Racialization in Lebanon -

Abstract

The combined impact of both Ottoman attempts at modernization and European colonialism in the late 19th century caused profound ruptures in Lebanese society still visible today. In his book The Culture of Sectarianism, Ussama Makdisi specifically identifies sectarianism as a culture produced through the tension of competing notions of modernity, which emerged and competed as old hierarchies were discredited, reformed, and reordered through imperial and colonial contact; it involved an imagined ancient rivalry between “races” as well as the Orientalist notion of the timelessness of those disputes. Racialization processes in Lebanon, however, are not addressed. I argue the importance of distinguishing racialization processes from sectarianism lies in the inability of the latter to explain separations and discriminations among groups which cannot solely be attributed to differences in sect and their imagined qualities but rather to concrete differences in the allocation of resources and relations of power. In this paper, I will argue that along with sectarianism, European colonization as nationalist identities were beginning to form within the Arab region of the Ottoman Empire’s borders and Lebanon’s subsequent incorporation into the capitalist modern world-system sparked racialization processes which categorized groups of people based on imagined racial qualities, and I will specifically focus on different chronotopes to represent how those racializations changed over time and space.