Death, Disappearance, Martyrdom: Warscapes of Contemporary Lebanon

SUMAYYA KASSAMALI, then a graduate student at Columbia University, New York, New York, received funding in April 2013 to aid research on 'Death, Disappearance, Martyrdom: Warscapes of Contemporary Lebanon,' supervised by Dr. Brinkley Messick. This project focuses on African and Asian migrant labor, Syrian refugees, and urban transformation in the contemporary Middle East. Based on two years of ethnographic research in Beirut, the dissertation examines how marginalized workers in Beirut have built a set of religious and commercial establishments, informal services, community rituals, internal codes, new ways of speaking Arabic, and underground spaces for leisure and desire that have reconfigured the capital city over the last decade. Research was conducted within mixed spaces of escaped female domestic workers, 'foreign' (ie. non-Arab) male laborers, and working Syrian and Palestinian refugees. In turn, this project provides a nuanced portrayal of how Lebanon is changing with the mass displacement of Arab refugees across its borders alongside the local presence of hundreds of thousands of non-Arab workers. It is centrally concerned with the complex modes through which belonging is created in conditions of structural exclusion, considering the analytic implications of large migrant populations who are rendered both permanently temporary and permanently foreign. At a time of significant regional upheaval as well as a so-called global migration crisis, it is thus offered as a provocation to rethink the assumed subjects, and therefore the attendant formulations of minority identity and sociopolitical life, of both Lebanon and the Arab world at large.