This chapter explores the representation of home in a range of contemporary Lebanese diaspora novels. It illustrates the importance of this theme to Lebanese diaspora fiction and how such fiction presents varied and even innovative views of home. In doing so it showcases that literature is not tangential to diaspora but is an essential component in broadening our understanding of the term. This latter point is pursued in the recently published volume A Companion to Diaspora and Transnationalism (2013), particularly by the editors Ato Quayson and Girish Daswani. They argue that despite the relatively recent development of Diaspora Studies, dated from 1991 with the inauguration of Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, the field has nevertheless ‘progressively acquired scholarly coherence with a visible set of debates’. These debates can be grouped into two streams. The first involves diaspora theorists like Robin Cohen, Stephane Dufoix and William Safran who set out ‘highly productive typologies of diaspora’ in their work. The second group features writers like Marianne Hirsh, Paul Gilroy and James Clifford who focus on the trauma of displacement as well as ‘offering models for rethinking the hybridities of diaspora’. While both groups deal with the phenomenon of diaspora as a form of displacement, the distinction between them relates to the former group's efforts to establish models of diaspora and the latter's ‘attempt[s] to describe the intangible elements of nostalgia, memory, and desire that elude the typologies of the social sciences’. In light of these differences, Quayson and Daswani suggest that ‘both social sciences and humanities approaches are imperative for understanding the full spectrum of the significations of diaspora’.

Despite this recognised need for contributions from both disciplines the more traditional and dominant of the two has been, in Floya Anthias's estimation, the ‘sociological approach that uses “diaspora” as a descriptive typological tool’. One of the key features of this approach is the framing of diaspora around the notion of an original home. This is not surprising given that the concepts of home and homeland are fundamental aspects of diaspora and are widely perceived as the opposite of dispersal and dislocation. Indeed, as Avtar Brah suggests, ‘the concept of diaspora embodies a subtext of home’.