Abstract
In the context of postwar Lebanon, this dissertation investigates various modes by which local and global actors attempt to reckon with the past, despite the state's amnesty law and its efforts to `close the files' on the past. It problematizes a range of social, cultural, religious, and artistic initiatives that engage the continuing presence of the past in the present. These projects have generated a rich and variegated field of activity related to the civil war by drawing both on contested local memories and representations of past violence and on transnational techniques of truth-seeking, witnessing, memorialization, and archiving. Although diverse, they aim, among other things, to pursue truth for the missing, to confront and debate painful memories, to collect and evaluate testimonies from former fighters, and to critique the absence of an official memorial or museum on the war. Beyond that, my research also looks at the interventions of transitional justice in Lebanon. I show how international experts inject themselves into specific sites of local activity, and endeavor to cultivate distinctive sensibilities towards suffering, modes of political subjectivity, practices of speaking and remembering, and conceptions of guilt and responsibility to extend the dominion of international law, global democracy, humanitarianism, and human rights. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the sites of their interactions, I trace the conflicts, tensions, and ambiguities that emerge when international experts and local artists, activists, and victims groups meet to grapple with the past and imagine the future in sites of prior violence, and argue that what is involved in these encounters are different, and sometimes clashing, configurations of time. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by addressing your request to ProQuest, 789 E. Eisenhower Parkway, P.O. Box 1346, Ann Arbor, MI 48106-1346. Telephone 1-800-521-3042; e-mail: disspub@umi.com