This paper analyzes the image of Lebanon provided by some Maronite Lebanese writers in their fictional prose texts written in Lebanon during the period of the French Mandate, which began with the proclamation of the State of Greater Lebanon in 1919 and finished with its independence after World War II. The paper contrasts and opposes the official Lebanon, which covered the geographical surface of the newly established State of Greater Lebanon, with the subjective Lebanon reflected by the authors in the texts, which corresponded mainly with the surface of Smaller Lebanon, even if the texts were written after the establishment of the state. The paper will show that, despite the prominent role of the Maronite Church in the creation of the state, some Maronite writers did not consider the territories outside the geographical surface of Smaller Lebanon as part of “true Lebanon” yet. The works analyzed in this study were written by the following Maronite authors: the well-known fictional writers Marun Abbud and Tawfiq Yusuf Awwad, the priest Marun Ghosen, the writer and journalist Karam Melhem Karam, the writer and historian Lahad Khater, and the lawyer Michel Shibli. All these authors share the experience of having written their texts inside the borders of the State of Greater Lebanon and not having emigrated to foreign lands. As such, their texts provide an inside perspective of the situation, in opposition to the outside view that other more famous Lebanese writers who wrote from the Mahjar could offer, such as Jibran Khalil Jibran, Amin al-Rihani, or Mikhail Naimeh. The paper will be divided in two sections. The first section analyzes the term Lebanon and the elements to which it is associated in the texts; the second section analyzes the concepts of country (balad/ bilad), homeland (watan), and state (dawla) and their use in the texts, especially their association or lack of association with Lebanon.

The creation of Lebanon in 1920 by France from what once was three disparate Ottoman administrative units, coupled with the imposition of a French colonial order, against the wishes of a sizable portion of the population, provoked a current of anti-colonial resistance that manifested itself in several outbursts of armed popular insurrection, and in a literary campaign launched in the press by Arab-nationalist writers who denounced and tried to de-legitimize the French mandatory project for the region. These two aspects of resistance to the French mandate have been the topic of several well known academic studies, including "The Great Syrian Revolt and the Rise of Arab Nationalism", and "Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege, and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon" to name but a few. Although these studies tapped the Lebanese press for historical evidence, they neglected to utilize the medium of vernacular poetry, especially that of 'Umar al-Z'inni (1898-1961), who was its master par excellance during the inter-war mandate era. Al-Z'inni, a Sunni Muslim from Beirut, composing under his pen name Hunayn, became famous as the most adroit social critic of the mandate, its governmental apparatus and its whole social order. However, Z'inni was no religiously motivated throw-back-into-the-past intellectual: he believed in the benefits of adopting a selective modernity, exemplified by using the French Chansonnier and adapting it to the local cultural and social environment. Z'inni's scathing social and political criticism spared no one, most notably the French government, its mandatory High Commissioners in Lebanon, and its local indigenous highly Frenchified supporters who were ridiculed in his poems. However, he also turned his lens toward the people of Beirut and Lebanon and criticized many an aspect of their way of life in the fast changing modern world, so much so that he won the epithet of Mulyir al-Sharq (Molière of the Levant). In my paper I will show that the vernacular satirical poetry of 'Umar al-Z'inni de-centers the traditional educated elites approach that has characterized academic studies on French mandate Lebanon, and engenders a more dynamic, fluid and multi-layered approach to understand the modes of collaboration and resistance between the colonized Lebanese and their French colonial masters.

Meanings of technology shift over time in relation to ideologies and power at specific historical junctures. Currently, journalistic and popular discourses on “new media” posit a schism between a “modern”/digital present and “traditional” ways of the past. Such assumptions risk overemphasizing technology as the driving force behind social change. This study seeks to help “chart the path” of the new media “tidal wave” rather than merely investigating its current “froth at the crest” (Lister, Dovey, Giddings, Grant & Kelly, 2009, p. 3). It compares Lebanese literary depictions of media and communication since the start of the Lebanese Civil War (1974-1990) with media and communication practices among Lebanese bloggers during the Summer 2006 Israel-Hizballah conflict. I focus the literary analysis on the Lebanese civil war novel, a still-growing body of literature by writers in diverse geographic locations who address the Lebanese Civil War. I describe how these works collectively articulate the centrality of media and communication to Lebanese experiences of civil violence. As per the psychoanalytic concept of “intertextuality,” my analysis displaces the authorship of any individual work and situates the collective genre within a larger field of discourses. Specifically, I situate the Lebanese Civil War novel in relation to histories of global journalism and Lebanese media and systems of communication. Lebanese writers use the novels to convey what Juan Salazar calls a “media poetics” of decolonized practices. Through writing they interrogate the centrality of Western journalistic standards; address silenced national issues, such as exile and migration; and convey senses and patterns of experience dismissed more broadly as “chaotic” or “senseless.” These literary codifications of media and communication were reflected in the Lebanese “blogosphere” during the 2006 Israeli-Hizballah war. Through a textual analysis of blogs, and ethnographic data on the objectives and experiences of bloggers, I examine media practices and constructions of journalistic authority during the 2006 conflict. Journalistic authority, or the power to produce a “legitimate”/authoritative version of events, is contingent, shaped by the various struggles from which it emerges. Therefore, I relate activist, expert, and eyewitness positions of authority among Lebanese bloggers in Summer 2006 to the Lebanese civil war novel. I demonstrate how Lebanese blogging reflected the historic erasures of traditional Western journalism and the shortcomings of Lebanese media and systems of communication. Lister, Martin; Jon Dovey, Seth Giddings, Iain Grant, Kieran Kelly (2009). New Media: A Critical Introduction. New York, NY: Routledge.

How does a generation without personal memory begin to grapple with its urban past in a nation that has silenced its memories? Moreover, how are symbolic sites of memory recovered and represented by such a generation? Much recent scholarship on post-war Lebanon has studied the memory culture of the decades following the declared end of civil war in 1990. Scholars like Sune Haugbolle and, more recently, Aseel Sawalha and Charles Larkin discuss the implications of Lebanon’s ‘amnesiac’ political culture on the social and political landscape. In the meantime, Lebanon – and especially Beirut’s – urban landscape has been altered beyond recognition by post-war reconstruction, mostly by private real estate holding companies, the most notorious of which is Solidere. In the early 2000s, as Solidere’s activity picked up speed (see Najib Hourani’s Capitalists in Conflict or Saree Makdissi’s articles on downtown Beirut), a slew of historical novels about Lebanon and especially Beirut was published in both Arabic and French, including Carole Dagher’s Le Couvent de la Lune, Alexandre Najjar’s Le Roman de Beyrouth, Amin Maalouf’s Le Rocher de Tanios and Rabi‘ Jabir’s Bayrut Madinat al-‘Alam trilogy. In this presentation, I will focus exclusively on the strategies of urban commemoration in Rabi Jabir’s trilogy. I argue that the genre of historical fiction is used in these novels to re-create the downtown life of Beirut in and around Martyrs’ Square from the 19th and early 20th century, a commemoration of a cityscape and an urban lifestyle that its author recreates using the tools of the archive (documents, bibliographies, etc). This post-memorial fiction – here, I use Marianne Hirsch’s definition of postmemory as “second-generation memories of cultural and collective traumas and experience” (Family Frames, 22) – attempts to recover Beirut’s repressed Ottoman urban history, and to re-write Solidere’s own narrative of the city center. By intertwining downtown Beirut’s past with its present, in a clever back-and-forth, palimpsestic act that superimposes the historical city upon the present city, site of capitalist consumption, Jabir’s novels map out the old upon the new, and thus refuses the erasure of the ancient city by its newest urban planners. In Jabir’s novels, a new, contestatory commemorative narrative of Beirut’s history and – more significantly, its present – emerges.