The Armenian transnation as unified in opposition to its Ottoman past

Type :

Presentation

Pages :

5 pages

Format :

.doc

Published date :

07/08/2008

Category :

History & geography

Sub category :

Modern history

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Summary :

Armenian 'transnation' is self-defined and ultimately unified by the Armenian genocide of 1915.
Republic of Armenia's villainization of its Ottoman past.
The fledgling Republic of Armenia.
Dispersion scholars such as Khachig Tololyan.
The Armenian transnation's victim psychology.
The most notorious Armenian villainization of the Ottomans.
Pushing a policy of genocide recognition.

Abstract

At the turn of the twentieth century, the Armenians were already a dispersed people; one scattered around the world but primarily divided between the ottoman and Russian Empires. Their dispersion, however, became part of their self-conception as a people in 1915, when the ottoman Armenians found themselves being systematically deported from their homes to other remote parts of the Empire by the powerful Turkish nationalist faction the Committee of Union and Progress. Whatever the intent of the CUP Armenians deportations was, the result was manifested in the suffering and ultimate death of approximately anywhere from 600,000 to one million armenian men, women, and children. Since then, to use the words of armenian scholar Lorne Shirinian, armenian people around the world have refused to forget their "destruction" at the hands of the Ottomans, "[absorbing] catastrophe, wandering, exile, diaspora and rebirth" into their very self-conception. And yet, in 1991, almost a century after the genocide of 1915, this self-proclaimed "wandering people" was officially granted its own nation-state, the fledgling Republic of Armenia. Accordingly, the issue has become how this new armenian "Homeland" is supposed to define itself-that is, how it is to supposed to unite itself with what is often referred to as the armenian "transnation," or the five million Armenians born and living outside of the Republic's borders