Armenians Beyond Diaspora
Making Lebanon their Own
- Explores Lebanese Armenians’ changing views of their place in the making of the Lebanese state and its wider Arab environment, and in relation to the Armenian Socialist Soviet Republic
- Challenges the dominant Armenian historiography, which treats Lebanese Armenians as a subsidiary of an Armenian global diaspora
- Contributes to an understanding of the development of class and sectarian cleavages that led to the breakdown of civil society in Lebanon from 1975
- Highlights the role of societal actors in the US–Soviet Cold War in the Middle East
- Challenges the tendency to read Middle East history through the lens of dominant (Arab) nationalisms
This book argues that Armenians around the world – in the face of the Genocide, and despite the absence of an independent nation-state after World War I – developed dynamic socio-political, cultural, ideological and ecclesiastical centres. Tsolin Nalbantian focuses on one such centre, Beirut, in the postcolonial 1940s and 1950s. Nalbantian explores Armenians’ discursive re-positioning within the newly independent Lebanese nation-state; the political-cultural impact (in Lebanon as well as Syria) of the 1946–48 repatriation initiative to Soviet Armenia; the 1956 Catholicos election; and the 1957 Lebanese elections and 1958 mini-civil war. What emerges is a post-Genocide Armenian history of – principally – power, renewal and presence, rather than one of loss and absence.
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1 - Repositioning Armenians in Newly Post-Colonial Nation-States: Lebanon and Syria, 1945/1946
Chapter 2 - The Homeland Debate, Redux: The Political-Cultural Impact of the 1946-1949 Repatriation to Soviet Armenia
Chapter 3 - Cold War, Bottom-up: The 1956 Catholicos Election
Chapter 4 - Making Armenians Lebanese: The 1957 election and the ensuing 1958 conflict
Conculsion
Bibliography
What emerges (from this book) is a post-Genocide Armenian history of - principally - power, renewal and presence, rather than one of loss and absence.
While “diaspora,” as Khachig Tololyan has written, is useful to “think with,” what would it be to think without? Or, as Tsolin Nalbantian urges in her remarkable new book, to think beyond?
Armenians Beyond Diaspora is an important contribution to both Armenian Studies and Lebanese historiography, and through it, Nalbantian offers an exciting new path for how minority communities, rather than serving as footnotes to national or regional histories, can be better understood as socially and politically integral parts of those same histories.
Armenians Beyond Diaspora is a major contribution to the field of Middle Eastern Studies. Nalbantian situates Armenians of Lebanon in the larger context of the Middle East during the Cold War period. Through her unique ability of analyzing the political discourse of the time, Nalbantian demonstrates how the bi-polar system had serious ramifications on Lebanon and its Armenian citizens. In this journey between time and space, the local and global, Nalbantian weaves together a narrative that combines history and anthropology in telling the story of a community which has been marginalized in the mainstream historiography of the Middle East in general and Lebanese historiography in particular.
