Hybrid lecture by David Leupold, Ph.D, research fellow at the Leibniz Zentrum Moderner Orient Berlin. This lecture is co-hosted by the Promise Armenian Institute at UCLA and the UCLA Richard Hovannisian Endowed Chair in Modern Armenian History.

Wednesday, October 9, 2024
6:00 PM - 8:00 PM (Pacific Time)
Bunche Hall, Rm 10383 (10th floor)
Los Angeles, CA 90095

Whether Jim Torosyan's late Soviet construction of the Cascade or the prestigious megaproject Northern Avenue in the post-Soviet period, to this day the spatial arrangement of the Soviet-Armenian architect Aleksandr Tamanyan continues to form the most important parameter for the urban development of Armenia's capital Yerevan. Tamanyan's architectural work, which can be understood as a local variation of Stalin-era Neoclassicism (Neo-Armenianizm), is understood by many residents not only as an unquestionable legacy but as proof of Armenia’s place in an alleged grand narrative of Western modernity.

However, this retrospective perspective of the city’s Stalin-era imperial legacy obscures the view on the deep fault lines that ran between him and his opponents, revealing the urban trajectory of the nascent capital as a site of embattled urbanity. One of his opponents was the surrealist writer Mkrtich Armen, who advanced a powerful critique of Tamanyan’s Western-modelled city in his writings. Banned upon publication by censors, his first novel "Yerevan. A Saga" (1931) cherishes a retrotopian vision for the future city, which embarks from the historical legacy of pre-Tsarist, Persianate-Islamic Yerevan towards the communopolitan horizon of a “New East” (Nor Arevelk’).

In his talk, Dr. Leupold will argue that these alternative imaginaries of the urban were informed, in an unexpected dialectical twist, both by retrotopian yearning for a (pre-)colonial past that was coming undone before their eyes and anticipation for a utopian future at a point of post-revolutionary history largely understood by its contemporaries as the dawn of socialist worldmaking. Based on this, he will conclude by discussing how the specter of a "New Eastern" city, built in unison with "architects of Georgia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan", speaks to a precarious and war-ridden present in which Armenians and Azerbaijanis are pitched against each other in a relentless struggle for mutually exclusive ethno-nationalistic futures.

 

David Leupold is a sociologist and research fellow at the LeibnizZentrum Moderner Orient Berlin. He was a 2018-2019 Manoogian Postdoctoral Fellow in the University of Michigan Department of Sociology and holds a doctoral degree from the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. His research interests comprise contested geographies and the collective imaginations of past, present and future in the post-Ottoman and post-Soviet space. His first monograph Embattled Dreamlands: At the Nexus of Armenian, Kurdish and Turkish Memory Politics (New York: Routledge, 2020) was awarded the 2021 annual book prize of the Central Eurasian Studies Society (CESS).

Sponsor(s): The Promise Armenian Institute, Center for Near Eastern Studies, UCLA Richard Hovannisian Endowed Chair in Modern Armenian History, Center for Armenian Studies, University of Michigan, UC Berkeley Armenian Studies Program, Ararat-Eskijian Museum, National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR)