Ghenwa Hayek

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).