Copyright: Erielle Bakkum Photography
Ghenwa Hayek
Research project
“Carrying Africa”, Becoming Lebanese
Project summary
Foregrounding Emigration and its Anxieties
Amidst resurgent debates about immigration in mainstream and academic discourses, my project, “Carrying Africa”, Becoming Lebanese turns a critical eye to the sociocultural impact of emigration on nations of origin. Specifically, it turns to the case of Lebanon to unpack the geographical imaginaries and affective grammars mobilized across a century of ongoing emigration (c.1860-present). By considering the the manner in which the diaspora is imagined from within the homeland, “Carrying Africa” reconciles these two spaces. Unlike most scholarship on Lebanon which focuses on one side of this geography or the other, this project prioritizes the role of the dialectical relationship between these two sites in the conceptualization of Lebanese identity. Additionally, by bringing this dialectic into focus, it demonstrates that diaspora is not a monolithic experience for emigrants, nor for their compatriots who choose to remain. Instead, diaspora is a complex constellation of experiences engendering specific cultural and social resonances.
Lebanon is significant for scholars interested in the entanglement between a nation and its diaspora due to the size, geographical spread, and ongoing history of emigration from that country. In the late nineteenth century, one third of the population of Mount Lebanon migrated; today, the number of people of Lebanese origin in the global diaspora in the Americas, Australia, Europe, and the Gulf countries outnumbers the population in Lebanon sixfold. Yet, despite hosting far fewer Lebanese emigrants than other sites of emigration, it is Africa which looms large in the longue durée of the Lebanese imaginary of diasporic life. The project reveals how since Lebanese migration began in the mid-nineteenth century, the African continent has been used as the imaginary site that underpins Lebanese anxieties about the nation-state. With remarkable historical continuities between the Ottoman, French mandate, and postcolonial periods, imaginaries of “Africa” have been used to dissuade Lebanese individuals from emigrating.
Frictions of Diasporic Entanglement
This project contributes to broader diaspora studies by arguing against notions of diaspora as monolithic both theoretically and within a national culture. It shows that some diasporic experiences take on considerable cultural weight regardless of their actual social impact. It reconciles between racial notions of diaspora and national notions of diaspora by reading them together, in the manner they are refracted in Lebanese culture. Tracking the racial, sexual, and cultural anxieties articulated in Lebanese accounts of emigration to Africa, the work participates in the project of unmooring, or unfixing what Arsan et al. call “the analytical stillness… and circumscribed geography” of contemporary Middle Eastern, and Lebanon studies (2013). The project moves ideas of diaspora away from discussions of the relationship between the global peripheries and metropolitan centers, thus contributing to expanding notions of ‘minor transnationalisms’, South-South connections, and the project of provincializing Europe. In doing so, “Carrying Africa” also contributes to a new transnational, transhistorical account of global South relations that moves beyond investigating and celebrating solidarities and uses particular case studies to expose what Antoinette Burton describes as the “frictions” between different postcolonial communities (Burton, Africa in the Indian Imagination, Duke UP, 2016).
Cultural Imaginaries of Diaspora
Through a doubled methodology of reading canonical texts contrapuntally and excavating an obscured and ephemeral cultural archive of emigration located in films, popular magazines, and government publications, “Carrying Africa” draws out the racialised dialectic between “Lebaneseness” and “Africaness”, and between “Lebanon” and “Africa” that is used to highlight and sustain anxieties and questions about Lebanon.
In “Carrying Africa”, I argue that readings attentive to the anxieties embedded in such encounters, framed in terms of race, geography, and diaspora force a re-evaluation of how nation, race, class and citizenship are articulated within a national culture through its interactions with its different diasporas. By exposing the racialized and racial discourses used locally to emphasize difference and maintain social and political power structures, “Carrying Africa” thereby also nuances sect- or class-based accounts of Lebanon’s cosmopolitanism.
Within this framework, Marseille plays a powerful role in the Lebanese imaginary of diaspora prior to the commercialisation of air travel. The shadowy figure of the wakil al-messagerie, the shipping company agent, appears in many accounts of the journey abroad. As the central shipping hub for transit in the Mediterranean, the port city features heavily in accounts of voyages to Africa as well as to the Americas, and it is the locus for many different accounts of departure, missed connections, and the travails of emigration.
Biography
Ghenwa Hayek is Associate Professor of Modern Arabic Literature in the Departments of Middle Eastern Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago. Her scholarship elaborates on the entangled relationships between literary and cultural production, space and place, and identity formation in the modern Arab Middle East, with a specific focus on Lebanon. Whether her source material is literature, film, or digital media, she seeks to nuance and complicate our understandings of the processes through which these dynamic cultures understand, represent, and position themselves in the world. Increasingly, her work has highlighted the affective impact of seismic social events such as mass emigration, rapid urbanization, or war on national culture, and probed the ways that cultural texts attempt to make sense of prolonged and continuous crisis.
She is the author of Beirut, Imagining the City: Space and Place in Lebanese Literature (IB Tauris, 2015), and with Alireza Doostdar, the co-producer and co-host of the video series Gaming Islam.
