Interlopers of Empire: The Lebanese Diaspora in Colonial French West Africa
Andrew Arsan
Abstract
This book is a comprehensive history of the Lebanese migrant communities of colonial French West Africa, a vast expanse covering present-day Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Mali, Guinea, Benin and Mauritania. While others have concentrated on these migrants’ role in the colonial economy, this work reconstructs not just their commercial undertakings and strategies, but also their everyday practices, understandings of place and kin, and political thoughts and sentiments. In doing so, it makes the case for a new understanding of diasporic life. Lebanese migrants did not remain irretrievably wedded to the ... More
This book is a comprehensive history of the Lebanese migrant communities of colonial French West Africa, a vast expanse covering present-day Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Mali, Guinea, Benin and Mauritania. While others have concentrated on these migrants’ role in the colonial economy, this work reconstructs not just their commercial undertakings and strategies, but also their everyday practices, understandings of place and kin, and political thoughts and sentiments. In doing so, it makes the case for a new understanding of diasporic life. Lebanese migrants did not remain irretrievably wedded to the old country and its habits, or shed their former selves to meld into their new surroundings. But nor did they slump into a world-weary homelessness. Beings in the world, they dwelt in travel. Their lives were defined not by dislocation, but by constant strategic accommodation. Moreover, this work examines the fraught responses of colonial Frenchmen, who regarded these migrants as parasitic interlopers whose presence upset the colonial order of things. This discourse, with its echoes of metropolitan French racism, shaped the ways in which Lebanese migrants understood and represented themselves. For even as they stressed their own utility, these migrants came to think of themselves as intermediaries par excellence.
Keywords:
diaspora,
migration,
Middle Eastern studies,
imperialism,
colonialism,
Lebanon,
West Africa
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2014 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199333387 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: May 2015 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199333387.001.0001 |
