Natalie Ghassan El-Eid

This project calls attention to transnational Druze communities in the United States and Lebanon, most notably to their fundamental ethnoreligious belief in reincarnation, as an intervention into the fields of transnational Arab, memory, trauma, and gender studies of the United States and the Global South. Examining the multiple, critical, and understudied ways Druze reincarnation narratives break silences and reshape contemporary understandings of the Lebanese Civil War and its ongoing violences, this research attends to the following key questions, ultimately pushing scholarship on the transnational Arab world in new directions: What does it mean to inherit trauma and memory from a past life? How do the afterlives of traumatic experience continue to shape lives, experiences, memories, histories, (un)official archives, and politics in Lebanon and across its diasporas? What future possibilities in seeing, listening to, understanding, and, ultimately, transforming the transnational Arab world can be forged by centering Druze voices?