Lebanese Colonial Hang-ups: Anti-Blackness and the Kafala System in Lebanon

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