Belonging and Longing: Armenian Youth and Diasporic Long‐Distance Nationalism in Contemporary Russia

Abstract

This paper examines the question of long-distance nationalism and Armenian youth in contemporary Russia. It contributes to existing debates on diasporic cultural identities and shows that long-distance nationalism is not simply an elitedriven phenomenon, but involves complex cultural, political, and symbolic processes and practices. Drawing on data obtained during six months of ethnographic fieldwork amongst Armenian youth in the city of Krasnodar, Southern Russia, it will be shown that young Armenians exhibit aspects of diasporic long-distance nationalism in different ways. While young Armenian men hold on to cultural traditions and practices that are formed in the past, female research participants have started to challenge them. Ã Ulrike Ziemer is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Centre for East European Language Based Area Studies (CEELBAS) at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. She received her Ph.D. from the Centre for Russian and East European Studies, University of Birmingham. Her research focuses on accounts of local-global relations experienced outside the West, especially the study of diasporic youth cultural identities and practice in Russia. Her most recent research explores questions of transnationalism and Armenian diasporic youth cultural identities in Russia. She has published articles in Europe-Asia Studies and Nationalities Papers.Ulrike Ziemer: Belonging and Longing

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“…Historical narratives and collective memories underlie diasporic notions of loss or the regaining of homeland, return, and more generally, belonging. Diasporas become seen as (re)created through shared imagination and collective memory (Alexander 2013;Ziemer 2010), including through the revival of shared historical experience in imagining their homeland (Wilcock 2018).…”

Growing up with a long-awaited nation-state: Personal struggles with the homeland among young diasporic Armenians

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Regrounding Youth Cultural Theory (in Post‐Socialist Youth Cultural Practice)

“…2003); globalization and national identity (Pilkington et al. 2002; Blum 2007; Ziemer 2009; Ziemer 2010); civic participation (Wallace 2003; Tereshchenko 2010); generations theory (Fürst 2010); and deviancy (Stephenson 2011). On the positive side, this has produced greater intersection between ‘domestic’ and ‘outside’ discourses as ‘local’ scholars have been integrated into the international research community and its dominant theoretical paradigms while ‘western’ researchers have undertaken more collaborative research.…”

“…Alternative ('informal') youth and popular music scenes were often read in terms of their political significance, being identified, by some authors, as key players in the collapse of sate socialist regimes (Ryback 1990;Ž ižek 1988 5 ). From the early 1990s, as the potential for conducting primary empirical work by western scholars opened up, the study of youth culture became subject to the application of a range of external social science paradigms including: youth cultural studies (Pilkington 1994); popular music studies (Cushman 1995;Steinholt 2005); youth transitions (Roberts et al 2000;Roberts 2008;Walker 2010); adolescence, integration and identity formation (Markowitz 2000;Horowitz et al 2003); social capital and inclusion ⁄ exclusion (Stephenson 2001;Pilkington and Sharifullina 2009); the sociology of individualization and risk (Williams et al 2003); globalization and national identity (Pilkington et al 2002;Blum 2007;Ziemer 2009;Ziemer 2010); civic participation (Wallace 2003;Tereshchenko 2010); generations theory (Fürst 2010); and deviancy (Stephenson 2011). On the positive side, this has produced greater intersection between 'domestic' and 'outside' discourses as 'local' scholars have been integrated into the international research community and its dominant theoretical paradigms while 'western' researchers have undertaken more collaborative research.…”