Review: Benjamin Alexander’s Ararat in America

The last chapter, “The Power of a Word: Naming and Claiming the Genocide,” is perhaps the least satisfying in no small part because it ignores almost all the Holocaust and trauma scholarship done by fine scholars such as Shoshona Feldman, Marc Nichanian and Taner Akçam, as well as seminal work by filmmakers such as Claude Lanzmann and Atom Egoyan on the impossibility of knowing or understanding the genocidal will to annihilation. But my main criticism of Alexander’s book is simply that it lacks complexity and often oversimplifies such as when he uses sentences like “a good Armenian” and “a good American.”

Another vexing problem with the book is that it needs to be copyedited: there are simply too many repetitions, typos and stylistic inadequacies.

More disturbing perhaps, is the author’s glossing over of groups of Armenians such as emancipated women, feminists, agnostic/atheists, LGTBQ + people, as well as Armenians who grew up in half-Armenian and half-gentile “odar” families, or Armenians who had at one point become assimilated but later went back to their roots. Nor does Alexander discuss in any serious way, for example, important groups such as Catholic and Protestants Armenians who have contributed mightily to Armenian culture in general and Armenian-American society in particular.

There is also the question of methodology and research, which is top-heavy with traditional conservative historians. Apart from the cursory mention of Stuart Hall and Benedict Anderson, Alexander ignores the contribution of important philosophers and thinkers such as Edward Said, Fernand Braudel, Michel Foucault and Hayden White and their contributions to theories of culture and colonialism.

There are also statements that simply seem wrong, such as the following: “The East had a simple rural virtue and a touch of mystique, the West (as exemplified by Western youth) had the sophistication, and the task of Armenians, was to find just the right blend.” Assimilation always involves sacrifice, but Alexander’s generalities fray the reader’s nerves. Stereotypes about the East and West and so-called differences between Armenian Americans and their host society which ignore their difference vis-à-vis Soviet Armenia and the post-Soviet Armenian republic render argumentation problematic. Which East is Alexander actually referring to? The lost lands of Western Armenia? Lebanon and Syria? The First and Second Republics?

I do not want to seem unfair to Alexander. This is after all a modified dissertation of only 180 pages — clearly, an enormous amount of work went into writing it. To his credit, the book is meticulously footnoted and gorgeously printed. Perhaps the thing to do would have been to restrict his field of enquiry to something like: “The Role of the Tashnag Party in Armenian Politics” or simply to write a longer, more ambitious study.