Thinking SWANA from the -stans: Armenia and Spivak's Other Asias

Abstract

Abstract:In response to a question posed by David Kazanjian and Anahid Kassabian: "Why is there no Armenian postcolonialism?" Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak began research that would become "1994: Will Postcolonialism Travel." This article is at the center of the 2008 edited volume Other Asias, which proposes an epistemic reimagining of continentality, race, religion, nationalism, diaspora and empire. Nearly twenty years later, however, Armenians remained especially fraught subjects in the 2020 California Ethnic Studies Model curriculum. Sketching a personal account of curricular debates alongside Spivak's call to theorize "Other Asias," this essay asks, Why is there no Armenian in Ethnic Studies?