لبنانُ! أَوَّلُكَ الدّنيا، وآخِرُكَ الدنيا&#8221; 
&#8220;وبعدَك لا أُفْقٌ ولا شُهُبُ 
الياس أبو شبكة (١٩٠٣-١٩٤٧)
“Lebanon, you are the beginning of the world and the end of the world 
And beyond you, there are neither horizons nor meteors” (author’s translation) 
– Elias Abou Chabakeh, Lebanese poet (1903-1947)

I remembered Abou Chabakeh’s lines, saturated in deep-seated parochialism and singular self-sufficiency, when I introduced my Brit Lit students to worldmaking, imagined and forged by literature and art. This concept draws on the work of the American philosopher Nelson Goodman (1906-1988), who sees in cultural expressions a confluence of material and intellectual forces shaping and conditioning real and fictional worlds – their boundaries, their past, present, and future. To Abou Chabakeh, writing in the aftermath of France’s imperialist formation of Greater Lebanon in 1920, the fledgling nation-state contained the world in its entirety: a world in a poem. Quite tellingly, Abou Chabakeh’s planetary fantasy of national triumph is completely detached from the larger Arab struggle for decolonisation. His ideal stands alone: insular, superior, wall-erecting – one that I would escape as far as I could: socially, intellectually, and emotionally.
Teaching is like that, sometimes; it infuses memories into the texts we are mining. At its core, teaching is a form of listening – listening to others and sometimes, listening to the ghosts that haunt us. Abou Chabakeh’s nationalist poetry haunts me. I, a child of the Civil War, recall reciting this nostalgic, nativist incantation as a quasi-pledge of allegiance to a venerated world I arrived into when it had already been lost. By tracing the vocabulary of empire, borders and nation-building threading through British literary history, I reflect on the foundational fictions that the patriotic poetry of Abou Chabakeh tells itself about Lebanon and its place in the world. I thought I left this world behind, ossified and mythified, and I resent its undiminished tug on my psyche.
It seems apt that I started planning this course, one that promises to cross boundaries and generic time periods, merely weeks after returning from a harrowing trip to visit my ailing dad in Lebanon. You see, for the last few years, my country of origin has suffered calamities big and small, tragic and sometimes bordering on the farcical: from medicine shortage, to a fuel crisis, to price inflation, the list of state-sanctioned crises grows by the day. Amid rampant political and financial corruption, the losses, the ruins are hard to tally. My parents, like so many, many others, live a life of perpetual precarity: they have lost their lives’ savings; they purchase privately-hauled water; they ration their food; they self-medicate; they queue up for long hours to buy gasoline, cars clogging the highway. Perhaps metaphorically, their once happy, healthy chickens stopped laying eggs. They tell me, even if unconvincingly, that their lives are in God’s hands. Mashallah and alhamdulillah.

In preparation for my trip, I buy vitamin supplements and painkillers in bulk. I order rechargeable flashlights and batteries online. I stock my suitcases with mundane items like deodorant, shampoo, and dish soap. I bring my mother an assortment of bonbons and chocolates, now delicacies she cannot afford. I resist the urge to compare myself to a character in a dystopian novel. Fictive hellscapes are my community&#8217;s daily reality. There is no catharsis here – only a raw and visceral collision with a damaged world.
Like Abou Chabakeh fantasy of a cosmic Lebanon, Beowulf’s Herot, the fictional mead-hall where major events in the early medieval poem take place, is construed as the “wonder of the world”. I tell my students we should feel uneasy about the concept of imago mundi, or a place as the image of the world. Mythologising a place, idealising a homeland, whether it is Herot, Lebanon, or the United States, engenders hierarchy. If only a select few are deemed privy to this fantastical, edenic topography, then a de facto need for border policing and criminalisation follows suit. Put differently, border-making justifies racist violence to ensure that those considered unworthy and disposable in this hierarchy of differentiation are denied entry into this fantastical world of wonder and abundance.
My students are understandably perplexed. We are, after all, troubling the dance of power, knowledge, and resistance between the privileged and the deracinated, the entitled and the non-entitled.

The jolt of recognition returns in our lesson on pre-modern cartography, which is inspired by <a href="https://youtu.be/RGgRgHJ9AhE">Nedda Mehdizadeh</a>’s capacious pedagogy. My class examines the performative speech act of putting the word “America” on <a href="https://www.loc.gov/rr/geogmap/waldexh.html">Martin Waldseemüller&#8217;s world map</a> for the first time in 1507 as a form of violent worldmaking. Indeed, the act of naming is a power move; it inscribes the settler colonial project of white Europeans in the Americas into existence. It is an origin story, a “birth certificate” as the Library of Congress calls it, predicated on the genocide of Indigenous populations, the forced migration and labour of enslaved Africans, and the extraction of land resources. More importantly, the fiction of totality that maps communicate constitutes an act of “worlding” (cf. <a href="https://postcolonial.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/spivak_readingarchive.pdf">Spivak 1985</a>); one that erases the memory, subjectivity, and geography of non-white people under the holistic banner of the “world”. The same imperial forces that legitimised settler colonialism in 1492, the year Christopher Columbus reached the Americas, arbitrarily divided the Middle East after the collapse of the Ottoman empire at the outset of the twentieth century. The French and English, as victors of World War I, performed a similar act of domination that reordered the world and cemented white European imperialism at the top of the global hierarchy. They surveyed lands and drew borders across Greater Syria that aligned with their self-interest and crushed native world-building aspirations. By its very essence, the long history of map-making tells a recurrent story of power and displacement.

Further on, when we look at the <a href="https://www.themappamundi.co.uk/mappa-mundi/">Hereford Mappa Mundi</a> (ca. 1300) and <a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.org/encyclopedia/al-idrisi/">Il-Idrisi’s world map</a> (1154) side by side, my students and I grapple with what it means to have two maps that position different geographical places as their focal centres – Jerusalem in the first, and Mecca, in the second. While the Mappa Mundi follows the three divisions of Asia, Europe, and Africa common in European medieval world maps, Al-Idrissi’s world is divided into the seven climates after Ptolomy, where the geographical vistas inhabited by Arabs appear as most viable, fertile. How can we see the medieval past, my class asked, through Arab and Muslim eyes? To what extent can we trouble a hermetically-sealed system of knowledge production that lionises Europe as the epicentre of worldmaking?
Literary history affords the space and scope to ruminate over these questions. It engages in worldmaking by dwelling on the stories that shape known and imagined worlds. In other words, our worlds are animated by what we mythologise, who we alienate and dehumanise, how we define our personhood, and where from our deepest desires and fears come. I understand people’s hesitation – scepticism, even – about drawing parallels between different temporalities and geographies, seeing in this enfolding of time and space an anachronism or an oversimplification. However, unless we actively reframe the questions we ask, reconceive the stories we tell, and open up the publics we serve, we will continue to recreate that hierarchical world that has been bequeathed to us by hegemonic knowledge producers. In this light, Puck’s famous line in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, “to put a girdle round about the earth,” reveals its sinister underbelly. Puck’s colonial fantasy to circumnavigate and stake the world in forty minutes frames worldmaking in lyrical language. Indeed, Puck’s beautiful imagery conceals the colonial forces that destroy Indigenous ecologies and erect extractive systems. Encoded in the language of wonder, desire and expansion is the undercurrent of violence intrinsic to the imperial project. In other words, the back-seam of pre-modern European exploration is racial exploitation.

For another lesson, my dear friend Matthew Harrison suggested that I teach the early medieval poem, <a href="https://oldenglishpoetry.camden.rutgers.edu/the-ruin/">&#8216;The Ruin&#8217;</a> to inhabit this sense of utter loss, of living a life amid the rubble of the past. In class, we dwell on these profoundly moving lines:
     [&#8230;] The halls of the city 
     once were bright: there were many bath-houses, 
     a lofty treasury of peaked roofs, many troop-roads, many mead-halls 
     filled with human-joys until that terrible chance changed all that.
In this early medieval poem, we encounter layers of grief, echoing and multiplying. My students and I finally share a brief moment of mutual affirmation. The struggle, the “terrible chance”, that we collectively, albeit unequally, endured during the pandemic makes us empathise, albeit selectively, with this overwhelming sense of suffering. Our losses of “human joys” operate as a shared language.
And my thoughts drift back to my communities in Lebanon, and the stirring urge to affirm their lives amid the litany of devastation: the port explosion of 2020; the ongoing financial collapse; the ravages of the pandemic; and the dispossession of migrant workers and refugees. Paradoxically, their losses refuse to be romanticised: “No poetry in the ashes,” as the poet Suhair Hamad tells us. Teaching is like that, sometimes. It holds space for the impossibility of rendering tragedies as artistically coherent moments in time.
As we contemplate the value of literature in the face of calamity, my students and I wonder about the stories that will emerge out of this moment of enormous loss? What traumas will we pass down? What shapes will our ruins take? What phantoms will we release? What fragments will we leave behind, about what we had and who we lost? And then, suddenly, amid the engulfing sense of destruction, a fragile question lingers as a testament to the intense emotional bonds that poetry affords: can we open ourselves to the possibility of forging a different, more just world? In the aftermath of disaster, we are left with the fragile hope that our worldmaking would be transformed by the possibilities of a radical imagination and creative practices; by the freedom to tell stories and love fiercely; and by dreams of being with, in, and for a borderless world.
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<pre>Photo Credit: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Eternal_Sabah_Mural_on_Assaf_building_in_Hamra,Beirut_-_Nightshot.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></pre>

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Reflecting on Lebanon’s current moment is a chance to step into multiple worlds to take down borders and forge more just ones.

The world in a poem: Notes on displacement and diaspora

For the first half of <a href="https://www.itv.com/hub/oprah-with-meghan-and-harry/10a1332a0001">Oprah with Meghan and Harry</a>, the audience witnessed a Black woman telling her story to another Black woman, making legible her perspective, and reclaiming her humanity. Much ink can be spilled about Meghan Markle’s complicity in propagating the fictions of a racist institution such as the British monarchy. Similarly, the iconic media mogul Oprah Winfrey has profited from the racial, cultural and social forces that created and sustained the myth of American meritocracy.
However, radical Black feminist thought urges us to focus on the systemic mechanisms of racial hierarchy that excludes Black lives from the domain of full humanity. Instead of criticising specific public figures, such as Michelle Obama, Beyoncé, and of course, Meghan Markle, Black feminism gives us the tools to talk about the compounding oppressions that affect the lives and livelihoods of Black women. In this short piece, my aim is to use these tools to address the royal family’s dismissal of Meghan Markle’s plight as an example of superficial diversity that infiltrates much of modern racial discourse, as well as reflect on the TV interview’s evocation of Black aesthetics as a political and cultural category of resistance
<h5>On diversity and inclusion</h5>
For a brief lull, the interracial royal wedding was lauded as a golden opportunity to shepherd the monarchy into modernity. But what does this modern sheen encompass? By incorporating a Black woman into its system of kinship, the modern monarchy appeared to signal the end of racism and locate an endpoint to the glaring realities of the afterlives of colonialism and slavery. In this fantasy, any talk of racism ruptures (white) national harmony, which is mobilised by what the feminist philosopher Sara Ahmed calls <a href="https://feministkilljoys.com/2019/04/29/nodding-as-a-non-performative/">“non-performative” speech acts</a>: words that are not followed by actions. In the ecology of a multicultural society, positive-sounding words, like “embrace” and “love” in Kasie Hunt’s tweet below, neutralise and contain attempts to address race and racism.

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Screenshot 2021-12-01 at 19.45.40

A screenshot of a tweet by Kasie Hunt that says: “Prince Harry alluded to this, but it’s true — his marrying Meghan was a once in a generation opportunity to bring the monarchy into the 21st century and embrace a new version of the family that the modern world could embrace and love [.] They didn’t just fail. They spat on it.” 9:44 PM, March 7, 2021
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What makes Markle’s withdrawal from the royal family radical is the reclamation of her voice and agency after her pain and suffering were devalued and swept under the carpet. In the <a href="https://www.itv.com/hub/oprah-with-meghan-and-harry/10a1332a0001">ITV broadcast interview</a>, Markle criticised the virulent racism of the tabloid establishment, and the royal family’s indifferent response to her cri de coeur. “I wrote several letters,” she said over and over again, about the injustices and indignities surrounding her. The Firm, as she sometimes called the royal family, did not shield her from the persistent structural and cultural vilification as she performed “her job”. The monarchy’s treatment of Markle’s racialised depression and fatigue – “I didn’t want to live anymore,” she confesses – exposes the inner workings of white institutions that ruthlessly silence Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic (BAME) and Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) groups in the name of civility, love, happiness, propriety and tradition. Here, I draw on Ahmed’s identification, in Living a Feminist Life, of civility as one of many strategies that oppressive powers use to coerce minoritised people. In these sentiments, Ahmed locates “the violence and power concealed under the languages of civility, happiness, and love, rather than simply or only consciousness of gender as a site of restriction of possibility”. Indeed, the inequality at the heart of Markle’s disillusionment with the royal family resonates with so many Black and other BAME women in white institutions that fail to support and protect them. In Markle’s case, the trauma of racism drove her towards suicidal ideations, which were dismissed as bad publicity for the institution.
What are the implications of Meghan Markle’s refusal to perform civility, to remain silent, to absorb her erasure until she reached the precipice of death by suicide? The personal and the cultural are always political; Meghan Markle’s personal experience of racism points to a larger, public phenomenon of racialised hierarchies. As minoritised people, we are forced to remain subservient and to paper over our feelings of dispossession. We internalise that we are undeserving of fairness, that the racism we encounter is a figment of our imagination. When we speak out, we are faced with the disavowal of institutions that demand proof of our oppression over and over again. The world does not need Meghan Markle to tell it that Britain is a racist place, that there is a deep-seated investment in white supremacy at the heart of the monarchy. All it takes is a look at the daily news, to learn how <a href="https://www.magonlinelibrary.com/doi/abs/10.12968/bjom.2020.28.10.718">COVID-19 has affected the maternal mortality rates of BAME women</a>, to see borders closed in the face of refugees, the bodies of Africans drowning at sea. What Meghan Markle’s story cemented is that superficial celebrations of diversity and inclusion, or what scholars call “the politics of representation,” without deep, de-centered, and structural transformations do not constitute change. Quite the opposite, it is a conservative ploy that gives racist institutions a modern veneer. And most damagingly, it demonstrates how feel-good progressivism always defaults to neoliberal fictions that silence the oppressed and affirm the powers that be.
<h5>Black beauty as empowerment</h5>
What is striking about the ITV broadcast is its use of the iconography of Black liberation.
Black feminism gives us the vocabulary to dwell on the political and cultural significance of Black aesthetics. Having analysed the <a href="https://the-rambling.com/2019/01/26/issue3-kafantaris/">fantasy of white British domesticity </a>that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s engagement interview evoked a few years ago, I was struck by the aesthetics of this special, particularly its rootedness in Black self-fashioning. Here, I wish to introduce Zora Neale Hurston’s “will to adorn” theory of Black aesthetics, a concept that illuminates how Black people have understood and willingly performed their embodiment, power and position in a white society. From music, to visual language, to sartorial choices, Black people seek to beautify the world around them as a political stance of resistance, community, and care. I borrow Zora Neale Hurston’s language of intentional adornment here, because I find it useful in my discussion of Meghan Markle’s Oprah interview as a representative of an oppressed population responding to a history of injury. How does this perspective reconfigure our understanding of Meghan Markle’s conversation with Oprah? Allow me to start over.
In a lush, sun-kissed, Southern California garden, across from an olive grove, two powerful Black women testify about virulent racism and institutional violence. On our right, a seasoned and decorated matriarch of American broadcasting wears a pink sweater with a crisp white shirt underneath it. She radiates an air of authority, experience and compassion; her ethics of care unfurl the tessellations of Meghan Markle’s “unsurvivable” life as a senior member of the British royal family. Markle’s sartorial choices are as suggestive of the ethos of this conversation. Donning a black dress, she is visibly pregnant. In her voluptuous embodiment, Markle performs her vulnerability, beauty and power. Where Markle’s wedding dress featured the flowers of the commonwealth, which acknowledged her full immersion in the symbology of colonialism and its aftermaths, the lotus flower adorning her flowy silk dress is packed with meaning. As a blossom floating on the surface of the water, the lotus emblematises regeneration that is always rooted in the slime underneath. I see the slime as representative of the structural racism that devalue a Black woman’s insistence on her subjectivity, her humanity and her personhood.
My work on premodern queenship and racial formations can provide a backdrop for understanding the longue durée of these tropes, or modes of thinking, about elite or powerful women in the public sphere today. The persistent fictions surrounding “good” foreign royal women script them as passive, with their mobility restricted and their desires shaped by the will of the patriarchal institution. This iconography is meticulously fabricated through visual and material culture, and can help us understand how Meghan Markle deviated from the ideal in which she was conscripted.
One telling example is the representation of Anne of Bohemia, King Richard II’s queen, in the early modern cultural imagination. For instance, in the anonymous Thomas of Woodstock (1590s), Anne is portrayed as an exemplary queen who gets absorbed by Englishness, her past identity completely erased. On the other hand, an unruly foreign queen like Margaret of Anjou, who performs her political power without reservation, is demonised as the “she-wolf of France” in William Shakespeare’s Henry VI plays (1590s). Margaret’s refusal to abide by the codes of meek English womanhood renders her as a racialised infection gnawing at the heart of the commonwealth – a cultural, political and physiological infection that needs to be excised.
Meghan Markle refused to remain differential to an indifferent establishment who did not care about her welfare and that of her child’s, and for that reason she was vilified and considered incompatible with true, white-centered Englishness. More importantly, her affirmation of her worth and beauty in an idyllic California garden speaks to a long tradition of an “aesthetic of Blackness” – a lineage, an inheritance, a desire “to bring delight, pleasure, and beauty into lives that were hard, that were materially deprived,” to use the words of bell hooks. Seen in this light, Meghan Markle’s control of her narrative, aesthetics and agency, despite a damaging and dehumanising context, is in itself a radical act. It connects her to a history of Black people’s transformative capacity to love themselves and the world, in spite of a world that does not love them back.
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<pre>Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons</pre>

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Meghan Markle’s famous television interview fits into a history of iconography of Black liberation, just as it exposes the inner workings of a white royal institution.

Mira Assaf Kafantaris