In 1898, Lieutenant Khalil Aswad fought in the battle of Guanica in the Spanish American War, helping seal the U.S. victory and subsequent colonization of Puerto Rico. Most of his army salary was sent every month to his sisters and father in Brummana, located north of Beirut along Mount Lebanon. After his untimely death of a heart attack at forty-seven, Khalil was rarely brought up. When his sisters died years later, most of what was known about him went with them, although the house remained a meeting point, refuge, and symbol of home for generations to come. Khalil Aswad was my great-great uncle, who I learned about while finishing years of research on the Syrian diaspora in the United States. Through the tumultuous twentieth century, the home he built in Brummana represented belonging: first a quiet retreat from Beirut in the 1960s, and later as a place of reunion after the family scattered across the world during the Lebanese Civil War. The United States, on the other hand, was a space of unbelonginga place of alienation even as it served as refuge from that war. As an American-born product of the war diaspora, and a scholar who has spent much of my time researching and critiquing U.S. empire, how do I reckon with both Khalil’s erasure from my family history in Mt. Lebanon, and my erasure from U.S. imperial history? My presentation uses Khalil’s life and his erasure from both my family’s and U.S. history as an entry point to examine the intersections of memory and imperial histories of Mt. Lebanon over the long twentieth century. Using my great-grandfather’s personal letters, and years of archival research in the United States and Lebanon, I argue that changing imperial relations between Lebanon and the United States has erased the memory of each other in the “home,” “destination,” and in between. The notion of Mount Lebanon as refuge from imperial forces, and of U.S. empire as a solely destructive force in the Middle East, worked together to make my family history unrecognizable to me. I follow the works of Amitov Ghosh, Saidiya Hartman, and Sherene Seikaly, and use autohistory and autoethnography to understand global history on an intimate scale. I examine a family’s continual unsettling from “home,” and the limits of its memory when faced with changing relations to race and empire.

Mount Lebanon holds an unparalleled position in the nationalist imaginary of the Republic of Lebanon since independence in 1943. Even though the nation-state of Lebanon arose out of the French Mandate for Syria and Lebanon, nationalist discourse relied upon an imaginary of Mount Lebanon as a historical entity stretching back centuries. Resultantly, earlier political entities such as the Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate and the Mount Lebanon Emirate formed a linear narrative of nationalist development that collapsed the diverse and heterogeneous histories of Mount Lebanon into a singular one. Emerging from this historicized imaginary were constellations of geography and narratives of a nation-state rooted in Mount Lebanon that also encompassed nearby areas without needing to rely on other potential nationalist projects. Due to the exigencies of the French Mandate, the Maronite and Druze oriented focuses of the Mount Lebanon region faded away to be replaced by an ersatz pluralism that secularized histories formerly imbued with religious components. This paper explores the development and deployment of Mount Lebanon as an imagined space in the nationalist discourse. Using political speeches from the years following independence, I interrogate how the imaginary of Mount Lebanon became reified to represent the Republic of Lebanon. The tension generated by a state guided by a constitution guaranteeing equality of its citizenry and a National Pact doing the opposite via sectarian quotas made the narrative of a non-sectarian Mount Lebanon all the more pertinent. Therefore, presidents and parliamentarians would narrate stories of Mount Lebanon as a proto-Lebanese state fighting foreign occupiers and positioned cultural components of the region as representative of the nation at large. Politicians deployed a Mount Lebanon without sectarian components to craft a communal history for the young state distinct from its neighbors. Likewise, these speeches extricated Mount Lebanon from its integration into the wider region by focusing on an imagined communal history that necessitated inclusion of coastal regions. Through interrogating the ways in which an imagined Mount Lebanon emerged as a nationalist symbol, my paper builds on and engages with the literature that situates the historicity and ideology of the nation as a political project.

By the end of the 19th century, the Antiochian Orthodox community had secured greater autonomy over its own affairs vis-à-vis the Ottoman state and other Greek Orthodox Patriarchates, but greater autonomy brought with it fraught new questions of internal church governance. This paper centers on an underappreciated moment of contestation over the status of Mount Lebanon within the Antiochian Orthodox Church during the late Ottoman Empire. Historically, Orthodox Christians in Mount Lebanon fell under the ecclesial jurisdiction of the Beirut Archdiocese (Muṭraniyya). They also relied on financial and logistical support from Beirut-based religious societies run by clergy and often funded by wealthy lay members in Beirut. However, Orthodox clergy in Syria felt that the Muṭraniyya of Beirut and Mount Lebanon had grown too large and worried that it might eclipse other archdioceses – perhaps even overshadowing the Patriarch in Damascus. To restore what they felt was a proper, historic balance, leaders of the Damascene Orthodox community sought to separate Mount Lebanon from Beirut’s jurisdiction. However, this was not merely a squabble over whether Mount Lebanon would have its own Bishop (Muṭran) or remain under the auspices of Beirut. Rather, the disagreement implicated competing socio-spatial visions of Bilad al-Shām within the Antiochian Orthodox community. Drawing on church records and Arabic language newspapers, this study recounts the dispute over Mount Lebanon and the eventual separation of the Mountain from Beirut in matters of church governance. Although the Beirutis were unsuccessful in maintaining formal control over the Orthodox community in Mount Lebanon, I argue that their quixotic attempt represented a strong current of a proto-nationalism that envisioned Lebanon as being fundamentally separate from Syria even before the fall of the Ottoman Empire. In doing so, this study complicates Lebanese historiography which often overlooks the contributions of Orthodox Christians to Lebanese nationalism in its embryonic stages. Second, this paper argues that the conflict presaged divisions within the Orthodox community that would only intensify during the French Mandate as its members were divided up into post-Ottoman nation-states. The position of Mount Lebanon in the Antiochian Orthodox imagination both shaped and was shaped by the community’s attempts to navigate political and social changes during the late Ottoman Era.