Between Host-Countries and Homeland: Institutions, Politics and Identities in the Post-Genocide Armenian Diaspora (1920s to 1980s).

This dissertation explores the conditions and actions that led to the transformation of a post-genocide Armenian dispersion into a transnational diaspora. Over time, banishment and mistreatment had forced large numbers of Armenians to abandon their ancestral homes in the Ottoman Empire. The most decisive manifestation of such displacement was the deportations and wholesale massacres during WWI, retrospectively defined as genocide, which resulted in large concentrations of survivors in the Middle East, Europe and the Americas. Using histories of Armenian communities and institutions, the Armenian language periodical press, and the information acquired through in-depth interviews with notable diaspora Armenians in Lebanon, France and the United States, this study analyzes the formative impact that changing international and host-country specific socio-political conditions have had on the ways in which Armenian elites and institutions defined and redefined their attitudes towards Soviet Armenia; how competing discourses on conceptions of the Armenian homeland, diasporic identities and incompatible ideologies and orientations towards Soviet Armenia clashed and led at once to the emergence of different forms of Armenian identity and to a transnational schism in the Armenian diaspora. It suggests that while genocide recognition after the fiftieth anniversary of the Armenian genocide in 1965 introduced a shared ground between the formerly hostile Armenian camps, by the mid-1980s, the prevailing institutional divisions produced homeland-centered and diaspora-centered paradigms of diasporic belongings. Throughout, this research considers the ways in which institutions and leaders aspired to forge and project transnationally coherent, aspirational Armenian identities, to which they worked to rally their constituencies, and juxtaposes these efforts to the actual subjectivity and fluidity of Armenian diasporic identities and self-images of subsequent generations, shaped under different host-country contexts. This study draws on theoretical and methodological principles developed in diaspora studies, as well as transnationalism and globalization. It contributes to social constructivist perspective in diaspora studies by stressing the role of elites and institutions in the formation of the post-genocide Armenian diaspora and diasporic identities, and equally emphasizing the influences of changing international and host-country conditions and the policies of a state, projecting itself as the homeland.PhDNear Eastern StudiesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/113641/1/sahakv_1.pd