ABSTRACT
If the essence of a nation, as Renan suggests, is a rich legacy of unifying memories, Lebanon finds itself fundamentally flawed. Little consensus exists with regards to Lebanon’s modern birth; even less surrounds the discourses of civil war and national recovery. The cessation of hostilities in 1991 may have opened the way for a proliferation of scholarly historical readings and disputed narratives, yet Lebanon still awaits an official unified history curriculum for its schoolchildren. This is reflective of a society still grappling to reconcile a polyvalent history; struggling to integrate a self-destructive past within an unstable but shared future. This chapter explores the postmemory generation’s engagement with Lebanese history; assessing how it is informed by and mediated through schooling, the home, and wider public discourses, influencing perceptions of national identity and conceptions of the nation. I draw on the mnemonic practices of remembering, forgetting and imagining, to provide structure to the historical debate while delimiting student experiences and responses to educational pedagogy, popular narratives of denial and remembrance, and the contested national imaginaries of the ‘Independence Intifada’.
