We Are All Armenian | Voices from the Diaspora
Edited by Aram Mrjoian
224 pages
March 14, 2023
$35.00
In the century since the Armenian Genocide, Armenian survivors and their descendants have written of a vast range of experiences using storytelling and activism, two important aspects of Armenian culture. Wrestling with questions of home and self, diasporan Armenian writers bear the burden of repeatedly telling their history, as it remains widely erased and obfuscated. Telling this history requires a tangled balance of contextualizing the past and reporting on the present, of respecting a culture even while feeling lost within it.
Edited by Aram Mrjoian, We Are All Armenian brings together established and emerging Armenian authors to reflect on the complications of Armenian ethnic identity today. These personal essays elevate diasporic voices that have been historically silenced inside and outside of their communities, including queer, multiracial, and multiethnic writers. The eighteen contributors to this contemporary anthology explore issues of displacement, assimilation, inheritance, and broader definitions of home. Through engaging creative nonfiction, many of them question what it is to be Armenian enough inside an often unacknowledged community.
Mrjoian is an editor-at-large at the Chicago Review of Books, an associate fiction editor at Guernica, and a 2022 Creative Armenia–AGBU Fellow.
Patrick Nathan, author of Image Control: Art, Fascism, and the Right to Resist (2021) and Some Hell (2018) says of the book: “Each of these extraordinary essays is a life altered by a century-old genocide, illuminating not only the recognizable aspects of political violence but its hidden, cruel subtleties—how it always lingers, but lingers differently. As heavy and dazzling as a geode.”
Leila Emery, co-editor of and contributor to the forthcoming anthology Iranian Revelations: Voices from the Iranian Diaspora has this to say: “The greatest strength of We Are All Armenian is the diversity of its writers. The presence of multiracial Armenian, queer Armenian, and polyamorous Armenian voices alongside one another adds a bold richness that goes beyond simply being novel. Not only are these stories that many readers may have never heard before, but they also beautifully subvert preconceived notions about who and what constitutes the Armenian diaspora. The writers, who understand profoundly what it means to have one’s history erased or denied, thus ensure that other types of erasure are both confronted and avoided.”
We Are All Armenian may be pre-ordered through the University of Texas Press at a 25-percent discount and free shipping with promo code UTXM25.
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I wrote a book. About Armenians Genocide & Armenian pogrom in 1988-1990Sumgait & Baku Azerbaijan. I saw Armenian pogrom in Baku Azerbaijan when I was 13 years old boy. And my Grandmom-mom and Grandad-dad were victim Armenians Genocide in 1918 .