Armenian Identity: Memory, Ethnoscapes, Narratives of Belonging in the context of the recent emerging notions of globalization and its effect on time and space

Abstract

The proposed paper based on fieldwork among Armenians in Lebanon, Armenia and Montreal examines from a feminist and socialist perspective how Armenianness with its varieties constructs public and private gendered, racialized, class divided spaces. In the symbolic construction of Armenianness attention has been given to memory, the 1915 un-recognized genocide of the Armenian people and to the moral imperative put in particular on Armenian women as bearers of culture. The everyday practices of Armenians are examined as they tend to demarcate, construct spatial and symbolic boundaries. In particular the paper looks into the concepts of de-territorialization, ethnoscapes, transnationality, globalization in the Armenian context.