Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor's Foreword
- Acknowledgements
- Foreword
- Introduction Post-War Anglophone Lebanese Fiction: Roots and Routes
- Part I Homesickness and Sickness of Home
- 1 Koolaids and Unreal City
- 2 The Perv and Somewhere, Home
- Part II Trauma Narratives: The Scars of War
- Part III Playing with Fire at Home and Abroad
- Part IV Exile versus Repatriation
- Afterword
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - Koolaids and Unreal City
from Part I - Homesickness and Sickness of Home
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor's Foreword
- Acknowledgements
- Foreword
- Introduction Post-War Anglophone Lebanese Fiction: Roots and Routes
- Part I Homesickness and Sickness of Home
- 1 Koolaids and Unreal City
- 2 The Perv and Somewhere, Home
- Part II Trauma Narratives: The Scars of War
- Part III Playing with Fire at Home and Abroad
- Part IV Exile versus Repatriation
- Afterword
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Recent sociological studies of diasporic representations of Lebanon by first-generation immigrants have yielded complex perceptions of home in reference to both Lebanon-as-homeland and various host countries. Dalia Abdelhady concludes that these immigrants' personal connections to their homeland are but one among many forms of attachment and ‘ways of being at home’ abroad (2010: 146). Their cosmopolitan realities, she explains, reveal Hamid Naficy's concept of moveable and therefore temporary homelands, which challenges conventional notions of belonging. Though still present, Lebanon ‘serves as a starting point for creating [new] homes’ (147) and so remains vital to redefining their national identities, but it is not necessarily a place to which they want to return. In short, their manifold images of home are ‘dynamic, temporary and inclusive’ (148). Similarly, Suad Joseph affirms that many Lebanese who secure decent livelihoods abroad ‘both love and hate Lebanon’ and ‘both want to return and never to return’ (2009: 141). More significantly, she concludes, they remain connected to relatives and to their home country, as well as to their adoptive countries, as much through their desiderative imaginations thereof as through their past and contemporary realities. In so doing, they generate ‘new concepts of family, identity, and community’ (142).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Post-War Anglophone Lebanese FictionHome Matters in the Diaspora, pp. 21 - 51Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2012