Maintaining Heritage and Assimilation

Chapter Two explores the Iranian Armenian community’s struggles to maintain ties with their heritage, all the while they resist assimilation to the host nation’s culture. Within these culturalproductions, representations of Armenians who often adopted subordinate social profiles as they were pushed to the margins predominate. This positioning resulted in a cultural practice of destabilising identity categories, embodying the values and practices of multiple identities and forging multiple, overlapping national and historically influenced identities. To explore the ways in which Armenians resisted assimilation or rather assimilated in Iran and in the US, this chapter provides the most important theories of assimilation and examine the Armenian community’s responses to each one of those theoretical perspectives.