Ghosts in The Archive—Lebanon’s Second-Generation Post-War Novelists and The Limits of Reconstruction

Abstract

This article explores structural reasons for the “archival turn” performed in the civil war novels of Lebanon's second-generation post-war novelists since the early 2000s. It recognizes the abundant use of precise spatial and temporal references, which contrasts with the practice of Lebanese writers of the 1990s, and explains this change as the result of the authors’ socio-economic position and their position in the literary field. The post-civil war novel thus appears as the memorial practice of a closely circumscribed, largely secular intellectual elite who are excluded from sectarian war narratives as means to make sense of the past.