Shami 19and Public, addresses the emergence of a wide range of locations, social
statuses, discourses and practices that destabilize the notion of distinct
private and public domains: from memoirs and testimonies to strategies
of surveillance, from the Tehran bazaar to migrant domestic workers. For
the Middle East and North Africa region, the shifting, porous and yet
often ideologically rigid line between the private and the public has been
dealt with most comprehensively by the literature on gender and sexuality.
And yet those insights tend to be neglected or sublimated when “public
spheres” are invoked, thus leading (once again) to positing easy and mis-
leading distinctions. This section explores the various ways in which pri-
vacy and publicity are organized and negotiated in the changing cultural,
political and economic relations between state and society, and the ways
in which the construction and representation of the self, the domestic, the
collective and the national intersect in different settings.
e chapter by Haugbolle takes the case of Lebanon after the civil Th
war (1975–1990) and explores the boundary between private and pub-
lic as the boundary between self and society and biography and history.
Memory, and the writing down of autobiographies and testimonies, is the
medium that translates back and forth between these realms and becomes
vital for the reconstitution of publics in postconflict societies. Such soci-
eties, Haugbolle points out, are “packed with voices” as a result of social
groups having been torn apart and set against one another. The publica-
tion of such memories in books, and even more significantly in that most
public of spaces, newspapers, makes them essential building blocks of
new postwar public discourses and spheres.
e Lebanese case is interesting and special because these “private” Th
voices engage and inflect a “feeble national history,” further fragmented
by the sectarian violence of the civil war to an extent that might reverse
the usual relationship between the hegemonic nation and its counterpub-
lics. Haugbolle focuses on women’s voices, showing how the war enabled
the access of women to formerly masculine realms and the emergence
of a voice that had “previously depended on representation by others,”
although these voices often seem to lament the destruction by the war of
the selfsame “civility” that had previously silenced them. Haugbolle then
explores the paradoxes of the attempt to create a new postwar nationalism
through the testimonies of former militiamen (and women), who stress