Armenian Diasporic Belonging as a Historically Contingent and Relational Field: Introduction to the Special Collection

This introduction conceptualizes Armenian diasporic belonging as a historically contingent, relational, and multilayered field of practices, affiliations, and attachments. Bringing scholarship on diasporic belonging, cultural identity, transnationalism, and Armenian diaspora studies into dialogue, it demonstrates how Armenian diasporic belonging has evolved and continues to unfold across multiple scales—from forms of diasporic localism rooted in sedentary practices to transregional, transimperial, and transnational engagements. Within this multidimensional diasporic social field, belonging is shaped by distinct historical trajectories marked by continuity and rupture, while also unfolding relationally, intergenerationally, and intersectionally through shifting power relations and discourses of sameness and difference. This introduction situates the contributions to this issue, showing how each explores a distinct layer of diasporic belonging by highlighting a particular configuration or offering an analytical lens for tracing the evolving interplay of continuity and difference across scales, generations, and contexts. By examining how locally situated and geographically distant articulations of Armenianness converge, intersect, and at times conflict, this special collection advances broader theoretical understandings of how transnational communities negotiate continuity, difference, and belonging across time and space.