The Drowned and the Displaced: Afterlives of Agrarian Developmentalism across the Lebanese-Syrian Border

This article traces the layered significance of displacement for Syrians whose parents’ and grandparents’ villages were flooded after the Euphrates Dam in Tabqa was completed in 1973. Known as al-maghmurin (the drowned), many of the dam’s displaced descendants are now living as refugee farmworkers...

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Main Author: China Sajadian
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: North Carolina State University, Moise A. Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies 2023-03-01
Series:Mashriq & Mahjar
Subjects:
Online Access:https://lebanesestudies.ojs.chass.ncsu.edu/index.php/mashriq/article/view/347
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author China Sajadian
author_facet China Sajadian
author_sort China Sajadian
collection DOAJ
description This article traces the layered significance of displacement for Syrians whose parents’ and grandparents’ villages were flooded after the Euphrates Dam in Tabqa was completed in 1973. Known as al-maghmurin (the drowned), many of the dam’s displaced descendants are now living as refugee farmworkers in Lebanon. Based on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork at the Lebanese-Syrian border, the article analyzes how these refugees grappled with the struggles, promises, and losses associated with Syria’s high modern era of agrarian reform against the backdrop of Syria’s ongoing war. Facing the uncertainty of long-term displacement, their vernacular narratives about the dam resurrected Baʿthist ideals of state-led agrarian development and expressed a yearning for stability. Such expectations of material improvement, however, sat in tension with an intergenerational history of economic insecurity, decades of rural outmigration, and their everyday predicaments as refugee farmworkers. This article shows how these histories took form in the maghmurin’s everyday talk about the dam: the servile agrarian past that Syria’s land reforms were meant to overcome, the many unintended displacements these reforms unleashed, and the ways they contended with these past displacements in the present. In doing so, it argues that the displacement of these refugees was not a singular event triggered by war but rather a fractured inheritance and ongoing afterlife of agrarian developmentalism and Syria’s long post-socialist transition.
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spelling doaj.art-1ea410365a6d4a92ac9923721872dcbf2023-03-21T14:19:29ZengNorth Carolina State University, Moise A. Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora StudiesMashriq & Mahjar2169-44352023-03-0110110.24847/v10i12023.347The Drowned and the Displaced: Afterlives of Agrarian Developmentalism across the Lebanese-Syrian BorderChina Sajadian0Smith College This article traces the layered significance of displacement for Syrians whose parents’ and grandparents’ villages were flooded after the Euphrates Dam in Tabqa was completed in 1973. Known as al-maghmurin (the drowned), many of the dam’s displaced descendants are now living as refugee farmworkers in Lebanon. Based on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork at the Lebanese-Syrian border, the article analyzes how these refugees grappled with the struggles, promises, and losses associated with Syria’s high modern era of agrarian reform against the backdrop of Syria’s ongoing war. Facing the uncertainty of long-term displacement, their vernacular narratives about the dam resurrected Baʿthist ideals of state-led agrarian development and expressed a yearning for stability. Such expectations of material improvement, however, sat in tension with an intergenerational history of economic insecurity, decades of rural outmigration, and their everyday predicaments as refugee farmworkers. This article shows how these histories took form in the maghmurin’s everyday talk about the dam: the servile agrarian past that Syria’s land reforms were meant to overcome, the many unintended displacements these reforms unleashed, and the ways they contended with these past displacements in the present. In doing so, it argues that the displacement of these refugees was not a singular event triggered by war but rather a fractured inheritance and ongoing afterlife of agrarian developmentalism and Syria’s long post-socialist transition. https://lebanesestudies.ojs.chass.ncsu.edu/index.php/mashriq/article/view/347MemoryfarmworkersBiqaʿ ValleySyriaEuphrates Damagrarian reform
spellingShingle China Sajadian
The Drowned and the Displaced: Afterlives of Agrarian Developmentalism across the Lebanese-Syrian Border
Mashriq & Mahjar
Memory
farmworkers
Biqaʿ Valley
Syria
Euphrates Dam
agrarian reform
title The Drowned and the Displaced: Afterlives of Agrarian Developmentalism across the Lebanese-Syrian Border
title_full The Drowned and the Displaced: Afterlives of Agrarian Developmentalism across the Lebanese-Syrian Border
title_fullStr The Drowned and the Displaced: Afterlives of Agrarian Developmentalism across the Lebanese-Syrian Border
title_full_unstemmed The Drowned and the Displaced: Afterlives of Agrarian Developmentalism across the Lebanese-Syrian Border
title_short The Drowned and the Displaced: Afterlives of Agrarian Developmentalism across the Lebanese-Syrian Border
title_sort drowned and the displaced afterlives of agrarian developmentalism across the lebanese syrian border
topic Memory
farmworkers
Biqaʿ Valley
Syria
Euphrates Dam
agrarian reform
url https://lebanesestudies.ojs.chass.ncsu.edu/index.php/mashriq/article/view/347
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