The article explores cultural anxiety towards Armenian heritage in the historic town of Telavi, as a lived experience of cultural nationalism in post-Soviet Georgia. The complex history of colonialism and imperial/Soviet domination results in the overlaying of multiple epistemic regimes of identity construction, which results in tensions and contradictions in how ethnicity and cultural heritage are imagined and experienced. This constitutes a “past presencing” framework for an imaginative engagement with the hegemonic historical discourses and family memories, within which distant periods of the national past are reconnected and reinvented to make sense and negotiate meanings of the Armenian heritage and identities in the present. More specifically, the article analyzes embodied and emplaced practices of surname change and engagement with the Armenian religious and sacred sites in the town, moving the discussion to the tensions between the (in)visibility of Armenian heritage as part of Georgia’s national monumental time and discursive construction of Armenian disappearance in the town as a “return” of their “authentic” Georgian-ness.
Anton Popov (Thu,) studied this question.