Between Middlemen and Interlopers: History, Diaspora, and Writing on the Lebanese of West Africa

Abstract:This article explores representations of the Lebanese in West Africa from the colonial to the postcolonial and contemporary eras. It contextualizes a diverse body of scholarly and vernacular works by examining the arrival of the Lebanese, their patterns of settlement, and the growth of their communities, while also demonstrating how academic studies of these populations developed alongside the accounts of Lebanese migrant authors and travel writers. It identifies three genres of scholarly analysis. The first focused on the Lebanese as “middlemen” in the colonial and early independence eras. The second inserted the migrants in discourses of dependency and underdevelopment during the Cold War period. The third, contemporary trend contemplates the migrants’ roles in globalizing forms of religious and national identity on one hand and the history and historiography of empire on the other. Recent works have further repositioned the story of West Africa’s Lebanese in ways that show how the migrants and their descendants reasserted their ties to their ancestral “homeland,” while redefining what it meant to be Lebanese from diasporic perspectives. Ultimately, scholarship on the Lebanese of West Africa represents a case study of the evolution of historical and social scientific deliberations on “strangers” in colonial and postcolonial societies. Periodizing this body of work demonstrates how theoretical constructs of race, religion, belonging, and identity have evolved in tandem with the historical unfolding of colonialism, decolonization, and nationalism in West Africa.