Becoming White: Contested History, Armenian American Women, and Racialized Bodies

I. Introduction: Historical Erasures and Racial Borderlands In his recent memoir, Black Dog of Fate, Armenian American poet Peter Balakian describes how, in 1941, his grandmother began to have flashbacks about the Armenian genocide which she had survived years before. Upon hearing the news of the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the onset of war, she became paranoid and delusional. Eventually, she was treated with electric shock therapy, after which she resumed her usual demeanor. "No one ever mentioned this moment in your grandmother's life," Balakian's aunt tells him. "I never heard her mention the Turks again. It was as if it never happened. We say in Armenian: When the past is behind you, keep it there" (180). Recovery of the past is an important function of ethnic literature, both politically and poetically. But what happens if the veracity of the historical narrative itself is contested? What are the effects of the traumatic events of the past upon the body when those events are denied? How may narrating the body's origins become a strategy of re-presenting the contested history? Recent Armenian American novels and memoirs figure their narratives of origin as centrally connected to the 1915 genocide carried out by Turkey on its Armenian citizens. In light of Turkey's persistent denial that a genocide of the Armenians took place, and of the United States' collusion with Turkish denial, many Americans are not well-informed about the Armenian genocide, while many Armenian Americans believe that Armenian genocide history is under constant threat of erasure. Writing the Armenian genocide into literature, as several recent novels do, is a way of writing it back into history. (1) This article argues that literary inscriptions of Armenian genocide problematize and reconfigure Axmenian American ethnicity and gender and that the body is centrally implicated in these acts of negotiation. Carol Edgarian's Rise the Euphrates, a recent novel about three generations of Armenian American women, is one such text. It provides a legible example of how the female body becomes a primary trope in the recovery of history and of how the contested nature of Armenian genocide history complicates the way the female body and ethnic origins are figured. Armenians' racialization in the United States also has implications for this literary articulation of the Armenian American woman's body and its origins. Like the history of the Armenian genocide, the history of Armenian whiteness has been repressed, albeit for different reasons and by different forces. Furthermore, the occlusions of these two histories are not only parallel but interrelated in terms of their effects upon the body. Bodily effects of racialization for people of color have been well explored in theoretical and critical dimensions, but scholarship about bodily effects of racialization on white ethnic subjects is scant. Despite the fact that Armenian Americans enjoy white privilege in the United States, I am claiming that their racialization has carried bodily consequences. Whiteness as a disciplinary regime configures bodies as they are assimilated, excluding some behaviors and signs while producing others. Edgarian's literary rendering of the body's historical (genocide) origins, therefore, must be read in the context of the bodily effects of racial assimilation. In order to account for the ways in which Armenian narratives of origin function in relation to the body's race and gender, this article will consider a wide-ranging set of sources coveting several eras. It begins with a summary of conceptions of race in Armenia and Ottoman Turkey prior to the Genocide, (2) followed by a brief discussion of how Armenians have been racialized in the United States. These sections contextualize the interpretation of Rise the Euphrates in the second half of the article. I will argue that the novel's recovery of Genocide history is told as a narrative of bodily origins, and that it works in tandem . …