Global Armenia: UCI Ph.D. candidate explores creative power of contemporary global Armenian filmmakers and writers
Department: Armenian Studies
Post Date: December 10, 2018News Details
Karen Jallatyan, a Ph.D. candidate in comparative literature at the University of California, Irvine, is completing a dissertation on the creative power of contemporary global Armenian filmmakers and writers. Through their unique creative vision, these writers contribute to the emergence of a truly diasporic culture by transforming inherited national artistic traditions. Born and raised in Gyumri, Armenia, Jallatyan draws inspiration from the lighthearted wisdom and exigent creativity of this city.
Jallatyan’s research draws upon the juxtaposition between the contemporary Armenian diaspora’s experience and the Anglophone multiculturalism debate of the past three decades informing in so many ways our present notions of diversity. National literature is often considered as monolingual and as representing national identity. Instead of representing national identity, Jallatyan sees that diaspora Armenian works (written in Armenian) inscribe the post-catastrophic and post-national experience of dispersion.
“My work as a scholar would not be possible without key contributions from diaspora Armenian intellectuals Vahé Oshagan, Marc Nichanian and Krikor Beledian,” Jallatyan says. The three authors have provided him with poetry, literature, and criticism to further discover the meaning of the Armenian diaspora experience in a globalized world.
The journey through graduate school towards completing a dissertation and beyond has been at once riveting and exhilarating for Jallatyan. Countless hours of reading and note taking devoted to the discourse of critical theory and the dynamic archive of diaspora Armenian literature and film are paying off now as profound links between Francophone and Anglophone artistic and intellectual trends and diaspora Armenian culture start to reveal themselves for him. Slowly arriving at such privileged borderlands and feeling the creative potential as well as the responsibility entailed in accessing them is the ultimate joy for Jallatyan as a scholar.
He is profoundly grateful to the UCI Professors Ackbar Abbas and Gabriele Schwab from the Department of Comparative Literature and Roxanne Varzi from the Department of Anthropology for advising him on his dissertation. “They have set the bar high in thinking and writing creatively while encouraging me to freely experiment with my research interests,” he says.
In future work, Jallatyan would like to further explore the transformative power of art in the wake of diasporic displacement by drawing comparisons between diaspora Armenian (including post-Soviet) and Caribbean artists. Thinking the two cases together is particularly fruitful as it reveals the differential ways in which language can be part of a diasporic emergence. This is especially true when it comes to poetry, as the works of Vahé Oshagan and Derek Walcott amply demonstrate.