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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 Je...
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, som...
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.
Lebanon may be the most complicated place in the world to be a "mixed" couple. It has no civil marriage law, fifteen personal status laws, and a political system built on sectarianism. Still, Lebanon has the most interreligious marriages per capita in the Middle East. What constitutes a mixed marriage is in flux as social norms shift, and reactions to mixed marriage reveal underlying social categories of discrimination. Through stories of Lebanese couples, Love Across Difference challenges readers to rethink categories of difference and imagine possibilities for social change. Drawing on two decades of interviews and research, Lara Deeb shows how mixed couples in Lebanon confront patriarchy,...
“A brilliant, revisionist argument that places oil companies at the heart of 20th-century history—and of the political and environmental crises we now face.” —Guardian “A sweeping overview of the relationship between fossil fuels and political institutions from the industrial revolution to the Arab Spring.” —Financial Times Oil is a curse, it is often said, that condemns the countries producing it to an existence defined by war, corruption and enormous inequality. Carbon Democracy tells a more complex story, arguing that no nation escapes the political consequences of our collective dependence on oil. It shapes the body politic both in regions such as the Middle East, which rel...
Armenian Christianity Today examines contemporary religious life and the social, political, and cultural functions of religion in the post-Soviet Republic of Armenia and in the Armenian Diaspora worldwide. Scholars from a range of countries and disciplines explore current trends and everyday religiosity, particularly within the Armenian Apostolic Church (AAC), and amongst Armenian Catholics, Protestants and vernacular religions. Themes examined include: Armenian grass-roots religiosity; the changing forms of regular worship and devotion; various types of congregational life; and the dynamics of social composition of both the clergy and lay believers. Exploring through the lens of Armenia, this book considers wider implications of ’postsecular’ trends in the role of global religion.
“Stanton’s analysis of radio as a new tool of the colonial state contributes a great deal to studies of Mandate Palestine and imperialism.” –Journal of Palestinian Studies Modeled after the BBC, the Palestine Broadcasting Service was launched in 1936 to serve as the national radio station of Mandate Palestine, playing a pivotal role in shaping the culture of the emerging middle class in the region. Despite its significance, the PBS has become nearly forgotten by scholars of twentieth-century Middle Eastern studies. Drawn extensively from British and Israeli archival sources, “This Is Jerusalem Calling” traces the compelling history of the PBS’s twelve years of operation, illumi...
A study of the 1908 Young Turk Revolution from the perspectives of Arabs, Armenians, and Jews. The Ottoman revolution of 1908 is a study in contradictions—a positive manifestation of modernity intended to reinstate constitutional rule, yet ultimately a negative event that shook the fundamental structures of the empire, opening up ethnic, religious, and political conflicts. Shattered Dreams of Revolution considers this revolutionary event to tell the stories of three important groups: Arabs, Armenians, and Jews. The revolution raised these groups’ expectations for new opportunities of inclusion and citizenship. But as post-revolutionary festivities ended, these euphoric feelings soon turn...
What causes violent conflicts around the Middle East? All too often, the answer is sectarianism—popularly viewed as a timeless and intractable force that leads religious groups to conflict. In Everyday Sectarianism in Urban Lebanon, Joanne Nucho shows how wrong this perspective can be. Through in-depth research with local governments, NGOs, and political parties in Beirut, she demonstrates how sectarianism is actually recalibrated on a daily basis through the provision of essential services and infrastructures, such as electricity, medical care, credit, and the planning of bridges and roads. Taking readers to a working-class, predominantly Armenian suburb in northeast Beirut called Bourj H...