Welcome everyone. I'm Ruba Saleh and I'm the chair of the Center for Migration and Aspera Studies and a member of the Department of Anthropology. I'll just tell you a little bit about how the event is going to unfold. So first of all, we're going to give the floor to Kim Triton as she's our event organizer and she's going to take you through some information about the technical aspects of the event. Then we'll have Professor Edward Simpson with the word of welcome and then the event will officially kick off with Professor Ghassan Hajj. So Kim, please, if you can spend a few words to explain how it's going to work and how to do this. Great, thank you everybody for joining us. We have got the meeting open so people will join throughout the next kind of 10 to 15 minutes, I believe. But thank you all for joining us again for this session just to let you know how this session will work. If you can't hear audio or your visual goes out, the best thing to do is to exit the session and re-enter. I have set it up so that you can re-enter at any time. There won't be a problem if you do leave and I will see that you've re-entered and admit you in. Just to let you know as well in terms of, I'm sure you've all used Zoom at some point by now, I think we're all kind of used to it, but if you haven't, if you just scroll across the bottom, you'll see that there is the chat box. So throughout the session today, if you have any queries, questions, discussion points around the topic or related to it, do feel free to drop them into the chat at any point of the session today. And then after we have the talk, we'll actually go back through the chat and pull out all your questions and we might ask if you want to ask them through the audio or we'll read them out and then ask if you have anything else you'd like to add to them. You can also drop into the chat if you want to at the moment where you're calling in from and what drew you to the session, if you would like. The other thing to note is that we would ask that all your microphones are muted during the talk itself, just it helps with any feedback noise. And then what I'll do is once we enter into the Q&A part of the session, I will invite you and unmute you in order for you to be able to ask your question at that point. And then as I say, if there are any troubleshooting measures, do let me know in the chat. If you think that the audio or visual problems might be on our end, do let us know on that as well. It might be that we need to exit and re-enter. Just one final note to say that these sessions are recorded, so it's just good to make you all aware of that. And for those of you who joined our last two sessions, the recordings of those two sessions will be going up on the Facebook group shortly, so sorry for any delays in that, we normally put a couple up each time so you'll be able to see that. And I will be sending an email around to all of you after today's session with all the links from where you can find the recordings for the session. So I think that's pretty much everything there. Do drop me, so if you have any technical problems, do just drop me a note in the chat and just say, Kim, can you help me with this? But I think that's everything you need to know from me. Thank you very much, Kim. And so without further ado, please, Ed, if you can. Morning, everybody. My name is Ed. Good afternoon and good evening, depending on where you are. My name is Ed. I'm the head of the anthropology department at SOAS, and I'm here to welcome you all to the Center for Migration and Diaspora Studies annual lecture, which is going to be given by Professor Gasset Haag today. But before Ruba introduces our speaker, I would like to take a minute to introduce you to our host, because I think that's important as well. Our host today is Professor Salih Ruba, as she is commonly and affectionately known in our department. Ruba is the chair of our Center for Migration and Diaspora Studies at SOAS. The Center was established in 2007, and as you know, it also hosts a very successful master's program. Both the Center and the program are very important to the anthropology department at SOAS. The Center and its work is admired by other institutions in the UK and elsewhere. But importantly at SOAS, it's also been a beacon of critical scholarship. Ruba has hosted bold and cutting-edge debate this year, which has been vitally important to all of us, although not all of us have participated in it with the enthusiasm that we should have done, frankly, I now realize. I think Ruba has taken the measure, the pulse of where we are, and in many ways the work of the Center has been far ahead of other parts of SOAS in understanding the climate of what it means to live in London this year. So the Center has hosted seminars on waiting, waiting both in Marseille and Bosnia, discussions on veiling, discussions on white privilege, and do Black Lives Matter. And for those of you who are at SOAS, you'll know how important these things currently are on our campus. For those of you who are not at SOAS, you'll realize how important these things are for the world more generally. So in essence, under Ruba's leadership, the Center has been pioneering, has taken a pulse that lots of other people have not even acknowledged, and has Ruba's passion and hard work that has carried the Center so successfully through this year. And you might think, well, why is Ed going on about Ruba? The lecture is all about Professor Hajj, and of course it is, and he is our guest, but Ruba is going to talk about. I'll speak. I want to publicly acknowledge Ruba's promotion to professorship in an environment where there's a large audience, thank you very much, which is really an acknowledgement of all of the hard work that Ruba has put into this Center and to other endeavors at SOAS over the years. Her own hard work is obviously reflected in her publications, but I think importantly in bringing 110 people together on a Wednesday morning, which is a fantastic achievement. Ruba, my personal thanks and appreciation for having done this, and I hope the rest of you have a wonderful morning, and thank you, Professor Hajj, for joining us and for delivering an annual lecture for us. So, Ruba, if you're not too embarrassed, I'll now hand it back to you. Thank you very much, Ed. This is totally impromptu, so I'm very moved by your words and recognition, and I'm very thankful. I also am equally very thankful to Professor Hassan Hajj for accepting to interrupt his very well-earned sabbatical and most important activities that we can all follow on his very prolific blog and social media to deliver the annual lecture of the Center for Migration and Diaspora Studies, and it is obviously my great pleasure to now introduce you to Professor Hassan Hajj, although differently from me, Hassan needs no introduction. Hassan Hajj is the University of Melbourne's Future Generation Professor of Anthropology and Social Theory, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He is widely known for his pathbreaking work on the enduring presence of race and its associated forms of white nationalism and white entitlements. The idea, as he very cogently expresses in his book, that if you're not doing well and you're white, your expectation is that you're entitled to do better because you're white. His earlier writings reflect on the experience of nationalism, racism, and multiculturalism among white Australians, particularly in his book, White Nation Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society, which was published in 1998, where Hassan explores the desire and fantasy for a white nation penetrating even the most liberal Western ideals and imaginaries as well as their political economies. Hassan has also written on the political dimensions of critical anthropology, focusing on how critical anthropological thoughts can generate new problematics that pertain the rail and action of radical politics. His insights on the relationship between critical thinking, radical politics, and anthropology are elaborated upon in his masterful book, Alter Politics, Critical Anthropology, and the Radical Imagination. Hassan's most recent publication is Racism and Environmental Threat. It takes on a very fruitful interrogation on the intersection between racism and the ecological crisis. Hassan has also, most importantly for this context even, provided scholars of diaspora and migration studies with what I think are the most insightful lengths to understand the policies, the imaginaries of migration, and exclusionary dynamics around it. Ideas of weighthood, stuckness as an existential condition, the ideas of migration and its counter as mobility envy have really deeply changed the way we think about migration and migration regimes. As a public intellectual, as an active blogger, as a public commentator and social media user, Hassan also contributes to inform our everyday with thought-provoking reflections on contemporary crisis. Hassan has just completed his latest manuscript, which is an ethnographic reflection on the transnational culture of the Lebanese diaspora, and I believe the lecture today draws upon this latest work. And so we are so excited, Hassan, to have you as Ed has mentioned, it's 8 p.m. in Melbourne today, so a particular added thank you to you for not only accepting this invitation, but accepting this invitation at a very late time in the day. So without further ado, Hassan, the floor is yours and thank you again. Thank you very much, Robert. Thank you very much, Center for Migration and Diaspora Studies and the Department of Anthropology and Sociology for this invitation. It is true that I'm on a very extended long third sleeve, and this in fact is the first academic thing I do this year. This is how seriously I'm taking my leaves. So this is the first presentation said the last few days were going through the book that I have handed in by the end of last year, which is called the diasporic condition. And this is coming out with University of Chicago Press probably around October this year. And the lecture on diasporic anisogamy, although there is a chapter in the book called diasporic anisogamy, but the actual concept of diasporic anisogamy is quite central throughout the book for the approach that I'm developing for the study of diaspora. So in a way I'd be wanting to take you for a trip throughout the whole publication. I mean it is a book which has literally taken about 25 years. Can you hear me? Yes, yes, yeah. And so it has taken pretty exactly almost 25 years to ethnographic work and on and off of course and from a variety of perspectives. And it has changed in many ways, but I want because it's such an involved book it's almost like a PhD thesis. I feel talking about it like it's a PhD thesis. You know when students have just finished the PhD thesis, I know it happens all the time and I remember for myself like it's very hard to take one thing without wanting to say blah, blah, blah, blah, I want to talk about everything that I have written. So because if you don't understand everything that I've written you will never understand this particular point. So there is this kind of feeling in me that I have to get you through everything in the book in order to for you to appreciate what I'm trying to achieve in with the concept of any of them. But I won't, I promise. However, I want to introduce a couple of key if you like outlooks that I developed in the book as a kind of like way of telling you how to approach how I'm approaching the concept and how I hope you will approach looking at it because it's quite experimental in in some ways. First thing the first thing I want to say is that I do make a very serious break with I wouldn't say all definitely not because I have used some some scholarship but I will I make a break with the dominant scholarship on migration and diaspora to the extent that I feel that this scholarship is always issue directed. It is always interested in migrants as a problem or not themselves being problem as having problems. So there's you know you can be studying migration from a governmental perspective in the government of the country where migrants left and say there's a brain drain issue I want to study the problem of brain drain as I'm studying migration or you can study it from the perspective of the government of the receiving country and say the economics of migration are they are they useful economically are they not study the process of cohesion study study sort of like questions of integration etc but you can also study it from the perspective of the migrants themselves and say you know migrants are subjected to racism I want to study racism I want to study marginalization I want to study sort of like over exploitation now I'm not going to do any of this in this book I don't do any of this in fact I work very hard on not working on racism and not working on governmental problems I work very hard on not being supportive of the oppressed migrant etc now I hope for some for those of you who know my work I hope you take it for granted that it's not because I don't think these issues are important obviously I've written a lot about this but I am in a way partly experimenting with I would say counterintuitively a pure science of social science of diaspora I know that now I know there isn't such a thing as pure social science of diaspora and I am attempting nevertheless to do something I don't believe in and I don't believe exist but I am this is how I'm tending and wishing myself to be I think partly I feel and I don't know if you experience it the same way I do but I feel there is a slight over politicization of scholarship at the moment in relation to migration diaspora etc I think as there is a loss of any measured attempt at thinking the difference between scholarship and politics and whether to meet and whether to don't meet there's a lot more about where they meet but there's some people who think that they go together it reminds me a bit of the phase in Marxism when Autista wrote that philosophy was class struggle in theory and so everyone who's philosophizing thought they were doing class struggle and today everyone who is writing all kinds of things think they are engaging in anti-racism anti-colonialism etc and I often feel that this is the scholarship is measured according to how anti-racist it is and how anti-colonial it is which I don't mind right right but at the same time I feel as will use as you know sometimes good politics produces very bad scholarship and vice versa it's true that some good scholarship produces bad politics but I want to acknowledge that there is a space where scholarship and politics don't go hand in hand you know and there is something which is specific to scholarship which one needs to think about even when they are politically committed so in this in this book I kind of like you know in a way I'm using the cultural capital I have for having written so much on racism that I can afford at least some people not thinking of me as being non-political to be non-political so this is a kind of like strategic maneuvering with my background if you write so that's the first thing I like you to be oriented towards the questions I'm asking myself come from a kind of like what is diaspora what what is this label thing called the Lebanese diaspora what are its properties how do I understand it best what are its features how is it lived questions like this but perhaps if there is one single political dimension it would be what I would call as I called it in my book altopolitics it is derived from a critical anthropological tradition and it involves asking the question in what way does what I'm studying why then my understanding of the possibilities and the plurality of modes of living and modes of existence that is you approach something by saying in what way is what I'm studying capable of widening my horizon and giving me more knowledge about the plurality of the way people live their lives this is what I consider a critical anthropological approach as opposed to a critical sociological approach which is more interested in relations of power domination class gender etc so obviously you will say I'll do both but I'm trying to emphasize that anthropological question of can the study of diaspora give us access to other modes of existence and how how does it help us think these modes of existence now this is the general orientation so from there there's a couple of other manner things I want to highlight which is which are more in relation to how empirically I approach the public the first thing is that I take seriously the notion of a diasporic culture and diasporic life world and I ask myself what is a diasporic life world how does the process of migration etc how do they create a diasporic life world and a diasporic life world is clearly a transnational reality all for me all the Lebanese who are around the world etc who are still form have all kind of attachments to Lebanon etc form together what I call a transnational diasporic life world so I'm taking as an object this transnational life world it's I'm not taking I am not and this is very crucial I am not taking as my object the Lebanese culture and its transformation in US or how you Lebanese adopt to adapt to living in Venezuela or I'm doing my field I'll do it did my fieldwork in Venezuela and US in Europe in a bit in Brazil so I can I followed Lebanese and Lebanese families in many places but I wasn't really interested in how they adapted to Brazil how they adapted to Venezuela how they adapted I was more interested in how they generated in their totality a diasporic culture so I'm more interested in the relation they have among each other if you like and with Lebanon and how they form this transnational reality there's a similar approach obviously in in Nina Nina Glick she was work in terms of transnational networks but notice in Nina's work the emphasis is on networks and so the emphasis is much more on relations and socio sociological questions I'm more interested in the question of culture and life rather than just networks so this is as broadly as I can I can go now first substantive departure I treat diasporic culture as the culture of Lebanese modernity I show in the book how Lebanese modernity emerges as a diasporic culture that is in a sense this is very crucial because what it means is that there is no Lebanese modernity that is not diasporic but also means that diasporic culture is just as much in Lebanon as it is outside of Lebanon so I don't define diaspora as being away from Lebanon diasporic culture is the culture of Lebanon as it was transformed by capitalism and took its form in the making of Lebanese modernity now you might say this is quite sort of like how can one so so let's start just let me sort of like be clear here to say that Lebanese that diaspora diasporic culture is the culture of Lebanese modernity is to say that even if you haven't migrated you are part of diasporic culture and that's crucial and but what is the relation between migration and diaspora is very complex because take in Australia we have beach cultures and beach cultures often emerged as a result of the practice of surfing in fact many of the beaches emerged and became beach now beach cultural because of the practice of surfing so you can say that historically this beach culture could not have become could not be possible without surfing but you wouldn't say today that only if you are a surfer can you be part of the beach culture in fact you can participate in beach culture without ever surfing you might not have that much cultural capital but you still can be part of a beach culture without surfing likewise you can say that a diaspora migration as a practice was crucial for the formation of diasporic culture but it doesn't mean that you have to have today you have to have had some experience of migration to be part of diasporic culture so let me quickly say two features about what I consider a diasporic make diasporic culture what it is and that can help us understand the concept that I want to develop of any zone so the first thing I became interested in was what I called the internationalization of the space of viability the internationalization of the space of viability what I mean by this is that as capitalism emerged in Lebanon people started to have a consciousness of the world as a place where they can make a living now you might think that's not much but it is for me an incredible experience you have to think about it what does it mean when at one point in history a Lebanese villager if you know Lebanese villagers they are often in the mountains they have a long history of otaki there as the mountains are not sort of like in 17th 18th century they are sort of like nested in the mountains so people did not think their viability what I mean how do I make my life a viable life they didn't think their viability outside of the confines of the territory where they exist soon as they start to think in their viability maybe in terms of going to the coast etc but what I'm interested in is the emergence of a point where a Lebanese villager gets up and says maybe maybe I'm going to make a living in Halifax I heard there's a place called Halifax I'm going to go to Halifax I'm going to go to Queensland have you ever heard of this place called Queensland in Australia which is now think about it I mean like it's quite an incredible thing this is not about consciousness of the world right be very clear about it because a consciousness of the existence of the world existed long ago what I'm talking about is the emergence of a consciousness that I can go and throw myself and invest myself as Bourdieu would say invest myself that is try and see how I will go in life by going to Canada by going to Brazil by going etc it's a very peculiar state of consciousness because unlike other migrations it did not follow a colonial route so it's not that a Lebanon was colonized by the French the Lebanese went to Paris or went to France so it's not like Algerian migration or like the most common mode of thinking of the Indian migration to the UK this kind of stuff no there was nothing directional about it it was okay the world is there and let's look for a place where we can make a living in the world now for me this is an amazing thing sort of an amazing transformation of one's consciousness so I spent quite a bit of time in a book analyzing the meaning of this transformation and now we come closer to the question of an isogamy a corollary of this consciousness of existing in an international space where I can go and make a living is a comparative consciousness comparative consciousness involves the idea that slowly and surely you start being unable to think of one thing without thinking or maybe maybe shall I go to university in Beirut where actually maybe I should go to France or no maybe I should go to England or maybe I should go to the UK but before that even if I'm going Hawking maybe I'm going to go to Brazil maybe I'm going to go to the US and I've got a lot of sort of like instances where some privileged people it's not always the case but some privileged people interact with their migration like people in a lolly shop where shall I go maybe I should go to Brazil maybe I should go to the US I've got a brother a brother in Australia I've got a son in France where shall I go and every day change my mind so this idea is that where where where will go but it involves comparison this comparative logic becomes an integral part of diasporic consciousness today such as and the cases that I spent quite a bit of time thinking through is so you know just to give you a short quick story anecdotal thing from the book this guy was getting sort of like a bit like mockingly not not seriously whatever in a jokey manner you're getting stuck into his Lebanese wife he's an American Irish and he stuck he took his wife to the Grand Canyon and she looked in front of the Grand Canyon and she said this reminds me of Wadi Khadisha which is some sort of like a big valley in Lebanon and so he started saying what the hell is this every time I take you somewhere you cannot just look at it it tells it reminds you of it reminds you of and he's there was another couple and they were started joking all of them about how every time you take a Lebanese somewhere that it reminds of Lebanon even though Lebanon is only a couple of square meters so there was sort of like saying I mean how many places on earth can be replicated in Lebanon inside two square cameras so they were making a joke about this comparative logic but besides the joke there's something very interesting here because it means that you cannot see a space which is not superpose to another space this is what I mean by the comparative once you are gripped by diasporic consciousness you can never see one thing you always see something and something else you compare it with and this state of consciousness has become I think generalized today it's no longer very specific to to diaspora but it's diasporic origin is very very important and so so I spent quite a bit of time analyzing this logic this comparative logic and this is the comparative logic that take us to the question of anisography why and what in what sense and what is the relation between comparative logic and the anisography and what is anisography this is what we're going to investigate now so the first thing is that take one of the main sort of like social phenomena where comparative logic presents itself is in diasporic in feelings sorry I'm losing a common word here sort of like nostalgia that's the word I'm looking for thank you very much so the nostalgic logic is itself very comparative sort of like what am I doing here I should be there and there's always a here there sort of like dimension to nostalgia now when people treat nostalgia they almost treat it as if it's some kind of a disease or not necessarily disease because I don't want to imply that people treat it as something bad it's more that they treat it as something that happens to people when they migrate they can't help it if you are a migrant you get nostalgic and nostalgia is a symptom of if you like it's a symptom of migration now what I want to start sort of like introducing you to and which I developed a lot in bank is the fact that nostalgia is strategic that it is not as innocently just a feeling I have that in fact there are certain social forces and etc which lead you to be more or less nostalgic and that your nostalgia is often directed towards something it is not just a feeling that you have let me go back to the example I started with when we were saying the woman was looking at the grand canyon and she said it reminds me of where the adhesion now you can see this as an innocent comparison but there's more to it than that because I want to argue that what she is also saying is to her husband who is American she is saying to him well your country has the grand canyon but my country has one condition that is you your country has offered me this but my country offers something else that is it becomes a competitive giftedness here sure you can give me grand canyon but don't think that I'm going to look at the grand canyon and say oh my god it's so amazing thank you so much for making me experience the grand canyon because if it wasn't for the grand canyon my life would be so deprived of valleys and etc who do you think you are my country has bloody great valleys and I am telling you you're not showing me much my country has enough so now this is what I call an isogamic logic what is an isogamic logic is when you have a relation between two parties where there is a hint of inequality that is happening and where there's a need for a labor of valorization to maintain the relation all these were the important the labor of valorization an isogamy in classical usage in levy's thoughts is marriage or reciprocity between two people of unequal status or two groups of unequal status and now the first thing when levy's source was doing it sort of like thinking it it was not an object of controversy which had the high status which had the low status so like so but you know if today an american might think his high status and levy and the levy's low status but this doesn't mean the levy's is going to accept that high american is high status so the highness or lowness of the status is itself an object of struggle in an isogamic relation it's not accepted who has the high cultural but there is something fundamental in all the interviews that are made in all the observations which has sometimes this high culture low culture has to do with racism sort of like developmentalism from an advanced developed country from from sort of like a third world country not not industrially developed so sometimes there is this kind of relation but one of the things that interested me was that there was hints even though levy's do not shy away i'm generalizing here of course there's wonderful levy's and awful levy's but some levy's are very racist in benzuela for instance or in african they're just colonial erasists so it's not that they feel in a developmental capitalist with the modernist sense that they are the lower status part of the equation when they are in benzuela and yet i invariably noticed that there were moments where there was a sense of inferiority and i'm cutting a very long story short here but i came to the point where i became very clear to me that at the basis of this is this idea that i come from a country that could not keep me i come from a country that could not keep me so i might be uh in in in benzuela i might be i might be in europe way i might be in us it doesn't matter so still the fact is i come from a country which could not cater for me and it is because of this that i am here and so this is where the language becomes very interesting because you find sometimes metaphors of adoption sometimes metaphors of marriage sometimes metaphors of simply sort of like exchange but always there is this sense that the host country has offered something either in marriage or by adopting or by et cetera now in this process of exchange you get a classic and isogamic situation now what is the classic and isogamic situation take i give you a kind of like schematic example from lebanese village a guy marries marries well that is he married a woman whose family is economically better off let's say so they married her family are rich his family are poor or even just status the woman has no interest in her husband coming and saying publicly something like i am so grateful for so and so to have married me she has pulled me out of my lowly family and has positioned me in her family in fact her wife his wife would not like him to do this because to be down on your own background reflects on her and also people have to ask her why is it that you've made someone from this status she has an interest in him valorizing his background and he has to also say so you know i've got a situation where people say oh they don't say like his father is an educator they don't say his father is an educator they say his father sort of like is very very entrepreneurial he's gone and opened the cafe and they avoid talking about education so there's strategies of valorization that happen you valorize the lower party but now the interesting thing is that the lower party that comes into the equation has to learn not to trespass that is there's a point where self-valorization becomes real lack of gratitude and you don't want to get to the point where your wife would say well who the hell do you think you are you know have you forgotten where i'm taking you that is you have to learn to valorize yourself valorize your way know the limits of where self-valorization becomes lack of gratitude and also the superior party has to learn not to just put its superiority swamp the person in superiority and know how to do it so it is a very interesting subtle strategic game and is organic relations they are very interesting because here inequality is not something that needs to be abolished it's not some kind of like you know it's not some kind of like a activist approach to inequality oh no there's inequality here how are we going to abolish no this is an unequal relation each party is trying to seek their viability without grand political activism just sort of like moving between how to valorize oneself how to valorize the other and how to operate within this space so so when immigrants go to a space they often expect valorization which never happens so the lebanese for instance often start engaging in self-valorization as a kind of substitute for an expected valorization from the host state which never comes so it's a bad and is organic relation if you like often especially migrants in the west because the western states and western population don't play the game of oh i valorize you or i'm i'm having a good relation with you no on the country they throw the status lost their their understanding of the lost status of the person in their effects and so the person is left with having to engage in strategies of self-valorization and and often this self-valorization is gendered now this is where it becomes very interesting that is the imaginary of it is gender that is the stories always take the shape of but lebanon is a great place lebanon is a great mother it's the father that marked up the mother that's why my mother had to leave me so like it takes the form lebanon's country sort of like the nature in lebanon is so beautiful or lebanon people are so lovely and they love it just if it wasn't for the state etc so the state is always kind of like the male who fails to look after the woman which made the woman forced to abandon her children and so when when the migrant goes to other places they start playing this process of valorizing the mother country and blaming the father country for the problems of the mother country that is saying sure lebanon is a bloody great place and i wouldn't believe it if it wasn't for blah blah blah blah uh loudly politics loud sometimes it is nature versus people you know it takes variety the structure allows for you know i mean like there's this joke which like it's one of those jokes which every probably every people every country people in the country say it about but like so it's sort of like what it goes something like like when god created lebanon the countries around were very chance i said how did you create a country that's so beautiful the nature is so lovely etc and made us so ugly imagine so god said you know you're right so he created the lebanese this the idea is that sort of like here nature is lovely and etc the people are bad it's the similar structure of the mother's good nature's good etc the active part is bad organizing principle is bad the law is bad the principle behind the law is bad but they say they say that the essence of the place is lovely it's just the others who are mucking it up and so these are all what i call anisogamic strategies of valor valorization and and and nostalgia is part of this when people offer nostalgia it's not an innocent feeling kind of like often the intensity of nostalgia etc is linked to these anisogamic dynamics the more you don't valorize me the more i'm going to learn for where i come from the more i don't realize myself the more i'm going to get stuck into but there is also often a kind of like a quasi refusal to accept on the path of migraines any any sense of gratitude for the people living for the people where they are migrating to because of the bad nature of this anisogamic like i know i know the case of this lebanese guy here in australia who is seriously like a serious reactionary guy politically i mean i've known him for a long time and there's a friend of the family and he's kind of like like his racist towards indigenous people in a kind of like seriously unreconstructed unconscious way sort of like you know he says things like this all the time sort of like black as high etc anyway and then out of the blue we were talking about we were talking about so so so you should be thankful for the australia for australian to have welcomed you in in australia he said why should i be thankful for them welcoming me they don't own the country australia is an indigenous place australia always will always will be what suddenly has turned into a radical searching a certain indigenous indigenous sort of like power in australia and i was looking amazed and it was very easy for him to say this in order not to say i want to be thankful towards white australians having having accepted me i can't not anything is better than saying that kind of like you know what now it's very interesting this this kind of like how because the host does not valorize the income then it unleashes a negative dialectic where the income never never valorizes the host and the host in turn turns more so it becomes a negative dialectic which is the very essence of a bad and isogamic relation when and in the book i've got a case of a guy who migrates to the u.s and marries his cousin and his cousin is richer than him and most of his problems came from the fact that he could not cope with the fact that his uncle's family looked down on him and he turned it into a question of migration country from one country to another even though it was clear it wasn't the migration from u.s from lebanon to the u.s that was the source of his suffering but the anisogamic relation he had with his with his cousin now so anisogamy means that one needs to look at how expressions of attachment to the host country and more the attachment to the country of origin all are part of a negotiated relation with the host country so they're not just i don't get just nostalgic and express nostalgia just because i'm feeling nostalgic i i might feel nostalgic but how i how i express it and the intensity with which i express it and to whom all of these are part of a anisogamic logic but the most important part of anisogamy that i trace in the book doesn't have to do really with logic it has to do with what i call which is another crucial dimension of diasporic life well that i examine in the book what i call the lenticular condition now so then lenticular l-e-m-t-i-c-u-l-a-r lenticular condition now i'm just going to briefly introduce you to what lenticular condition means so i can develop more fully that question of valorization and anisogamic valorization at the heart at the heart of folk understanding of the migrant experience is always a form of what i call monorealism which is the idea that you can only be in one place so i am looking at the grand canyon i'm in us i remember the valley in lebanon you can only be in one place and remember another place so when you are engaging in comparison the assumption is always it's a comparison between a lived space and a remembered place and this is what i kind of like try to quite i like to think as systematically as possible destroy in in the book this accepting this idea that you can only inhabit one place and you remember the other place and that question of memory is always sort of like you know in memory studies in nostalgia it's always about memory have you remember memory memory memory so with the notion of memory there is the highlight of a relation to the past but in but in diaspora it's not always the comparison is not just with the past because the comparison is also with another place so what does it mean when you are nostalgic to another place i mean we all know that like the classic things that we take them for granted that migrants when they migrate they leave a place and they think that it is still as it is sort of like even though it is changing but i don't think it's changing and scholars always mix time and space and see them see them together but it's very interesting because no one asked the question what actually does it mean to inhabit the space as opposed to remembering a place and what are the technical criteria which make us accept that here you have inhabitants here you have remembers so there's this woman in Montreal she was talking about her grandmother she said who lives in Montreal and she said you know she goes to the Lebanese shopkeepers she only buys Lebanese groceries she lives as if she is in Lebanon and i became interested with the notion of as if that is she was talking about her grandmother and she was certain that her mother lived in Montreal but she lived as if she was in Lebanon now what i subjected to a kind of like analytical microanalytic lens was more the question of why what does it mean to inhabit Montreal as opposed to as if not really inhabiting Lebanon but acting as if you are inhabiting Lebanon so what's the difference between the relationship this woman had with Montreal and the relationship she had with Lebanon now you might think come on like it's very simple she is in Montreal and she's not in Lebanon let's not play silly games and etc and be a matter of fact about it but i want to convince you that it's not so straightforward at all actually i mean it's actually in anthropology it's a classic classical problem of place when i say i did my ethnography in Papua New Guinea you know so where i did it in highland where so where where were you located what did you inhabit what is the place you are actually referring so i say i'm in Sydney some of you are in London some of you are in netherland i can see some people from all over europe here it's wonderful and i say okay and we are also on the net so we are occupying a multiplicity of spaces we are occupying the space of the net virtual space and we are occupying rooms now but what interests me is when we say so i'm in Sydney i am inhabiting Sydney which is by the way robot i am i live in Sydney not in melbourne uh and uh and now what does it mean that i'm in Sydney where i mean i'm not in Sydney Sydney is huge like every other place i'm actually in my land uh in uh a suburb called glim and so how how do we say i am in aspects i'm confidently say so i am in australia but not in lebanon but why uh on what basis obviously i am not everywhere in australia let alone i am definitely uh i'm not everywhere in nusa as well as i'm not everywhere in Sydney i'm not even everywhere inside my house i'm not even everywhere in on the first floor right but so what are the combinations of actual experience and imaginative experience that combine together to create the statement i am in i say i am in Sydney sure i went to the pool uh so i remember that i drove along a southern road uh and every day so i have a memory of the places i've been going to on an everyday basis and i have an immediate relation with uh the paintings uh here and my partner is having a gin and tonic because i'm wearing her health uh in the background there and uh so i can relate to all these things that position me confidently uh my partner saying that she finished the gin and tonic and uh and i can confidently on the basis of certain things i remember certain things i'm confident exist around me certain things like this say i am in Sydney which is in australia now you can't see it here but i have actually a photo of my father and i've got a couple of momentos that i've got from lebanon and they remind me of lebanon now when i relate to these directly do i say i remember lebanon i'm not in lebanon why why do i say i remember lebanon and i am why not say that i am in Sydney and i am in lebanon i'm not inhabiting lebanon in the same way i'm inhabiting Sydney no one is saying to inhabit has to be the same way but when do we say that i am inhabiting a space on the basis of relation to certain things and the remembrance of other things now the same process is involved with me saying so so what i'm inviting you to think is that we inhabit multiplicity of spaces rather than think simply in inhabiting one place and remembering other places i'm inviting you to think in terms of multiple inhabitants and different types of inhabitants so no one is saying obviously that i am in Sydney in the same way i'm in lebanon now what is interesting is that a lot of the data i've got reflects people who say i am in two places i'm thinking they say i am here and i you know also i am here i'm also there you know my sort of like i'm occupied i'm doing this i'm doing that here and i'm doing that there like people don't actually always say i'm now i'm not trying to dissuade you from saying there are such a thing as memories but i'm saying that the question of remembering a place does not capture the totality of the experience like we are too often let in memory do the work by creating an opposition between inhabiting and remembering instead of trying to think multiple inhabitants and different modes of inhabitants and and once we start thinking this way we start seeing that we are and we can and we do often inhabit a multiplicity of spaces differently but we do and so a person is sitting in their large room like me whatever the immediate material reality that they are relating to is the first raw material then they use their imaginary to think themselves as inhabiting this place or inhabiting that place when i was in us this guy was showing me his new house and he was holding the baby and he was a total Elvis Elvis freak and he had part of his large room totally kind of like from Graceland called kind of like all kind of Elvis memorabilia uh uh you know everything posters shares cushions everything and you turn to the to the left and there's a bar which has a Lebanese cedar and uh Lebanese hookah and a serum for making kibbeh and it looked and he said and he said to me he said look he was holding his baby like this and he said look this is my America talking to the Elvis part of the language and this is Lebanon and when he said that his baby went sort of like like this and he said to his baby yes see America Lebanon America Lebanon and uh in a way as that is what i'm trying to convey with the notion of lenticular yard lenticular now lent the lenticular is actually a photographic technique these are those photos which uh when you flick them you see they can contain more than one photo you know you flick them so you see sort of like Jesus Mary before after frowning clowns smiling clown you know you flick them so they contain two two photos in one and they their reality flicker they flicker this is this is what i call lenticular reality and what i'm trying to convey to you is that diasporic reality is a lenticular reality people are continuously inhabiting a multiplicity of realities and they flicker i'm not just in in australia i'm in australia and i lebanon is constantly flickering and i personally i'm talking here but i i'm in in the book i i produce a lot of data to show how this actually works all the time uh not exclusively i'm not trying remember i'm not trying to abolish the concept of remembering it's just that i feel that it monopolizes imagination and stops us from thinking the possibility of multiple inhabitants rather than thinking that one inhabits one reality and remembers all the time there is such a thing as multiple inhabitants simultaneous right because in migration studies there are multiple inhabitants but it's people who move from one place to another i'm not talking about that i'm talking about simultaneously inhabiting realities multiple realities so so this this now is what i move to try and develop my understanding of an isogamic valorization because what i argue is that and yeah is valorization is not simply a kind of like intellectual exercise valorization is what i call a process of intensifying reality that is you vote by attaching yourself more to one reality of another reality you vote by you don't you don't valorize you don't valorize lebanon by saying always but just by saying oh my country is beautiful you valorize lebanon in the face of wanting to devalorize the u.s by living living inhabiting lebanon more intensely even though you are living in the u.s but you inhabit lebanon more intensely that is an isogamy becomes a game of intensification and strategic intensification you intensify the real one reality at the expense of another reality in order to say i am not invested as invested in this reality i'm going to invest myself more in this reality because it's more rewarding i don't want to be suffering you and your racism etc i'm going to to live here and in fact when i interviewed the grandmother who was living in montreal and as if living living in lebanon she gave me this amazing tale of how she never wanted to travel to montreal to to canada and her husband sort of like forced her to to come and she was she told me how sorry about how she was part of the first book club in the village and then when she moved to montreal she started working in the shop with her husband and never managed to read anymore and so she gave me a kind of like misery tale uh and she was saying i uh we made a lot more money but i i i did not read anymore and etc and so she created two worlds a world of satisfaction and emotion and a world of uh money making which is often the division that they make uh in this process like the two spaces one one space embodies affect uh love and such and one space uh embodies starts embodying uh more instrumental uh money making uh logic so much so that actually i got a wonderful information from re-reading Marcel Morse on double morphology i don't know if you know this text but Marcel Morse in double morphology it's a study of eskimos it's a study of eskimos and the study of society in eskimos they have two inhabitants but they don't inhabit them at the same time however what's interesting about Morse's study of this double morphology is that this type that he was studying so they actually change their culture when they move so when they're on in in in in one season when they are down they are authoritarian uh sort of like rule abiding etc when they move to the other space in summer they become libertarian um and so Morse analyzes how they exist in these two spaces but not simultaneous and so i felt what i was analyzing was a kind of like simultaneous double morphology so instead of you move in summer here and there is constantly with you you are occupying constantly two spaces and each space is invested with very different values and you're leaning on one on the other as part of your strategic negotiation of your relation this is what an isogamic sort of like strategizing okay thanks thank you so much that was so really brilliant and brilliantly delivered with so many vivid examples um that made your talk so really intense and made it i think in a way that everyone can actually connect to what you're saying at a at a very sort of individual level as well so not only you're given you have given us lots of thought for thought about uh how to rethink the relationship between the migrant or uh and and the host and the home societies in in in very interesting ways but also i think that each one of us has had a moment where he or she identified and and and felt very personally about what you were talking about um we have now time for um questions and answers i have lots and lots of comments and questions that i would like to ask you i will just limit myself to one question to a couple of questions with while the audience is gathering their thoughts um the first one is that obviously i want to be a little bit the devil the devil's advocate here and want to come back to the issue you started your talk with by taking distance from a certain type of scholarship which is inscribing itself in in a very political framework and and of course you are more than legitimate to do so by virtue of your pedigree and by virtue of what you know what we know you have written and your engagement your everyday engagement but i was wondering to what extent this is actually so distant from the political i think what you're offering us is is a very um it's obviously a really fresh and important approach because it takes us back to one of your dear issues about this you know the fact that we are stuck together and we need to understand how to deal with this and and people are constantly negotiating their statuses their their existences in all the kinds of interesting ways you mentioned so in that sense i think it's very refreshing to to kind of zoom in and think about the everyday negotiations of individuals of subjects who are part of histories larger canvases but they are every day making themselves um at home in these in these multiple ways and negotiating with different imaginaries and spaces and places and and so on to me this is absolutely refreshing but i'm wondering to what extent we can actually shy away from the political structural context in which in which these exchanges these unisomic negotiations happen and of course you know the you know the i was just watching a movie the other day in the royal anthropology film festival which i couldn't finish watching because it was too sad of a palestinian refugee from shatila one of the refugee camps in beirut who lives for greece the the director is michelle fleife who's well known and and this latest documentary shows the trajectory of this palestinian refugee leaving the camp in lebanon a place of hopelessness of course there are lots of negotiations happening every day there isn't only hopelessness but in general in the long duray of things it's a place of hopelessness and adds up in greece where basically his possibility of engaging with anyone other than the other three palestinians he's living with in a in a dump place is in the park where basically he resorts to to become a sex worker and the horizon is that he apparently then goes back to to the camp because you know from one space of hopelessness to another and i was just wondering what kind of unisomic unison unison uh unisomic yes you would see i mean i think yeah so okay i mean i'll just finish i'm wondering to what extent this is very useful to analyze and understand long-term diasporic communities such as the lebanese who enjoy also certain type of status and and so on and so forth and i i think you you know you obviously uh probably agree with me and and and but i just want i felt the need to say this yeah and um i mean i think i think it's uh i mean i mean i think it's crucial that i'm not dealing with refugees here one yes i mean i'm not dealing with refugees uh you know i mean to the extent that you can extrapolate the study of lebanese diaspora to study in elements of refugees i mean that's that should be for your own creative encounter with your own empirical empirical sort of like relation so so i i definitely don't want to claim some mega universalism about what i what i am studying i mean i'm studying the lebanese diaspora i'm hoping that from that i can get some ideas about diaspora but i'm yeah i mean one needs to limit and also but also uh not just limit you can i think you can use definitely there are a variety of ways the notion of anivogamy but you will need to bend it transform it to suit your own i mean i'm not offering formulas here i'm just thinking my subject and and be happy to see people uh bend it and transform it and do other things but i like i mean what would give me joy is people thinking creative reasons uh i'm transforming but i would definitely not want to think that there's a formula for analyzing all kinds of diasporas around the world but the question of the political too uh very quickly i would want to say i think i've ended up in a very political space uh very consciously because what i want to argue is that personally i i i don't expect necessarily people to agree with me but i think we academics are lousy politicians and we don't we're not very good at politics and yet everyone likes to do politics and we are not good at politics uh actually our biggest political impact is when we concentrate on what we do best and in a very funny way we end up being much more efficiently political when we concentrate on being good academics rather than try and play the politics of politicians uh because i mean you said even the language that we take is position position that i have this position and you have this position i mean i can't do politics with positions uh uh anyway yeah this is another another another conversation but but i what i want to assert is that you don't escape the political but by affirming the academic you introduce into the political something new that instead of trying to mimic and we produce an academic version of what politicians do the job is to introduce something fresh from an academic perspective that can transform politics rather than mimic it yes absolutely thank you so much ressan this is uh a great point to actually to bring to this forum i hope that uh it will offer food for thoughts also for our students while they are thinking what kind of an academic will they become if uh and i think this is something that needs to be given a lot of a lot of attention but i think there are already lots of questions in the chat feel free to unmute yourself and ask the question directly to to ressan if you want to if not we can read them out but it would be very nice to have an exchange so please uh i can see daniella i can see bella ellie maria please do unmute yourself sure i can start if that's okay sure hi um my name is daniella george i'm a phd student at the university of queen but i hear in portugal where it's sunny but um thank you so much this was a really interesting talk um the question that i asked in the chat box was especially about diaspora communities that return and how in the reconciliation process between the imagined community and the construction of the place of origin especially for second generation and then when in the actual return uh trying to i think there also emerges a similar to what professor has mentioned of the competitive nature of showing you do belong but you are different and i just wanted to ask about this how how does this work within that same um with that same logic i'm not sure i understood very well sort of like the nature of your question can you can you repeat it in a different way perhaps okay so uh for i can i can i use an example so for example i am a portuguese american and i grew up in a portuguese community much like those you described of lebanese communities outside of uh of lebanon and i have returned returned to portugal and there's also a new negotiation you know because i have grown up in a context where um where portugal for example was constructed in a specific way within the community of newark for example where i where i grew up and the reconciliation of coming back you know and it not being the same culture that was produced outside within the diaspora yeah the differentiation between that yes yes i mean it's very uh it's very interesting to look at i mean like to just give you a sense of the difference in lebanon from uh what you are describing here which are which might be the same but you tell me you can tell them but i mean there's always this imaginary that the place people migrate from is monocultural and the place people go to is multicultural that so the village in lebanon apparently has lebanese culture and when people go to the world they become part of a multiplicity of culture now what's interesting about when people come back to a lebanese village is that the lebanese village is a microcosm of the world first of all uh the names of people people are called Jose, George, Louis so they have american names they have brazilian names these are the people living in lebanon right like because people name after migrants especially after successful migrants so like if Carlos uh Carlos uh many of that did really well suddenly you get a wave of people called Carlos it's uh it's actually something i treat in the book because it's kind of like successful migrants are considered like saints of migration uh because the migrant who does well embodies innocence and it's like saints if you name after the saint maybe you will get a little bit of their baraka and and you will you will become successful so like likewise because Selma Hayek became uh a kind of like uh successful sort of like lots of girls are called Selma uh so you have multiplicity of names but also you have like actually the first time i went to the village uh the mayor took me on a tour of what they call villas and they say this villa is Saudi this villa is Venezuela this villa is brazilian that is they name each villa according to the emittance money which has produced them and then you have uh the carcass clinic uh you have a Saudi financed football field uh so so the whole village the microcosm of and multiplicity but not only names i mean the accents the accents of people uh and so when the second generation uh goes to Lebanon this is what shocks them most so because they imagine they are going back to some kind of like pure monocultural which never existed almost because Lebanese villages have been like this since uh the end of the 18th century thank you Ghassan there are um several questions in the chat so if you don't want to um unmute yourself uh i'm trying to see how i get to the chat here i can i can read them out if you want or well i mean yes sure so there is a question but if people want to ask first please do do unmute yourself and ask the question if you want it's okay yes thank you well Ghassan first of all this was groundbreaking i mean i was in tears most of the time thank you pause i'm not just a scholar of migration and refugees but i have my family has underwent multiple migrations and this is actually very interesting your thinking in regard to multiple migrations within the course of just two or three generations um so to make a very long story brief for example my grandfather left my maternal grandfather left over a hundred years ago as a very poor boy in Greece went to South Africa and became a multi-billionaire all of this fortune was less was was lost for different reasons i am very poor myself right now but anyway um my my paternal grandmother was also uh one of the most prominent negreponte families in Asia minor and when the catastrophe happened she had to leave and come as a refugee to Greece so that's also interesting returning to Greece as a refugee being Greek but she didn't come to Greece and she instead she went to Egypt so then my father who was born in 1922 was raised in Egypt um and he himself um um returned to Greece when he was in his 40s um so there's been multiple migrations connected not necessarily to um the financial migrations and then my brother left Greece 20 years ago and went to Wales now this is very interesting because my father is an example of a person who obviously left Greece and went to Wales UK for a better financial future and he did not succeed for almost 10 years he was at the verge of homelessness and I was supporting him so that he would not become homeless the last five years he is uh doing okay the interesting parties that he's living in this most beautiful natural world place so one of the most beautiful I've seen you know in the world and uh both he and one of his best friends who's also Greek think it's a horrible place so we see here uh a supreme example of nostalgia I go there and I say what beauty this is and how I wish I could stay here and look at this nature and they say oh come on this is awful the cafes close at 10 these people they only drink they never eat the mosaic when they drink so they become drunk we in Greece we never drink to drink we drink while we eat I mean all there's a million different things so of course he was struggling in Greece and if he was not struggling he would not have left so he's super glorifying this nostalgia and I'm just wondering here um because you made a very very interesting point when you mentioned the dichotomy between academia and politics but I'm wondering how we can I'm always wondering this thing how we can take the this groundbreaking thinking you presented us today and and put it in lay people's words because my brother is not an academic he was a sea captain and then he was whatever and now he's a low command and whatever but to put it in lay people's language that could make them realize their situation because it would be therapeutic in a way if he understood everything you presented to us today you know so I'm not going to think of talking let me yeah thank you yeah let me let me just say that I think because what I said is itself the product of listening to lay people so so the relation is really dialectical it's not that I've found some some truth that I need to convey the truth came to me from the people I'm working with this is in the essence of the anthropological exercise also also sociological so that matter but uh but what is what I think is crucial is that yes I think there is a function in the academic exercise of putting in words certain things that people formulate but not necessarily very clearly and and often the most successfully conveyed across the board truth are not things where people say ah amazing I didn't realize this you have in fact in my experience when I have managed to communicate something about racism for instance or etc when I was doing uh kind of like public intellectual exercise is more people saying to me I've always known this you've just put it in a word which helped me express what I've always known oh yeah so you don't teach people you just give them tools absolutely and so I think that's that's where where where thank you thank you and if I may I would like to just spend a word to to really praise rascals because I think you have a unique style and you unique way to to write and to talk which is always so accountable to the ethnography to the ethnography you conducted and it's at once personal and deeply ethnographic as opposed to many sort of anthropologists who take one example and then spend you know one line on on on the evidence and then 20 pages on on on theories that one gets almost disconnected from the point so I think this is something that I really want to praise and for me it offers really a model for our students as well on how to think about the relationship between ethnography and and the process of writing and and communicating so really thank you also in the talk that was really special um thank you move I think you mute it I saw all the things I said where I was muted no you weren't muted okay so I just wanted to give the floor to bella I I heard all the wonderful things you said about me would you like to ask your question yeah yeah thank you thank you to Sanhaj for that lecture lecture is really insightful and um especially I really liked your concept of nostalgia and the self-falarization I never really thought about it like that um yeah my question is um based around more well obviously young people um but like third generation diasporic communities like I'm I'm third generation Indian Kenyan you know the Indian diaspora that went to Kenya um and and then of course then then I moved to Europe and then now I'm in the UK um and a lot of the things that you're talking about I definitely see with my grandparents um when they moved to Kenya and they you know they had they were living as if they lived in India almost you know with the music they listened to with the way the house was set up and things um but by the time it came down to me I was I already didn't feel you know very Indian I was I was brought up in Kenya it was this weird there was some expectations of Indian Indians in Kenya and so I also had to undergo this process of self-falarization as you said and then when I came to Europe I had to go to a whole other process of self-falarization right and of course because I don't feel like I belong in a specific place so um yeah I was wondering what you think about that one like a diaspora like someone from a diaspora doesn't actually feel like they but they have one place that they belong to and if you've thought about that anyway yeah yes absolutely I mean obviously uh like in my research but also personally I know many Lebanese who are not part of the Lebanese diaspora in any any sense in the sense of uh attachment to anything Lebanese so they have inherited a name but they have inherited sometimes the lock even uh and they have inherited uh some food but when I try to say to them well does Lebanon mean anything to you say no uh but some do so it's a variety of intensities again and so I think diaspora is an inheritance so you inherit you have inherited certain certain uh certain genealogy from your parents and your grandparents and inheritance some people refuse their inheritance some people are unaffected by the inheritance some people are determined by the inheritance so so how you how you are relate you relate to an inheritance is a very very uh complicated thing that varies across the board so I would definitely not try and be formulate in trying to establish some this is people who belong to the diaspora this is people who don't belong there's also the problem of do you use emic or etic you know classical do you use people's feeling of belonging or do you create some category yourself and say look at you must be part of the african diaspora you must be part of the I don't care what you think uh but at the same time you're dealing with that problem it means you are right otherwise you wouldn't even ask the question uh uh the fact that the question is there for you is a mode of belonging uh uh it's not the common mode of belonging but because for some people even the question doesn't exist like don't even bother me with Lebanon or whether I mean I just like the fact that you are asking a question about your belonging is a form of belonging even if you come to the conclusion that you don't belong but asking the question is a form of belonging uh that is it's a form of relation it's a form of negotiating your inheritance uh because if if if not you wouldn't ask the question so so I think uh like given you know I'm yeah I mean I extrapolated from just two words you said but uh I think it's interesting when someone says this because you don't want to imprison yourself by cliched answers and preconceived answers of what is and what is not and et cetera and I think this is where uh creativity is very crucial uh you have to you have to uh you might find by going analytically slowly and carefully you might find that you have in you non-discovered mode of belonging uh which uh you need to explore uh it's not always the case that people always have the right answer for you from the outside so you're the best person in a sense to deal with it thank you Hassan that was uh a really um a very cogent answer I'm just wondering how much you can take because I I am aware that uh we are all inhabiting in fact simultaneously multiple uh places and you for you it's 10 p.m in the evening so uh I wonder if you want to take one or two more questions or um you want to finish here um so I just wanted to hear how much you you are still sort of I'm uh I'm I'm not that old that I want to go sleep at 10 p.m so I can I can I can I can I can I can cope with another maybe there's maybe there was well maybe there was a genuine panic with some hummus waiting for you just next to um so we have plenty of uh really wonderful questions and also a lot of people thanking you who had to leave for teaching and other duties but uh I think there is um one question that I I wanted to read out to you because um uh I thought uh someone is mentioning um how much your talk uh made her think about or yeah made her think about abdel malik sayad's work as well and uh whether or not well that definitely uh it's not by chance I mean abdel malik sayad is someone you know when I worked with bouyeur I had a personal relation with abdel malik and uh sort of like I learned I learned a lot from him and uh he figures definitely in the book uh as especially because for abdel malik there's there is no study of migration which is not a study from that's both from the sending and receiving country uh you don't do one or the other and uh sort of like it is so so so what he calls the double absence uh ladoublah sauce which uh involves a gaze which tries to analyze the migrant both from the perspective of being an immigrant and from the perspective of being an immigrant as he puts it and definitely uh those places are present in in the book uh explicitly no not implicit thanks there is a question from um when uh you who sorry if I mispronounce uh thank you for the interesting talk I wonder how you think about the question of time the missed ongoing changes of the place in the lentic lenticular phenomenon um yes uh very nice well I mean that's that's quite interesting in the sense that I begin by thinking the lenticular if you remember by trying to argue that uh the conceptions of or for fronting so problematic of time is a Eurocentric uh in fact uh conception of modernity so what I'm trying to argue also in the book is that you what one of the differentiations between European modernity and diasporic uh modernity is precisely uh the relation between time and space that dies as a diasporic modernity now you know I mean it's not either or right it's never either or either space or time no no sophisticated thing called like to think space without time or time without space so it's not a question is it time or is it space it's a question of what is emphasized in the dialectic between time and space so like when you think of European nostalgia uh the structure of European nostalgia is governed by yearning for the past now one of the things about thinking nostalgia and time in the past with time is that when the past is never recoverable yeah you can never get the fast back now when you are nostalgic for another space it's not the same now it's it's interesting right because we know that when you are nostalgic to another space your nostalgia for another space is another time and therefore uh the place would have changed uh and so time has had its effect but if you highlight the question of nostalgia for another space you cannot say that another space is irretrievable in the way you say the past is irretrievable in fact in fact when you look at uh at European poetry about about memory and space you get well I know it's very far I mentioned it in the book uh the very famous uh Lamaqian poem about the luck of the lake where where where his he is sitting by the lake remembering his lover where he was on before and his lover has died and he's lamenting the passing of time and saying why can't we stop time so we can enjoy uh we can enjoy our beautiful moments and then after having said that time can never can never be retrieved he turns to nature around me and say oh rocks or etc why don't you carry the memory that is he's asking the space because for him the space continues to exist unlike time which has been retrieved written so he asked the space to embody the lost memories because it allows the memory to continue and in a way uh this is what happens with diaspora you have a primacy of space which allows the continuation of the past because it embodied in space in a way which is not the same as european nostalgia this at least how I analyzed it in the book thank you Hassan the questions are getting uh I mean we're getting many many questions and I think we are also running a little bit out of time as people are moving on to um teaching which you know in terms of time starts at 11 but um I think that there is time just for last question so um uh there is a question that I think we we we promise to ask you on behalf of Roy Russell who's asking and I think it's the best way to conclude did anyone inhabit the world as a space or even the universe or are we trapped in our experience at attachment to our birthplace repeat the beginning did anyone inhabit the world as a space or even as a universe or are we trapped in our experience at attachment to our birthplace oh well I mean I think I think uh that's a lovely lovely way to end on this existential transcendental note uh well I mean I think I have one of the things I have always highlighted and the highlight is precisely that we are never trapped in the spaces we are we are inhabiting because those spaces um so in actually the book I do I do a lot of work on the difference between metaphor metaphoric and metonymic realities so uh because to understand to understand how our surrounding takes us beyond our surroundings so you're looking at a photo as I said you're looking at a photo you're in Sydney you look at a photo of your mother in Lebanon now is this photo a metaphor of Lebanon or metonym that is for those of you who don't know the linguistic base differentiation a metaphor is something that replaces the reality so it is not the reality it's an order which represents the reality a metonymy metonymy is something from that reality that represents the reality so the photo is part of Lebanon it's an extension of Lebanon if it is a metonymy it is an extension of Lebanon an incursion of Lebanon into Sydney space or whatever space and so if it is a metonymy that's why it becomes part of a reality if it is a metaphor you say okay I'm in Australia and I remember since to the photo which is a representation of something which is outside so I advocate a metonymic sort of like liberation which always makes us move outside space and into the universe and that has to engage with the work of our imagination just as much as as the empirical reality brilliant I try thank you so much Hassan and thank you everyone I I really think this was a really special lecture for many kinds of reasons some of which have been also mentioned in the list some people thought it was self-theorical and there is a sense that Hassan you are not only just a public intellectual and offering us really hope in the discipline in its the indirect intervention in the possibility and the potentiality to change the word but also you offer some therapeutic and somehow counseling effects to the extent that everyone feels connected feels moved feels really that what you have to say speaks to their everyday and histories of migration and inhabiting the world from wherever they are and I really want to thank you for this for which is not just what you've done with this talk and with this book that we are really looking forward to read but I think in the wider work that you've produced over the past decades so really thank you so much for pushing our boundaries and thank you very much Robert thank you very much thank you and thank you all for your question and for listening and I hope I didn't go on your breakfast or or anything like this that was very much I'll leave you with Kim who will just explain something about the recording and where you will be able to find it thank you thank you thank you all and goodbye


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Hello everyone, my name is Sarms Jabra or Sadamed Yasser Jabra, Ibrahim Jabra, depends on who you ask and who I'm talking to. I work for the city of Detroit. I live in the city of Detroit. I did a fellowship in the city of Detroit, big fan of the city, second best city in the world, first best city of being Baghdad, where I was born in the late 80s. We came here in the early 90s. You know, my dad was in the army, my mom didn't know where he was, and he came back one day on leave and they were just like, we're getting out of here. And they left and we were able to leave to Amman because Amman was the only city that was really accepting Iraqis at the time. So as refugees, we went over there. I was getting to be school age, and my parents said, okay, we need, we want our sons, I have a little brother, to start school where they finish it. So are we going to go to America or are we going to go back home?  And she's like, look, your husband is going to be seduced by one of these hussies I have yet to find a topless car wash. So I've been here for 20 years. I'm sure they're here somewhere. In any case, so we left Amman, we came to America, we're able to come to America pretty easily as far as, you know, leaving everything behind can be for two reasons. One, my mom was actually born in Colorado. The second part of that is in addition to being born in America, my mom used to and still kind of works for the United Nations. She was doing data analysis for them. When the war happened, Iraqi currency went from three times the American dollar to 33 cents. So your currency, even if you're wealthy, depreciates by 900%. Thankfully, her pension was in American dollars. So she was able to cash that out. We came here. We came to Midland, Michigan, which is in the middle of Michigan, rural city. And one thing I would like to point out, my brother is 26. He was born February 1990. The war, the Gulf storm started, I think, in May 1990. So effectively for my brother's entire life, in his mid-20s, America has had, has either been at war, sanctioning, or occupying Iraq. In any case, yeah, things began to change drastically after 9-11 suddenly became being brown as a thing. And I, you know, I mentioned that kind of go by two different names. Well, I started, I started going by SARMs at that point, because people just became very curious about, oh, Sarmad, where are you from? Oh, you're from Iraq. What do you think about the war? What do you think about Saddam? I'm thinking, you know, what do you think I feel about that? And, you know, they might have good intentions like, God bless you for being curious, but it's a painful experience for someone who has had their entire life kind of drastically shifted to go over those wounds. But what I'm really concerned about is my family, my younger cousins, you know, I have an older cousin. She is phenomenal. She was the first attorney in like our extended family. She's got this beautiful family. She lives in Georgia. She's got a son and I think he's in third grade or something. And I just heard about this just the other day.  And that's heartbreaking. That's, you know, for his one classmates to say that he must have gotten in from somewhere, right? And kids just kind of repeat back what they hear. They reflect the world that is presented to them. And this is the world that's presented to my cousin's classmates. And now this is the world that's being reflected onto my cousin. And that is not a world that I want anyone to live in because it's a dark, mean, horrible world. And as this product of war and as a refugee and as a son of refugees, I know what darkness can look like. You know, I begin to think myself, you know, with this election, like what is going to happen. And on a local level, you know, I'm trying to have these conversations with people in Detroit, just to come together to know each other to build a network. And then from there be able to respond strategically to, you know, what may come.


Some developments already under way. For example the hotel at Cambridge North Station. It's actually the reason why we want to get this draft plan out to you for comment because it's a tool for us when developers put in planning applications. We can ask them to pay attention to the plan and push back on things that aren't in line with what we want to see. All together we think the waste water treatment plant will be relocated in around about four or five years and the first new homes in significant quantities will be a couple of years after that. It will take about 20 years in total for North East Cambridge to be fully built and during this time we're planning on a number of temporary things to happen too. Examples are pop-up community spaces, temporary business spaces and temporary community gardens or public spaces. So it will take a long time no doubt about it but we think it'll be worth it. We want to make it a place that will last for generations and be somewhere that you really want to live, work and play but we need you to tell us if we're going about it in the right way. So please get over to the website, check out the consultation and tell us what you think.