Renée Ragin Randall

Surviving the Wake: Narrative Afterlives of Atrocity in Modern Lebanon is a historico-literary analysis of the stories which give rise to, shape, and emerge from acts of extreme violence against civilians. In the context of modern Lebanon’s civil wars, I consider novels, plays and documentary films in Arabic, French and English–written in Lebanon and by its diasporans–where the experience and memory of atrocity is the primary subject. Tracing narrative representations of this particular repertoire of violence, I locate three concepts central to this microcosm of Lebanese civil war literature: identity, kinship, and belonging. These concepts, I show, form a triumvirate with which many have attempted to catalyze, and even justify, atrocity-and then to retroactively shape its purpose in narrative.