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This book rethinks the Armenian people as significant actors in the context of Mediterranean and global history. Spanning a millennium of cross-cultural interaction and exchange across the Mediterranean world, essays move between connected histories, frontier studies, comparative literature, and discussions of trauma, memory, diaspora, and visual culture. Contributors dismantle narrow, national ways of understanding Armenian literature; propose new frameworks for mapping the post-Ottoman Mediterranean world; and navigate the challenges of writing national history in a globalized age. A century after the Armenian genocide, this book reimagines the borders of the "Armenian," pointing to a fresh vision for the field of Armenian studies that is omnivorously comparative, deeply interconnected, and rich with possibility.
List of contents
1. Introduction: A Moveable Armenia.- I. Rethinking Boundaries.- 2. The Age of the Gharib : Strangers in the Medieval Mediterranean.- 3. Past the Mediterranean and Iran: A Comparative Study of Armenia as an Islamic Frontier, 1st/7th-5th/11th Centuries.- 4. A Fish out of Water? Medieval Armenia(ns) and the Mediterranean.- II. Connecting Histories.- 5. From "Autonomous" to "Interactive" Histories: World History's Challenge to Armenian Studies.- 6. Mapping Jerusalem: Re-Reading the City in the Context of the Medieval Mediterranean.- III. Breaking National and Imperial Paradigms.- 7. Between Anatolia and the Balkans: Tracing Armenians in the Post-Ottoman Order.- 8. Armeno-Turkish Writing and the Question of Hybridity.- 9. Wandering Minstrels, Moving Novels: The Case of Khach'atur Abovyan's Wounds of Armenia .- IV. Texturizing Diaspora.- 10. Weaving Images: Textile, Displacement, and Reframing the Borders of Visual Culture.- 11. Diasporic Flânerie : From Armenian Ruinenlust to Armenia's Walkscapes.- 12. Spaces of Difference, Spaces of Belonging: Negotiating Armenianness in Lebanon and France.- V. Placing Statehood.- 13. Contemporary Armenian Drama and World Literature.- 14. How to Write the History of the Third Republic (or How Not to Write It).- VI. Epilogue.- 15. The Mediterranean is Armenian.
About the author
Kathryn Babayan is Associate Professor of Iranian History and Culture and Director of the Armenian Studies Program at the University of Michigan, USA.
Michael Pifer is Lecturer in Armenian Language and Literature at the University of Michigan, USA.
Summary
This book rethinks the Armenian people as significant actors in the context of Mediterranean and global history. Spanning a millennium of cross-cultural interaction and exchange across the Mediterranean world, essays move between connected histories, frontier studies, comparative literature, and discussions of trauma, memory, diaspora, and visual culture. Contributors dismantle narrow, national ways of understanding Armenian literature; propose new frameworks for mapping the post-Ottoman Mediterranean world; and navigate the challenges of writing national history in a globalized age. A century after the Armenian genocide, this book reimagines the borders of the “Armenian,” pointing to a fresh vision for the field of Armenian studies that is omnivorously comparative, deeply interconnected, and rich with possibility.
