Séminaire collectif du CREA - Sofian Merabet

Archives, Fiction, and the Hotel Beirut

This talk and reading are based on a writing project that, as a work of fiction, bridges urban anthropology, history, and the study of sexuality. It focuses on the archives of a former Beirut hotel, but also explores different facets of the Arab diaspora in Latin America, including the refugee crisis engendered by the current Syrian war. Capturing the imagination of many Lebanese as a quintessential symbol of urban pleasure from the time of its construction in the late 1950s until it was destroyed in 2008, what I call the “Hotel Beirut” was built by a queer-identified owner with family connections to Argentina. In an effort to reconstruct what has come to be called the “golden era” of pre-civil-war Lebanon and its violent aftermath, my project examines the history of the Hotel Beirut by engaging in a methodical investigation of written administrative records and personal documents I found in such disparate places as Lebanon, Germany, France, and Argentina. Together with ethnographic interviews I have conducted, the textual study of the information available in this archive has enabled me to reconstruct the micro-history of the hotel and link it to the social, political, and religious macro-history of the city and the country, as well as its Latin American diaspora. The text revolves around the fictional character of a young gay Syrian man in his twenties who finds himself as a refugee in Buenos Aires. There, he not only discovers a new city and its inhabitants, but also explores his own homosexuality. Yet it is in Buenos Aires that he stumbles upon some personal documents pertaining to a recently deceased lady who, while living over twenty years in Argentina, had been the pianist of the “Hotel Beirut” before leaving Lebanon in the late 1980s, at the end of the country’s civil war.

Sofian Merabet is a socio-cultural anthropologist whose expertise lies in the modern Middle East (with a particular focus on Lebanon and Syria) and the wider Muslim world, including Muslim immigrant communities in Europe and the Arab Diaspora in South America (especially Argentina). With a PhD in anthropology from Columbia University in New York, Sofian Merabet has taught at the American University of Beirut, the University of Louisville, and New York University. Since 2009, he has been on the faculty of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Texas in Austin.