Missing Lebanon: art and autobiograph

Abstract

This thesis is a study in autobiographical discourses and an examination into how I locate myself as a subject in a geographical and historical continuum. It is an analysis on some of the authoritative influences that can shape the self and the subjective changes I effect through the writing of the self. Utilising aesthetic expressions such as poetry, photography, sculpture and video, I position myself at different times in Lebanon — the country of my birth — and in Australia — my adoptive country. Through these works and their discursive contexts, I choose to play witness to how varying degrees of difference are embraced or rejected in both these countries. Philosophical discourses by Jacques Derrida, George Bataille, Edward Said, Julia Kristeva, Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler, Nawal el-Saadawi, and Ghassan Hage amongst others, are woven into the text in order to illuminate some of the gaps and conflicts I encountered as I searched for meanings, and as I unpacked the densities of signs. The aesthetics of Mona Hatoum, Rabih Mroué, Lina Saneh, Sylvia Plath and other artists and writers are appraised and contextualised in the production of my own work.

Date of Thesis submission	2007
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Western Sydney University