An aesthetics of diasporic citizenship: the example of Lebanese women in the UK.

Migration for Lebanese is an ancestral practice that can be traced back to the Phoenicians. This cultural and social heritage has been maintained throughout time and still has an impact on the country to this very day. In the light of the expansion of capitalist mode of production on a global scale and the accentuation of human mobility across borders, the Lebanese migration represents an interesting case. This is not only because of their long tradition of travelling across the world but also, on closer inspection, because Lebanese people seem to have anticipated what has now emerged as a widespread ‘diasporic’ condition. In this regard, aspects such asbelongingandparticipationare crucial. The aim of this work is not only to study a specific migratory experience through atransnationalperspective but also to use gender as a fertile analytical category to interrogate all-encompassing issues such as human mobility and citizenship, and to raise more general theoretical questions. Ultimately, this approach will prove useful to critically examine concepts such ascitizenship, identityandboundariesproduced by contemporary nation states. The objective is to understand what the articulations ofbelongingandparticipationacross boundaries are and how trajectories affect them. The research has no pretence of exhaustiveness. Nonetheless, as it takes advantage of qualitative methods of analysis, it sheds light on aspects that can prove useful to frame contemporary migration in a novel global perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]