Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Middle East Studies
She/Her/Hers
About
"Laying Claim: Narrative and Atrocity during Lebanon’s Civil Wars"
Laying Claim: Narrative and Atrocity during Lebanon’s Civil Wars is a historico-literary analysis of the stories which give rise to, shape, and emerge from acts of extreme violence against civilians. In the context of modern Lebanon’s civil wars, I consider novels, plays and documentary films in Arabic, French and English where atrocity is the primary subject. Tracing narrative representations of this particular repertoire of violence, I locate three concepts central to this microcosm of Lebanese civil war literature: identity, kinship, and belonging. Together, I show, they form a triumvirate with which many have attempted to catalyze, and even justify, atrocity-and then to retroactively shape its purpose in narrative. The monograph works to demonstrate how these literary texts ultimately become a parallel form of historiography through the ways they index the negotiation of identity, kinship, and belonging in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Renée Randall is an Assistant Professor of Comperative Literature and Middle East Studies.
