Citizens of the World…Who Stopped on Every Shore

Eastern Mediterranean Migration, Social Thought, and the Diasporic Uses of the Phoenician Past, c. 1880-1940

Bibliographic Data

ID17822948
AuthorsAndrew Arsan (corresponding author)
Year2013
Volume1
Issue2
Publication date2013-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueMashriq & Mahjar Journal of Middle East and North African Migration Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2169-4435 • E-ISSN: 2169-4435
PublisherKhayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.24847/11i2013.15
OpenAlexW1932241421
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited17

The Phoenician past, historians have long argued, was the preserve of Lebanese nationalists who sought to trace the genealogy of their darling state into the distant past in order to articulate a distinctive identity for Lebanon reflecting their religious particularism and socio-economic interests. By contrast to this diachronic and often teleological approach, tracking the evolution of national consciousness, this article suggests a synchronic reading of the ways late Ottoman literati used the ancient past as an instrument of political debate and social reflection. The region’s public men, this article contends, found in the Phoenician past a soothing precedent for the massive migrations the Arabic-speaking Eastern Mediterranean witnessed from the 1880s onwards—movements which prompted much fraught debate and discussion. Contemporary displacements, in such a reading, were but the product of ancient predispositions. Only in the wake of the First World War was the ancient past pressed into national service

Aesthetics · Ancient history · Ethnology · Phoenician · Political science · Politics · History · Islamic Studies and History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Law · Middle East Politics and Society · Philosophy

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Open DOIOpen Access