Lebanese Cinema between "the African Unknown" and "the Streets of Beirut"

This article discusses the role that Lebanese cinema has played in articulating anxieties over emigration since its inception. I examine the manner in which the new technology of film modified and contributed to an ongoing cultural anxiety over the deleterious effects of emigration on Lebanon by producing an imaginative and affective geography of the African continent that acted as a negative counterpoint to idealized images of the nation. By drawing on and modifying the conventions of extant Western film depictions of the African continent, early Lebanese films attempted to dissuade their audiences from emigrating. I demonstrate this through a comparative reading of two films themselves made by immigrants: the 1931 film Mughāmarāt Abu-ʿAbd (The Adventures of Abu 'Abd, dir. Giordano Pidutti, 1931) and the rarely-seen 1964 film Abū Salīm fi Ifrīqiyā (Abu Salim in Africa, dir. Gary Garabédian), until recently thought to have been lost. I show how both films draw on already-existing European and American film and literary depictions of the African continent, including the expedition narrative, in which intrepid travelers adventure through the continent, and the safari film, a genre that adds the threat of wild animals to the previous kind of film. I argue that, unlike their colonial or imperial sources and interlocutors, these films' images of Africa's emptiness or danger are not used to represent the ultimate dominance of Western/imperial culture over Africa through triumphalist metaphors of conquest, but rather, to emphasize the danger that Lebanese subjects face in the continent, and to plead with their at-home audiences not to leave the country. In doing so, I show how a local cinema culture adapted the traveling medium of film—and the cinematic travel narrative—to tap into and promulgate a particularly localized set of fears around emigration. I use this to open up questions about the affective impact of migration on the places of emigration, rather than the sites of immigration, an often-overlooked topic of migration studies. I show how the study of films, in their content and in their impact, can expand and round out our conceptions of migration and diaspora by fleshing out the multivalent experiences of migration on those who left and those who remained. More broadly, the article also interrogates both the manner in which such filmic depictions destabilize center-periphery axes that dominate postcolonial discourses, while also complicating facile depictions of south-south solidarities by exposing the fissures and cracks in these accounts.