Buenos Aires, Argentina might not be the first metropolis in which one may think to encounter Middle Eastern minorities. Migration from both Syria and Lebanon to Argentina and Brazil in the period from 1920-1960 facilitated the convergence of a Syrian and Lebanese, Syriac-Orthodox community in Buenos Aires. This community in the diaspora managed to build an active intellectual and social life that remained connected to their homeland in the Middle East. During the 1930s, Churches were constructed, clergy were hired to attend to the new diaspora community, and the Syriac Orthodox Patriarch created a new diocese with an Archbishop responsible for keeping the community connected to the homeland. Magazines and other publications were used by the community to keep members informed of the latest developments in both the political and social conditions of the Middle East. This paper will examine the trilingual Arabic, Spanish, and Syriac journal Asiri, published by members of the community originally from Syria in Buenos Aires. Disseminated throughout the Middle East, and published from September 1934-August of 1956, I will explore how this monthly publication aided and allowed for an exchange of ideas regarding issues of nationalism, political activism, communism, and ethnicity between the diaspora community and those still living in the Middle East. Contributions to the magazine came from Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and diaspora communities in Argentina, Brazil, and the United States. This created an interesting medium that permitted members of the community to think of themselves as part of larger political movements and become increasingly aware of their status as ‘minorities’ in the newly independent states in the Middle East. This paper will examine these exchanges and analyze how members of the diaspora community helped to change the way Christian minorities in Iraq and Syria thought of themselves as a group belonging to the Arab and Assyrian nations rather than to religious denominations and millets. I will also seek to analyze how these ideas fed into the political movements that sought to de-colonize the Middle East, in particular communism and socialist political parties.

In the second half of the 20th century, Assyrians were attracted to intellectual and political movements that allowed them to emerge from the peripheries of their society, temporarily discarding their minority status to engage with other Iraqis of their socio-economic background. Within these secular and often leftist political spaces, Assyrians found room to maneuver and form strategic alliances mainly with the opposition, both as individuals and as a community. As a result, the Baʿthist state attempt to attract Assyrian political and religious leaders with favorable policies, such as the cultural rights issued in 1972. Assyrian intellectuals not only negotiated but also resisted government policies they disagreed with using the medium of popular culture and song. Music and singing became major means of resisting the status quo, curating social memory by disseminating a community’s own understanding of its history. In the summer of 1973, Shlemon Bet-Shmoel captured the Assyrian community’s account of the Simele massacre, perpetuated by the Iraqi army against the Assyrians in 1933, by performing a song entitled Simele. With the flow of music across borders, its influence extended beyond the zone of its creation. In addition to the use of written publications and modern Assyrian music, artistic images influenced symbolism on the covers of magazines such as Mordinna Atouraya, and double meanings could be discerned in certain poems and articles; this was especially prevalent during high periods of government censorship. This presentation will highlight the ways in which urbanite Assyrian intellectuals took advantage of new cultural policies and negotiated with the state using press and popular culture. My sources include discography of Assyrian music, complemented with cassette tapes and CD’s purchased in community centers and online digital collections along with oral interviews with folk singers. Oral history and folk songs provide insight into the roles and representations of women in Assyrian communities that are of significance to similar gender discourses in Iraqi society. The research is also based on original sources uncovered at the Iraqi National Library and Archives in Baghdad, and in libraries and private collections in Erbil, Duhok, and Mosul in languages ranging from Arabic, Classical Syriac and modern Aramaic. My research incorporates popular culture in the form of music, poetry, and oral history to take into account the cultural and artistic representations of various segments of the population.

Music and dance, as materialized through their performing subjects, are powerful tools for articulating nationalist history. Such an expressive embodiment of history and identity is an integral part of the Assyrian worldview that serves to unite and consolidate this ethnic and religious minority that inhabits the borders of Syria, Iraq, Turkey, and Iran. Violence and conflict have led the majority of Assyrians to flee their homelands, creating a global diaspora with significant populations in the global north. Interrogating the close connection between expressive culture and ethnic identity, this paper examines the practice and polysemics of the traditional Assyrian line dance sheikhani in a transnational performance context. Assyrians participate in sheikhani at events such as weddings and various public occasions. Many believe that sheikhani derives from the pre-battle warm-up of the Assyrian mountain warriors of Tiyari (present day Çukurca, Turkey), archetypal figures transmitted in their oral and nationalist history. The erasure of Tiyari in contemporary cartography adds representational import to its documentation as a reminder of the historical presence of Assyrians in the region, and their systematic persecution—song and dance being a means by which this mapping may be accomplished. Sheikhani, as a case in point, illustrates how traditional dance acts as an “instant embodied communal reference” or an emblem of ethnic identity that is instrumental in conveying cultural representation. Social anthropologist Jane Cowan theorizes dance as a heightened aesthetic and sensuous state that reinforces particular social meanings. Drawing from Cowan’s theory, I argue that sheikhani is a topographical and historical articulation of both Assyrian ethnic and national identity that is materialized through the body-politic. Framing the nation as an imagined community, I explore how the performance of sheikhani engenders a collective consciousness as it temporarily demarcates the space of performance as an imagined Assyria, and serves as a vehicle for the migration of memory from which the past informs the present. How do Assyrians engage with their past through material cultural forms as they simultaneously vie to assert themselves as a political entity within their homeland, yet must struggle for cultural survival in an increasingly diasporic condition? The data for this paper was drawn from ethnographic fieldwork which includes interviews and audiovisual materials documenting several Assyrian community events in Toronto, Ontario (2014-2016).

Music, or the musical object, has been approached in scholarship on culture in a number of ways. For example, music has been seen as “exhausted commodity,” in some cases, or as “cultural waste,” in others, especially in terms of the configuration and reconfiguration of nationalistic traits and their material expressions. While building on such conceptions of music as cultural artifact, this paper explores the cultural-material value of music in traditions that are otherwise considered as intangible cultural heritage (both, within and outside UNESCO’s definition of intangible heritage). In light of important ongoing conversations about material expressions of culture, the transience of culturality, and the imminence of shifts wrought by inter-culturality, I ask in this paper: What about cultures that have maintained a precarious connection between the material and the transcendent? Or, to be more precise in the case of religious minorities in the Middle East, what about musical cultures the existence of which has been marked by an intricate balance between the sacred and the secular? To address this question I consider examples from Christian musical traditions to interrogate the categories of cultural materiality and intangibility, on the one hand, in relation to one another, and on the other hand, in relation to categories of the sacred and the secular. I maintain that the case of Christian minorities in the Middle East (and specifically Syria) should shed new light on the interplay between these seemingly distinct modes of cultural and nationalistic expression. In the wider sense, addressing this question would helpfully nuance ongoing debates on pressing issues in the Middle East, not least among which is the survival of its cultural fabric, which is exemplified by religious minorities and their shifting modes of existence under the massive waves of conflict and migration that are destabilizing the region as never before.