Editorial: The Middle Eastern francosphère (original) (raw)

Increasing critical attention has been given to cultural production, literature, theatre, and cinema expressed in French from the Middle East and its diaspora, including examinations of how the deep inequalities in the Occupied Palestinian Territories play out in the Metropolitan banlieues and the former French colonial states of the Maghreb. 1 In exploring the 'francosphère' of this region, it is possible to map new lines of communication, solidarity, and capital flows across and beyond what are, for some, arbitrary borders. The aim of this special issue is to showcase some of these. Indeed, a regional survey such as this poses issues about scope and reach, where boundaries can and should be drawn, and how in the Middle East-or Eastern Mediterranean, Levant, Ottoman even-these become acute. Geopolitical borders in the region were determined by Sykes and Picot, decisions which still cast a long shadow over a region which has for so long been culturally identified according to European orientalizing definitions. Vexed questions of identity are discussed in Amin Maalouf's essay Les identités meurtrières (1998), which draws on the catastrophic rendering of these affiliations during the Lebanese civil wars. Within his corpus of fiction, novels such as Origines (2004) or Les Désorientées (2012) explore Lebanese identity and how, while there are those who stay, emigration to the US, Australia, Brazil, France, and Quebec has created a global diaspora. 2 These questions underscore much of the work of Lebanese-Quebecois playwright Wajdi Mouawad, notably Incendies (2003). 3 Jihane Chouaib's Pays rêvé, a