Armenian Musicians of Baku: Digital Diasporic Memory

• In Event: Legacies of Diversity in a Post-Multi-Ethnic Space II: Between Memory and Practice

Abstract

Ethnic Armenians constituted a sizeable minority in twentieth century Baku, Azerbaijan. They were particularly prominent as instrumentalists, performing and recording with renowned singers in state-sponsored ensembles as well as informal settings. The pogroms against the Armenian population in January 1990 ended the Armenian presence in the city. Members of this community, now living in a distinct diaspora within Russia, Armenia, and the United States, are currently involved in digitizing and archiving the musical culture of Armenian Baku through social media networks such as VKontakte, Facebook, and YouTube. Spanning nearly a century, these digital archives and musician-specific memorialization pages serve as a digital record of the Armenian musicking community in Azerbaijan. Considering these digital repositories and how members of the Baku Armenian diaspora experience these recordings, I explore how these digital archives enable acts of remembering and digital diasporic intimacy.

Author

• Jonathan Lee Hollis, U of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign