Description
As a new independent Republic of Armenia is established among the ruinsof the Soviet Union, Armenians are rethinking their history -- the processes bywhich they arrived at statehood in a small part of their historic homeland, and thedefinitions they might give to boundaries of their nation. Both a victim and abeneficiary of rival empires, Armenia experienced a complex evolution as a dividedor an erased polity with a widespread diaspora.
Ronald Grigor Sunytraces the cultural and social transformations and interventions that created a newsense of Armenian nationality in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Perceptionsof antiquity and uniqueness combined in the popular imagination with the experiencesof dispersion, genocide, and regeneration to forge an Armenian nation inTranscaucasia. Suny shows that while the limits of Armenia at times excluded thediaspora, now, at a time of state renewal, the boundaries have been expanded toinclude Armenians who live beyond the borders of the republic.
ISBN:9780253207739
