Guest Lecture

This lecture presents the outlines of The Nation as Colony, a book project that revisits how the ambivalent positioning of Armenians as intermediaries between “East” and “West” shaped histories of displacement and resettlement in the borderlands of West Asia. Moving across trans-imperial geographies—from the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean and the North Atlantic—it zooms in on key conjunctures at which colonial logics of race, empire, and development disarticulated place-based Armenian claims to Indigeneity while informing political imaginaries of the Armenian nation as a kind of colony. After discussing the entanglements of British colonial property regimes, international humanitarian interventions, Soviet emancipation projects, and neoliberal development in post-Soviet Armenia, the lecture introduces the speaker’s original concept of „developmentality” to theorize a seemingly enduring rationality of government that exceeds the state and operates through diasporic investment.

What emerges is a critical rethinking of diaspora not as a condition to be resolved through national reconstitution projects but a generative form of fragmentation that opens onto political futures in and beyond Armenia, reimagined through a postcolonial feminist lens.