Baroque Diaspora: Armenians in Transylvania and Beyond as a Paradigm of Early-Modern Multiculturalism

This article deploys Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of the chronotope to explore the spatio-temporal configurations that are manifested across aspects of early-modern Armenian painting, particularly depictions of St. Gregory the Illuminator, architecture, urban design, and works of geography and cartography from Transylvania and beyond. It argues that these forms of cultural production together constituted a Baroque diaspora and theorizes the latter as comprising early-modern communities that manifested a sense of identity based on a notion of non-oppositional difference. Relying on Gilles Deleuze's interpretation of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's metaphysics of the monad through infinitesimal calculus, the article theorizes early-modern Baroque multiculturalism as the non-oppositional coexistence of diverse cultures in a world of multiplicity shaped by a universalist—Eurocentric and Christian—idea of humanity capable of rational and theological enlightenment. Early-modern Armenian communities in Transylvania and beyond are understood as part of this Baroque multicultural world. In this way, the article invites further comparative studies of other cultures and groups as participants in the early-modern Baroque multicultural experience in Europe and globally.