Ways Out of the Void? Postcolonial and Decolonial Theories in Relation to Armenia and Armenianness

Abstract

The application of postcolonial theory to former Soviet socialist republics is much debated. For Tlostanova, ‘Western’ theorisations of colonialism consign former Soviet socialist republics including Armenia to an undifferentiated ‘void’, not fully part of the Global North or South. Spivak’s (2008) discussion of the Armenian case highlights the inability of conceptualisations of colonialism focused on the nation-state to account for the imperial forces at work in the Caucasus. She argues instead for the potential of a non-ethnic, critical regionalism highlighting local and highly specific histories. Tlostanova and others meanwhile have called for the development of more decolonial approaches drawing on Southern epistemologies and broader, intersectional explorations of national identity in relation to the Caucasus and other regions of the former Soviet East. In this article, we contribute to these debates by reassessing how well postcolonial analyses can illuminate the complex global power relations and identity formations in the Republic of Armenia. Furthermore, we explore the relevance of these theories to different groups resident there. The first section focuses on postcolonial theory and explores different periods of Armenian history and their legacies in terms of colonialism. The second section explores the (little) everyday salience of these theories to residents of a country dominated since independence by war with Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh), drawing on a research project on migration to and from Armenia carried out in the early 2020s and led by the first author. The third section discusses potential theoretical ways forward, and uses for, theories of post and decoloniality in such complex and unstable circumstances. The experience and multiple viewpoints of Armenia’s diverse internal diasporan communities -and particularly those resident in Armenia since the Syrian, Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh) and Ukraine wars – are threaded throughout.