The Diasporic Crane: Discursive Migration across the Armenian-Turkish Divide

Despite the fact that rubrics for reading national and “world” literatures through comparative optics have grown increasingly sophisticated over the last decade, the problem of how to theorize cross-cultural and literary interaction still plays a critical role in debates on global connectivity. This article suggests an approach for reading crosscultural interaction across literary systems and musical cultures by tracing the migration of discourses beyond their supposedly native origins. It therefore examines how a popular discourse about a well-traveled bird, the crane, itself migrated across Arabic, Punjabi, and Turkish literary cultures, a process that in part enabled Armenian intellectuals to configure the wandering crane into the predominant symbol of the Armenian diaspora during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Consequently, in mapping the non-linear flight of “cranes” as a symbol of dispersion between Armenian and Turkish literary and musical cultures in particular, this article argues the need to complicate simple uni- and bidirectional models for understanding cross-cultural exchange. Instead, it suggests that we ought to give more attention to specifying multiple forms of transmission—such as the interplay between manuscript, oral, and print cultures—in the study of semiotic ties between different peoples, even across far-flung geographic regions.