Negotiating Armenian Identity in Bourj Hammoud, Lebanon

Department: Armenian Studies

Date and Time: January 24, 2018 | 6:00 PM-7:30 PM

Event Location: Humanities Gateway 1030

Event Details


Featuring:  Dr. Joanne Randa Nucho 

How is Armenian identity produced, recalibrated and negotiated in and through the sectarian political space of Lebanon? What does it mean to be Armenian in Bourj Hammoud, a working-class suburb of Beirut initially urbanized by Armenian refugees of the genocide in the 1930s? How do class, gender, and geography play into how Armenianness is experienced from the perspective of residents of this city, long a hub for transnational migration and internal displacement within Lebanon? In this talk, I will give an overview of my research within the context of Bourj Hammoud and the ways in which notions of transnational diasporic identity as well as a very local experience of neighborhood belonging are both critical to the way that residents approach Armenian identity and their sense of connectedness to it.

Joanne Randa Nucho, an anthropologist and filmmaker, is the author of Everyday Sectarianism in Urban Lebanon: Infrastructures, Public Services, and Power (Princeton University Press, 2016) and a Mellon Chau Postdoctoral Fellow of Anthropology at Pomona College. Her films have been screened in various venues, including the London International Documentary Film Festival in 2008.

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