Tsolin Nalbantian

Sossie Kasbarian

Talar Chahinian

From genocide, forced displacement, and emigration, to the gradual establishment of sedentary and rooted global communities, how has the Armenian diaspora formed and maintained a sense of collective identity? This book explores the richness and magnitude of the Armenian experience through the 20th century to examine how Armenian diaspora elites and their institutions emerged in the post-genocide period and used “stateless power” to compose forms of social discipline. Historians, cultural theorists, literary critics, sociologists, political scientists, and anthropologists explore how national and transnational institutions were built in far-flung sites from Istanbul, Aleppo, Beirut and Jerusalem to Paris, Los Angeles, and the American mid-west. Exploring literary and cultural production as well as the role of religious institutions, the book probes the history and experience of the Armenian diaspora through the long 20th century, from the role of the fin-de-siècle émigré Armenian press to the experience of Syrian-Armenian asylum seekers in the 21st century. It shows that a diaspora's statelessness can not only be evidence of its power, but also how this “stateless power” acts as an alternative and complement to the nation-state.

Collective Identity in the Transnational 20th Century

The Armenian Diaspora and Stateless Power

Lara Deeb

Nadya Sbaiti

Practicing Sectarianism explores the imaginative and contradictory ways that people live sectarianism. The book's essays use the concept as an animating principle within a variety of sites across Lebanon and its diasporas and over a range of historical periods. With contributions from historians and anthropologists, this volume reveals the many ways sectarianism is used to exhibit, imagine, or contest power: What forms of affective pull does it have on people and communities? What epistemological work does it do as a concept? How does it function as a marker of social difference? Examining social interaction, each essay analyzes how people experience sectarianism, sometimes pushing back, sometimes evading it, sometimes deploying it strategically, to a variety of effects and consequences. The collection advances an understanding of sectarianism simultaneously constructed and experienced, a slippery and changeable concept with material effects. And even as the book's focus is Lebanon, its analysis fractures the association of sectarianism with the nation-state and suggests possibilities that can travel to other sites. Practicing Sectarianism, taken as a whole, argues that sectarianism can only be fully understood—and dismantled—if we first take it seriously as a practice.

Tsolin Nalbantian

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