoughtful and productive reflection by Dr. Maral Aktokmakyan on “Yesayan Studies,” and how the framing of Yesayan’s work as oftentimes either a feminist, and/or a witness of the atrocities against women during the Armenian Genocide, has both encumbered and promoted her vital place in Armenian and Turkish literary studies and criticism. What is particularly striking in this corpus of material by and about women is that it is prophetic in nature. It is both a reflection on the past, but also a hopeful message for the future that is not anchored and halted by the Armenian Genocide – a form of Armenian Futurism. Arsinée Khanjian, Aurora Mardiganian, and Zabel Yesayan provide direction for women of today and women of the future: how they were asked to act and perform in the past, how the efforts of women become the salvation for the recuperation and healing of a people who together experienced the collective trauma of genocide.
As JSAS moves in new directions and towards new modes of scholarly expression and community, we also want to embrace new directions in the production and performance of scholarly, artistic, and literary content. Aras publishing house in Istanbul – one of the foremost publishers of Western Armenian literature in the Armenian Diaspora – recently released its first audio book, a reading of Takuhi Tovmasyan’s moving Turkish-language Sofranız Şen Olsun: Ninelerimin Mutfağından Damağımda, Aklımda Kalanlar (Cheer to Your Table: Tastes from my Grandmothers’ Kitchens that Have Remained in my Mouth and my Mind), by the author herself. Tovmasyan’s work, with its uniquely-told family history, moves readers and listeners, alike, to think about the implications of the past in our presents, all through the lens of meaning that Tovmasyan attaches to the space of the kitchen, the foods prepared in it, and the communal sharing of meals at the table, along with life’s delights and devastations. Dr. Nazan Maksudyan elaborates on what it means to write Armenian histories in Turkish and discusses what the audio version of the book might offer its listeners as a kind of oral/aural invitation to participate in its lyric tradition and remember, together. This contribution takes us back once again to Istanbul, and points to the long-term and continued cultural significance of that city for Armenians and particularly for the expression of Armenian women in the city.
With her piece on Istanbul’s early theater scene, Ayşan Sönmez, a doctoral candidate at the University of Paris (Sorbonne), offers a colorful historical framework for rethinking the ways in which theatrical performances were modalities through which various identities were imagined, engaged, and promoted in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Elaborating on the relationship between the “new” theater scene and the Armenian communities of Istanbul, Sönmez shows how the theater became a site of political consequence and offers us a remarkable opportunity to reconsider the history of the theater in Istanbul as a means of better understanding the social and cultural implications of the changing relationship between the Ottoman state – and, later, a nascent Turkish Republic – and the active and creative Armenian community.
The contribution of Dr. Lorenzo Dominioni and Dr. Antranik Balian offers a study of the Armenian “eternity sign,” a particular medieval geometric whirl sign, that was intentionally engraved in the work of the 12th century sculptor Nicholaus living in northern Italy. The authors argue that the process of etching and creating become symbolic performative acts where the whirl witnesses the act of creation and symbolizes concepts around eternal life. At the same time, they point to the potential cross-cultural exchanges that the sculptural programs in some 12th-century art in the Po Valley bear witness to, including between Armenian artistic traditions and practices and those of artists and artisans living on the Italian peninsula.
The format of the round-table discussion seemed a fitting space within which to invite three scholars from different intellectual backgrounds to reconsider Sergei Parajanov’s celebrated film The Color of Pomegranates (Armenfilm, 1969) as historical intervention. Responding to Parajanov’s intentionally-curated miscellany as an actively-performed representation of the inner world of the Armenian ašuł/ashough Sayat Nova, our Reviews and Reconsiderations Editor, Dr. Rachel Goshgarian leads Byzantine Art Historian Dr. Galina Tirnanić and social historian of the medieval Middle East, Dr. Nicholas Trépanier, through an intense exchange on the ways in which art and its varied performances can help us to approach the premodern world, both specifically in Armenian contexts, and beyond them.
The motley of various forms of investigation in this volume – interview, think-piece, translation, reflection, and roundtable – reflect that not only performance, but the study of it, is prismatic: that the interplay between text and cultural performance are not only reciprocal but cross-spatial; and that performance in all its forms converges into dialogues around world-building, activism, and gender and identity exploration.
The JSAS extends its gratitude to our Reviews & Reconsiderations Editor, Dr. Rachel Goshgarian, to all of our contributors who have helped pave the way towards new directions in the field of Armenian Studies, and to you, our Readers.
Let us continue together as we keep the legacy of the JSAS alive.
