Lebanese identities: between cities, nations and trans-nations.

• Author: Humphrey, Michael

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.

Globalization is an important dimension of contemporary diaspora identity. The very possibility of diaspora identification has been enhanced by the technologies associated with space-time compression. For contemporary migrants this allows the possibility of close participation in social relations and nationalist politics at home. Middle East diasporas have involved themselves in nationalist politics since the Ottoman period but today diaspora politics takes place in a world where distance and time no longer attenuate communication and social identification. Previously distance had more effectively separated emigrants from the flux of 'homeland' politics and greatly restricted their capacity for participation, especially the possibilities of witnessing events and communicating personally with the people involved. The very globalizing processes that have displaced many migrants and refugees from their homelands now also allow a vital nationalist politics of identification and even participation at a distance. Global communications have created the capacity to produce and disseminate local culture globally through video, radio, television broadcasts and the Internet. These communications technologies create the possibility of projecting local diaspora realities--exile politics, cultural hybridity or national nostalgia--as an integral part of a transnational cultural identity. Thus in the Beirut press you can read about 'racism' towards Lebanese immigrants in Sydney.

Benedict Anderson (1992) describes the contemporary phenomenon of diaspora identification and mobilization as 'long-distance nationalism.' However he questions the morality of diaspora participation at a distance arguing that they can 'live their real politics long-distance, without accountability.' (3) These are not 'true exiles' waiting for victory to return home, Anderson argues, they are rather 'emigres who have no serious intention of going back home, which, as time passes, more and more serves as a phantom bedrock for an embattled metropolitan ethnic identity.' (4) Despite its nonaccountability this long-distance nationalism is not transitory because, according to Anderson, it is anchored in metropolitan identity politics of the host society. For Anderson, diaspora nationalism suffers from what Bauman calls 'optical morality'--one which diminishes with distance--and becomes a largely symbolic rather than moral belonging. (5)

What continued dispersal of people as diasporas and the emergence of new communications have done is to enlarge the sphere of the national and create a 'transnational' national space or a 'deterritorialised nation-state.' (6) But the political significance of the diaspora to homeland politics can vary enormously, depending on the relationship between the diaspora, homeland and the state. From the perspective of the state the (national) 'diaspora' may constitute a potential or actual extension of the national community. From the homeland the question of 'accountability' looks less important than the diaspora's potential for identification and mobilization around causes ranging from the repatriation of savings to the willingness to vote in home elections or merely to perpetuate cultural knowledge and national culture (traditions, religious belief and language). The diaspora is regarded as an extended national domain i.e., President Aristide of Haiti has referred to Haitians living in the United States as the 'tenth province of Haiti.' (7)

Diaspora identification may derive from the desire of individuals to re-anchor their identity in social origins provoked by a sense of loss in the milieu of multiculturalism but it can also derive from the legacy of past and continuing personal suffering from actual participation in nationalist struggles. When diasporas have been created by...