ABSTRACT
This chapter will survey some of the ways theorists have explained national identity-formation to place into broader context how the diaspora experience played a role in the Eastern Armenian intelligentsia’s nationalist project. Since the late nineteenth century, scholars have accepted the invented quality of modern national identity, and the extent to which the memory of the past requires the “present-day … will [of the individual] to perpetuate the value of the heritage one has received.” 1 The consensus among European thinkers was that the rational, progressive developmental teleology of historicism stipulated an understanding of the past to determine the destiny, the very existence of a nation. Recent thinkers on this question, often called “modernists,” more than ever have been interested in demonstrating that a peoples’ awareness of their membership in a national community is a strictly modern trend induced by recent transformations—that nationalism is the creation of contemporary actors motivated by economic modernization, social alienation, and political mobilization. 2 Moreover, the practice of writing history, perhaps more than any other discipline, is the touchstone for revealing how intellectuals or states formulated and created the dynamics of modern identity. “Nations without a past are a contradiction in terms; what makes the nation is a past … [and] the people who produce it,” claims Eric Hobsbawm. 3
