An aesthetics of diasporic citizenship: the example of Lebanese women in the UK

Abstract

Migration for Lebanese is an ancestral practice that can be traced back to the Phoenicians. This cultural and social heritage has been maintained throughout time and still has an impact on the country to this very day. In the light of the expansion of capitalist mode of production on a global scale and the accentuation of human mobility across borders, the Lebanese migration represents an interesting case. This is not only because of their long tradition of travelling across the world but also, on closer inspection, because Lebanese people seem to have anticipated what has now emerged as a widespread ‘diasporic’ condition. In this regard, aspects such as belonging and participation are crucial. The aim of this work is not only to study a specific migratory experience through a transnational perspective but also to use gender as a fertile analytical category to interrogate all-encompassing issues such as human mobility and citizenship, and to raise more general theoretical questions. Ultimately, this approach will prove useful to critically examine concepts such as citizenship, identity and boundaries produced by contemporary nation states. The objective is to understand what the articulations of belonging and participation across boundaries are and how trajectories affect them. The research has no pretence of exhaustiveness. Nonetheless, as it takes advantage of qualitative methods of analysis, it sheds light on aspects that can prove useful to frame contemporary migration in a novel global perspective.

Keywords::

• citizenship
• gender
• diaspora
• transnationalim
• identity
• Lebanon

Notes

^1. An ideal type is a standard of comparison that identifies the essential characteristics and enables us to recognise a phenomenon or behaviour systematically (Weber 1947). The criticism towards the idea of migrant as an ideal type acknowledges, on the one hand, the social and cultural heterogeneity of migrants (Bonfiglio 2011) and, on the other hand, challenges the naturalization of the global regime of nation states – hence, the crystallization of citizen and immigrant as a dichotomy (cf. Kofman et al.2000, p. 39, see also Al-Ali and Koser 2002, Salih 2003, Wimmer and Glick-Schiller 2003).

^2. In 1991, there were an estimated 20,953 Lebanese in France and 19,000 in England (Abdulkarim 1996, p. 36). With regard to France's favourable disposition towards Lebanese immigrants, see Abdulkarim (1996, pp. 51–52).

^3. The use of the adjective transnational in this piece of work signals different processes: the porosity of boundaries and the heterogeneity of transnational migrants (whether they are refugees, sex workers or self-made man/woman entrepreneurs, though often the line between these ‘categories’ intersects). Aware of the danger of creating a brand new grand narrative, the transnational approach developed here is an intersectional, empirically rich approach. It means that different variables of social stratification such as gender, age, socio-economic or religious background are taken into account so as not to obscure the agents' actual experience (Mohanty 1988, Grewal and Kaplan 2000, Al-Ali and Koser 2002, Pessar and Mahler 2003, Salih 2003, Yuval-Davis 2006).

^4. To clarify my use of gender, compare the whole passage: ‘Although a common practice in immigration research, we do not use “gender” synonymously with “sex.” Sex is best reserved as a simple dichotomous variable: male versus female. Gender is much more complex and involves the ways in which cultures imbue this biological difference with meaning such as demarcating between male and female domains in activities, tasks, spaces, time, dress and so on’ (Pessar and Mahler 2003, p. 814; cf. also Scott 1986, Erel 2009).

^5. In order to avoid creating a rigid, ahistorical category such as the ‘Lebanese woman’, gender is considered here as one of the social variables to take into consideration as a means to include concrete women's variegated lives and experiences.

^6. Of Greek origin, the term diaspora refers to a positive idea of dispersion and settlement in fertile lands within the Mediterranean basin. More recently, it has taken on the meaning of a traumatic experience with reference to the Jewish case (Cohen 2008). Exile and the longing for return are the extreme points to circumscribe the semantic sphere. Yet the concept of diaspora has gone through a process of redefinition, especially within the realm of Cultural and Postcolonial Studies as a means to better capture the emerging reality of transnational networks than the language of immigration and assimilation (cf. Appadurai 1989, Gilroy 1994, Tololyan 1996, Hall 2006).

^7. The theoretical grid provided by Cohen (2008, p. 17) to create a common frame of reference related to the concept of diaspora will remain in the background. Yet, I will not take this allegiance for granted as if the diasporic community were a given (Clifford 1994).

^8. By aesthetics, I mean an ethos, i.e. distinctive patterns of behaviour evolving into collective procedures, practices and formulae that people reflect upon, perfect and teach. In particular, I am borrowing from Foucault who defines an aesthetics of existence as ‘those intentional actions by which men not only set themselves rules of conduct, but also seek to transform themselves, to change themselves in their singular being, and make their lives into an oeuvre that carries certain aesthetic values and meets certain stylistic criteria’. In other words, Foucault's care for the self provides particular modes of behaviour that are ‘intrinsecally ethical as they imply complex relations with others, in the measure where this ethos of freedom is also a way of caring for others' (Foucault 1984a cited in Hofmeyr 2005, p. 9).

^9. Pateman's (1988) seminal work The Sexual Contract, for instance, deconstructs the fraternal pact that underpins liberal democratic thought. It masks the gender assumptions that shape the citizen as male by an ominous silence on the primal scene, where women do not appear (Pateman 1988, p. 113).

^10. By expert informant, I mean ‘a person that is of less interest as a (whole) person than in his or her capacity of being an expert for a certain field of activity’ (Flick 2002, p. 89). It is also worth specifying that the first-generation women are intended here as those women who were in their prime age (i.e. in the age group between 15 and 35 years) at the time of entry to the UK and are now 50 years of age or older.

^11. Compare the whole passage: ‘[…] The contradiction in which the adherent of a particular religion finds himself involved in relation to his citizenship is only one aspect of the universal secular contradiction between the political state and civil society. […] The droits de l'homme, the rights of man, are, as such, distinct from the droits du citoyen, the rights of the citizen. Who is homme as distinct from citoyen?’ (Marx 1844).

^12. It is largely acknowledged that modern Lebanese emigration began around 1850 and was characterised by three major waves of emigration. The first wave extended from around 1850 to the end of the First World War, the second wave from the end of the Second World War to the 1970s, and the third wave took place during and after the 1975–90 war in Lebanon (Hourani and Shehadi 1992, p. 4; cf. Burnley 1982, Abdulkarim 1996, Humphrey 1998, Joost Beuving 2006).

^13. During the civil war period, 40% of the population sought refuge, either temporarily or permanently, from political conflict in Lebanon (Tabar 2009, p. 6).

^14. On the topic, see the report prepared by the Lebanese Women's Democratic Gathering and the National Committee for the Follow-Up on Women's Issues, available from: http://www.lebanon-support.org/tatimma (cf. also Mokbel-Wensley 1996).

^15. Please see Mansour and Abou Aad (2012, p. 9).

^16. I intend by ‘epistemological vigilance’ not so much a philosophical standpoint as a practical one apt to maintain a safe distance from any licence ‘to the irresponsible use of concepts. [This should be understood as a way to] be cautious and circumscribed in understanding the ways in which concepts mobilize certain forces and coerce others’ (Isin 2005, p. 375; cf. also Spivak 1990).