Professor Ghenwa Hayek will explore the affective impact of a century of ongoing emigration on Lebanese culture (c.1860-present) and the imaginaries and grammars that have been mobilized to express it. She will show how ‘Africa’ plays an oversized role in the Lebanese cultural imaginary of emigration. This talk engages with critical contemporary scholarship in diaspora studies by using the Lebanese case to consider how the diaspora is imagined from within the homeland; and, further, how specific diasporic imaginaries and entanglements have been used to conceptualize national identity domestically. In doing this, it argues that diaspora is not a monolithic experience for emigrants, nor for their compatriots who choose to remain. Instead, diaspora is a complex constellation of experiences that gain and produce specific cultural and social resonances.
Ghenwa Hayek is Associate Professor of Modern Arabic Literature in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Chicago.