Date of Award
2021
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Department
International and Intercultural Communication
First Advisor
Santhosh Chandrashekar
Second Advisor
Bernadette Calafell
Third Advisor
Christina Foust
Fourth Advisor
Lisa Martinez
Keywords
Anti-blackness, Kafala system, Middle East history, Middle East politics, Performative allyship, Popular culture and media
Abstract
Lebanon’s colonial legacy has not only influenced the legal and political systems which operate in the country today. As I hope to demonstrate in this dissertation, the strength and cementation of these systems can be seen as a consequence of negotiations of identity, citizenship and nation state that took place during the Ottoman Empire and French colonial rule. The Kafala is one of such systems that developed through the Ottoman Empire and against the backdrop of European colonization. Discourses of race, citizenship, gender and sexuality that were being negotiated by colonial citizens and colonial powers, served to cement the racialized and gendered logics that continue to uphold Kafala today.
In this project I argue that a complicated and nuanced understanding of gendered racial configurations in the Middle East, and specifically within the Lebanese context, through and Arab and Islamic feminist perspective can help strengthen transnational solidarities in finding connections through and fighting global oppressions. The purpose of this study is to demonstrate how gendered racial constructions within the Lebanese context, continue to place migrant domestic workers in extremely vulnerable positions by relying on anti-Blackness. This project will look at mediated performances of anti-Blackness through a critical understanding of heteropatriarchal, colonial and racist spaces within the Lebanese context.
Publication Statement
Copyright is held by the author. User is responsible for all copyright compliance.
Recommended Citation
Gonzalez Noveiri, Sarah, "Lebanese Colonial Hang-ups: Anti-Blackness and the Kafala System in Lebanon" (2021). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 1925.
https://digitalcommons.du.edu/etd/1925
Provenance
Received from ProQuest
Rights holder
Sarah Gonzalez Noveiri
File size
213 pgs
Copyright date
2021
File format
application/pdf
Language
en
Discipline
Middle Eastern studies, Rhetoric, Gender studies