Exilic Becomings: Post-Genocide Armenian Music in Lebanon

Abstract

Abstract Through a comparison with the musical trends in the decades before and after its rise, this paper examines the estradayin movement in Lebanon--a pop music genre that arose in the Armenian exilic community in Beirut--as one whose spatial and temporal hybridities facilitated a transformative moment in the discourse of Armenian identity. However, with the start of Lebanon’s civil war and the re-diasporization of the Lebanese-Armenian community to California, this genre becomes the locus of a highly militant discourse of identity that subverts the inclusivity of the hybridity embodied within the estradayin songs into something exclusive, creating boundaries out of that which had once defied them.