Armenians Beyond Diaspora: Making Lebanon Their Own, Paperback

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. And it focuses on one such centre, Beirut, in the postcolonial 1940s and 1950s.

Tsolin 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 1946-8 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.

About author(s):

Tsolin Nalbantian is Lecturer in Modern Middle East History at Leiden University. She is co-series editor of Critical, Connected Histories (Leiden University Press) and has published articles in Mashriq & Mahjar, MESA Review of Middle East Studies and History Compass. She has written the entry 'Armenians in the Middle East' for the Routledge Handbook of Minorities in the Middle East (2018).