Voices Against Disavowal, Obscurantism, and Exclusion

Abstract

Life writing may have been acknowledged as an independent, if interdisciplinary, field in literary criticism in the North American and Anglophone European contexts in the 1990s, but in Lebanon the 1990s marked the end of a protracted civil war (1975-1990), and the country’s staggering corpus of postwar literature, in Arabic, French, and English, has been mainly geared toward fiction, rather than nonfiction. Against the backdrop of considerable social and political censorship in Lebanon, real-life accounts have been engineered into fictional prose over the past three decades.