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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how communities of grief form in the diaspora, as individuals witness war from afar and negotiate the moral weight of beginning a new life elsewhere. Focusing on recent Lebanese émigrés, it explores how grieving intersects with hopes that migration should signify a new beginning.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how communities of grief take shape in the Lebanese diaspora as individuals witness war from afar and are forced to negotiate loss and the moral weight of beginning a new life elsewhere. Focusing on recent Lebanese émigrés in Czechia, many of whom left during the 2023–2024 war in Lebanon, it explores how grieving intersects with anxieties around expectations and hopes that migration should signify a new beginning and movement forward.

Emigrating from Lebanon where grief, hope, and lightness are folded into moments of everyday life, immigration causes these intricately woven systems to unravel. In the diaspora, one is left to ‘sit’ with one’s grief, while also navigating the precarity of immigrant life and the new status of racialized Other. Inspired by affect theory and cultural theorists such as Sianne Ngai and Sue Kim, the paper situates grief within racialized emotional regimes in which non-whiteness is associated with excessive or disruptive affect, while whiteness is aligned with composure, restraint, and private emotion. These regimes shape how Lebanese migrants regulate and pre-empt their emotional expressions of grief to be perceived as adaptable and socially acceptable. Building on fieldwork in Lebanon and Czechia during and after the war, the paper traces how new communities of grief emerge in response to both isolation and the undesirability to express grief publicly in a European context. The paper ultimately sheds light on how the desire to live a good life in the diaspora is both hopeful and burdensome under conditions of war.