Lebanese identities: between cities, nations and trans-nations

Arab Studies Quarterly (ASQ), Wntr, 2004 by Michael Humphrey

INTRODUCTION

IN THIS ARTICLE, I DISCUSS the (re)constituting the 'Lebanese diaspora.' Our journeys and our presentations produce evidence of the existence of the Lebanese and their descendants in different parts of the world. Yet in what sense does the Lebanese diaspora exist? Does it exist by virtue of the historical fact of more than 100 years of emigration? Does it exist because of continuing personal ties and exchanges with Lebanon expressed by those millions of telephone calls, emails and visits home of so many different Lebanese? Does it also exist as a vital and complex network of global interrelationships forming a trans-formation? Does it exist largely as an imaginary homeland of nostalgic loss? Or is the very interest in diaspora being produced by the anxieties arising from the erosion of all identity in diverse nation-states in the face of globalizing processes?

In this article I explore the contemporary idea of diaspora as a product of large-scale migration and nation-state formation in the 19th and 20th centuries. In the past century emigration for economic or political reasons has resulted in cross-generational dispersal of people and introduced them into different societies and states whose own national trajectories have been distinct. The terms and conditions of national membership for migrants and their descendants have varied greatly for different generations of Lebanese emigrants across societies of North and South America, Australasia, Europe, and Africa. In the case of the societies of mass migration their experience in the 19th and most of the 20th centuries was assimilation while in the colonial and post-colonial states of Africa it was ethnic differentiation. I argue that the terms of participation of Lebanese immigrants in societies has been extremely important in shaping present interest in the 'diaspora' along with the crisis of the Lebanese nation-state itself and its renewal. (1)

The term diaspora has come into vogue in the last decade because it captures the ambiguities of contemporary social belonging. Diaspora refers to a form of social relations produced by the displacement from home. It implies a very conventional anthropological perspective on social life, the persistence of tradition (identity) despite its displacement from place of origin. It fits within the old dichotomy between tradition and modernity in which the anticipated loss of tradition is resisted. Yet current usage of the term includes not only the persistence of tradition (identity) as a product of collective resistance to cultural loss but also qualified acceptance by the host society. Diaspora identity is constituted against the national society out of a sense of loss and conditional belonging.

Today the use of diaspora refers to a sense of exile, the feeling of wanting to return home but being unable to because of exclusion by politics or history. One is made an outcast because of present need or fear, or because generational distance makes it impossible to find one's way back home. But diaspora is not merely understood as banishment or being made an outcast from one's home society but from all society. Its usage moves between the specificity of an historical experience to an existential condition. It is even used as a metaphor for the existential condition of post modernity to refer to uncertainty, displacement and fragmented identity. (2)

The contemporary use of the term Lebanese diaspora embraces all these different senses of exile. The 'Lebanese diaspora' and its present self-consciousness was brought into existence by the displacement of people by the Lebanese war. In their case the diasporic experience is the product of national disintegration and the destruction of social worlds and their experience of resettlement in migration. But alongside the 'new' war refugee communities are the 'older' Lebanese communities who experience the diaspora as a nostalgic sense of exile experienced as loss of culture and loss of social connections with the past. In addition, the diasporic identities of the 'new' and 'old' communities are being shaped by the corrosive effects of globalization which are accelerating the loss of cultural identity not just across generations hut within generations. The experience of social transience engendered by globalizing the processes makes all social and cultural renewal problematic. Social contexts everywhere are being eroded by the practices of flexible accumulation making social continuity as the basis for identity increasingly insecure. Postmodernity celebrates these experiences as 'de-territorialisation,' 'hybridity' and 'exile.' This is a world in which everything and everybody is being prised from their roots.

In thinking about the expression 'Lebanese diaspora' we need to negotiate these very different historical and metaphoric uses. One problem with the expression 'Lebanese diaspora' is that it is homogenizing. When used to refer to the resilience of tradition it conjures up a cultural essentialism, i.e., Lebanese 'cultural survival' across generations is an expression of their qualities as a people. Of course diaspora as an 'imaginary transnational community' is necessarily homogenizing, as is the 'imagined community' of the nation-state. However while diasporic imagining might be homogenizing the diaspora has not been formed by a singular process, are not culturally very similar. Nor do Lebanese diaspora communities conceive of the 'imagined present' or 'past' in the same way. The Lebanese emigrants who constitute the present diaspora are the product of quite different migrations with their own very distinct relationships to societies and to contemporary Lebanon. Some have been constituted through labor migration, others through trading activities, and others through flight as refugees from war and economic crisis in Lebanon. Moreover the societies in which they have become residents and/or citizens ranging from mass immigration societies, colonial societies, postcolonial societies and the former European colonial states now increasingly themselves countries of immigration, are very different.