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Abstract
This essay traces the historical process by which Armenians became legally white in the United States, demonstrating how arguments for Armenian whiteness were used as part of a larger strategy to exclude other Asian immigrants from nationalization in the early twentieth century. For late twentieth-century Armenian Americans, the conditions of racial whiteness include the erasure of Armenian history and the assimilation of Armenian bodies into European gender norms. Through a reading of Carol Edgarian’s Rise, the Euphrates, the essay argues for an Armenian American female subject that resists race and gender assimilation as well as historical erasure.