The problem with hybridity: a critique of Armeno-Turkish studies

Abstract

ABSTRACT The study of Armeno-Turkish Literature, or Turkish written in Armenian script, has boomed of late, posing a challenge to Turkish literary historiography's neglect of Armeno-Turkish texts. Though this scholarship has argued against the exclusion of Armenians from late Ottoman cultural history, it has also unintentionally reproduced the nationalist, exclusionary logic that such segregation rested upon in the first place. This article offers a critique of the now dominant scholarly understanding of Armeno-Turkish as a “hybrid” of ostensibly distinct late Ottoman-era Armenian and Turkish languages and cultures. It does so by reframing Turkish as an Armenian language, moving beyond the shortcomings of hybridity theory toward a more productive, “depropriative” idiom for the study of Armeno-Turkish that denationalizes the Turkish language.