Re-Locations of Lebanon: The Littoral and Extraterritorial Geographies in Postwar Francophone Writing

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article deals with transnationalism and Lebanese literature written in French from 1990, the date that marks the end of the Civil War and the beginning of reconstruction. Produced amidst the conflagration of the Lebanese nation, a substantial body of heterogeneous works which maintain points of contact with Lebanon—both real and imagined—have been produced from outside the nation, from conditions of either exile or immigration. Through innovative strategies of deploying trans-cultural referents, this literature attempts to remap a broader Mediterranean or global cultural field. In reflecting on the present partitions in the Middle East, it evokes coordinates of new and alternative imagined geographies which focus on the sea (ports, tidelines) as opposed to land. Postwar writings such as Les Échelles du Levant by Amin Maalouf, and Littoral by Wajdi Mouawad explore the relations between land and sea, the personal and the global, and embrace an as yet unmapped worldly subject. Despite their status as outsiders, these writers explore the weight of global immediacy and their proximity to the Eastern Mediterranean or Levant—they map an extraterritorial consciousness. In articulating a new relationship to the imaginary of the Levant, they attempt to re-locate Lebanon and its horizon of possibilities.