The State of Statelessness: Rethinking Belonging in Stateless Narratives from Lebanon and Kuwait

Abstract

A stateless individual, as described by the United Nations, is a person who is not considered as a national by any state under the operation of its law. While statelessness is a relatively well-represented issue in humanitarian, political, and anthropological studies, the cultural and literary production of stateless individuals around the world is overlooked and understudied. This thesis examines the aesthetic and narrative structures of two stateless narratives, Qayd El Dars by Lebanese author Lana Abdulrahman and Kaliska by Bidun-Canadian author Nasser Al Dhafiri. It utilizes the critical concepts of legality and spatiality to look at how places in Kaliksa and Qayd El Dars are mapped, and the effects that they have on their inhabitants. Under spatiality, it argues that stateless literature can uncover places of belonging that are often ignored or discredited in the public narrative of the nation-state. The concepts of roots and routes, which are often used in analysis of refugee, exile, and diaspora literature, are revisited from the lens of statelessness. Through a close reading of both content and form, this thesis argues that the arbitrary and self-serving methods employed by the states to exclude the stateless from official national belonging are built into the fabric of the narrative in stateless literature, with the Novel form serving as an embodiment of the totality of the stateless experience and its humanity and interconnectedness.