This paper explores the relationship of Syrian-Lebanese émigrés to the League of Nations surrounding the Syrian Revolt of 1925. Looking at the records of the League of Nations one finds a plethora of petitions from all over the mahjar both in support and against the French mandatory power. Based in Geneva and Cairo, the Syro-Palestinian Congress in particular sent regular petitions to the League, claiming to represent the aspirations of Syrians and Lebanese back home. Nevertheless, the pan-Syrian nationalism of the Syro-Palestinian Congress was especially countered by Lebanese nationalist groups in the diaspora. Indeed, members of the eighth session of the Permanent Mandates Commission (especially set up to discuss the Syrian question) expressed surprise at finding that little to none of the petitions came from inside the mandate itself. The long-distance politics of diaspora activists and intellectuals thus sought to transcend geography. Nevertheless such long-distance politics were not transnational in the sense that they superseded national understandings, but were more an expression of transborder, and yet particular, loyalties. Set against the backdrop of a new international system which ideally organized itself around the principle of sovereign nation-states, this paper seeks to understand the relationship of diaspora to homeland by looking at these contentious petitions, and asks to what extent émigré politics and activism sought to influence the political affairs back home. Looking at the triangular relationship of Syrian-Lebanese around the world to the French mandatory power and to the League of Nations thus provides a fuller picture of the Syrian Revolt of 1925. By decentering the study of the revolt, this paper is part of a broader attempt to shed new light on the development of nationalist identifications formed in part through a dialectical relationship between diaspora and homeland.

This paper locates Brazil as a major site of Syrian patriotic culture by examining philanthropic and activist networks between the city of Homs and a Syrian club in Sao Paulo, the Nadi Homsi. Established in 1920, Nadi Homsi was a Syrian young men's club linked first to Emir Faysal's Arab Nationalist government, and later to the Syrian National Bloc. During the 1920s, members presided over a distinctly anti-colonial political culture that analogized between the fortitude of Syrian masculinity and the will to sovereignty and independence for Syria. The Nadi prescribed a rigorous program for young men comprising charity, self-improvement, intensive ideological training, and corporeal discipline through sports. Merging Brazilian machismo with Syrian territorial nationalism, the club sponsored new schools, orphanages, and newspapers in Homs, altering Syrian social infrastructure. By the late twenties the Nadi promoted return migration of young Syrian men, with the aim of spreading a politics of patriotism grown in the diaspora. By “making Syrian men” in Brazil, the Nadi Homsi hoped to ultimately usher in a new political renaissance at home. In the process, the club inscribed new political meanings on young men's bodies and minds, making boys objects for nationalist political reform.

Lebanese emigration to sub-Saharan Africa began to pick up steam in the late nineteenth-century, and almost as quickly, it began to seep back into the literary consciousness; the first novella published in al-Machriq, Khar?dat Lubn?n (1898) tells the tale of a Lebanese immigrant who returned to his native village after twenty-five years in South Africa. Although the Lebanese diaspora in South and West Africa, which numbers approximately 200,000 individuals spread across a half-dozen nations, is not as culturally visible as other Lebanese diasporic communities, particularly those in the American continent and Europe, these immigrants to Africa have nevertheless left their marks on Lebanese fiction. Besides Khar?dat Lubn?n, the African diaspora appears in such canonical texts as Tawfiq Youssef ?Aww?d’s Tawah?n Bayr?t, where the quote in this title comes from, and Hanan al-Shaykh’s Story of Zahra. My presentation builds on recent work on the historical and contemporary Lebanese diaspora by scholars like Akram Khater and Ghassan Hage that has begun to broaden the scope of earlier ethnographic and statistical studies of Lebanese diasporic communities abroad and parse out the relationship between this diaspora and ‘back home’; as Hage puts it in a recent lecture, “just as the [Lebanese] village as a ‘home’ [is] present in the diaspora all over the world, the world of the diaspora [is] equally present in the village” (Hage, “The Everyday Aesthetic of the Lebanese Translational Family”, 6). In this talk, I will focus on the literary representations of Africa and the Lebanese diaspora in Africa in these three texts to explore how the imaginary geography of ‘Africa’ has been constructed over time, and what implications such a construction has on the cultural construction, formation and articulation of Lebanese identity. I argue that in these three texts, Africa and the African emigrant, who is represented as literally embodying ‘African-ness’, become the dialectical counterparts to textual constructions of Lebanon and Lebanese identity. Fraught with racialized and gendered complexities, these “signs of ‘abroad’ include, even as they repress, a rich and complex history”, (Said, Culture and Imperialism, 93), in turn shedding light on the complex histories of Lebanese emigration to Africa as well as the shifting dynamics of cultural and national identity formation in Lebanon.

The demise of the Ottoman Empire left a power vacuum that not only led to constant struggles over the fate of a variety of ethnic and religious groups in the Middle East but also urged Ottoman immigrants in the United States to face the challenges of what roles they might play in reshaping a world which they had left and which was in the midst of profound political and geographical change. Consequently, thousands of Ottoman citizens including Arabs, Turks, Kurds, Armenians, Greeks, and Sephardic Jews who had made their way to the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, constructed new identities based on ethnicity, religion, territorial dispersion, an imagined place of origin, a collective heritage, genealogical continuity, and a sense of extraterritoriality and loss. Decades later, the second wave of Middle Eastern migrants to the U.S., who came from post-Ottoman lands, drastically changed, redefined and reconstructed the identities of the first wave and their American-born offspring, often reinvigorating ethnic attachment and solidarity. The transnationalization of immigrant and/or ethnic identities, as well as transnational/transborder activities are relatively recent additions to the research agenda in immigration and diaspora studies. However, the transborder connections and activities of various Middle Eastern immigrant communities in the United States have not yet been studied extensively in a historical perspective. This paper will examine the transnationalization of ethnic identities, and politics among Middle Eastern immigrants in the United States, particularly Arabs, Kurds, and Turks from the late Ottoman and post-Ottoman lands. It will seek to address the following questions: What were the roles of the Middle Eastern immigrants in nation-making, state-building and post-war reconstruction of the homeland? What are the roles of home governments, political elites, immigrant organizations, community leaders and religious figures in the formation of diasporic consciousness? What is the relation between religion and ethnic or national mobilization? Why and under what circumstances did each Middle Eastern community prioritize one identity over another? How did nationalistic/political movements, ethnic conflicts, changing political boundaries, and power shifts in the late Ottoman and post-Ottoman lands impact diasporic identity in the United States? In sum, this paper will provide an overview of early Middle Eastern migrants to the U.S. and explore their transnational ties to the homeland.