Jumana Bayeh

Biography

I am an Early Career Research Fellow in the Faculty of Arts at Macquarie University. My research sits at the intersection of postcolonial studies and Middle East studies, especially the Arab Middle East and its diaspora. My main research interests include Arab diaspora literature and culture, the history of colonialism in the Middle East, and the politics and culture in the Levant. I have published a monograph and several articles on contemporary Lebanese diaspora fiction and am now working on Arab diaspora writers who reside in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Research Interest

Many of us think of the Arab Middle East as a region located elsewhere but for me the Middle East is dispersed and exists beyond its own confines. Its people have been migrating for centuries and Western countries have found numerous reasons, especially since WWI, to pay attention to the region's politics, resources and culture. The encounter between East and West has been well documented in postcolonial studies, but what is now increasingly coming to light is how the dispersed populations of the Middle East have debated and discussed the implications of that encounter. Some of the best sources we have for this are cultural texts - films, literature, memoirs, critical essays - composed by Arab migrants located in various Western states, like Australia, North America and Europe. This is the research area in which I am most interested. My current research project draws on an array of cultural texts to enhance the traditional ways that knowledge of the Arab Middle East has been transmitted, with the aim to develop a diasporic view of the region.