• 'Carrying Africa', Becoming Lebanese: Diasporic Middleness in Lebanese Fiction

    Author(s):
    Ghenwa Hayek (see profile)
    Date:
    2015
    Subject(s):
    Emigration and immigration, Ethnicity, Immigrants--Social conditions, Literature and transnationalism, Transnationalism, Arabic literature, Literature, Modern, Middle East, Area studies
    Item Type:
    Book chapter
    Tag(s):
    Diaspora studies, Transnational literature, Transnational migration, Modern Arabic literature, Middle Eastern studies
    Permanent URL:
    http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6KR9D
    Abstract:
    In this essay, I explore the ways in which the bodies of migrants, specifically of Lebanese men who have returned from Africa, are represented in Lebanese fiction. By focusing on the ways in which these figures are embodied textually, I seek to begin to shed light on the ways in which Lebanese authors have engaged with certain diaspora spaces, in this case, the often undifferentiated referent 'Africa'. I argue that the ways in which Lebanese fiction engages with the Lebanese experience in the African diaspora reveals not only a cultural attitude towards Africa that is tangled up in notions of scientific racism, and a colonial and postcolonial anxiety about Lebanese identity and nationalism, but also, concomitantly, a gnawing anxiety over the meaning of Lebanese identity and the viability of Lebanon itself. In this essay, I closely read two texts written and published almost a century apart, showing the remarkable similarity that nevertheless exists between them. However, I argue that, especially in the earlier prose fiction that is the main focus of this essay, Lebanese identity is figured as a sort of between-ness, between white European and African identities; it is through this betweenness that the figure of the exemplary Lebanese individual emerges.
    Notes:
    Winner, Khayrallah Award for Middle East Diaspora Studies, 2015
    Metadata:
    xml
    Published as:
    Book chapter     Show details
    Publisher:
    Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée (PULM)
    Pub. Date:
    2015
    Book Title:
    Diasporas, Cultures of Mobilities, ‘Race’ 2: Diaspora, Memory and Intimacy
    Author/Editor:
    Thomas Lacroix, David Howard, Judith Misrahi-Barak, Sarah Barbour
    Chapter:
    \'Carrying Africa\', Becoming Lebanese: Diasporic Middleness in Lebanese Fiction
    Page Range:
    99 - 114
    ISBN:
    9782367811819
    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    5 years ago
    License:
    All Rights Reserved
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