ABSTRACT
The construction of diasporas is fundamentally about the effort to assert and sustain very particular social boundaries across space and time, to ‘make oneself at home in the world’ through an avowal of membership in an ethnonational collectivity. The transcendent unity of ‘diasporic’ divided Armenians was established through the proclamation and narrative reiteration of a primordial connection. In the Middle East there had been extensive movements and contacts between Western Armenian-speaking communities in different countries, taking advantage of extensive personal networks as well as organizational connections. In spite of the extensive personal and organizational resources which had linked Armenians in dispersed diaspora communities before their arrival in London and which continued to connect them with Armenians elsewhere, they were acutely aware of distinctions which had been nurtured by this dispersal. Fragmentation, dispersal, transnational contact and hybridity, all features identified with diaspora formations, were certainly therefore denoted but more often denounced or worried over than celebrated by these Armenians in London.
