Between two worlds: cultural bereavement, intersubjective memory and the politics of identity in the Lebanese American immigrant experience

This paper draws on oral history interviews conducted in 2025 with Lebanese and Arab American immigrants and their descendants, archived at the Moise A. Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies (GR0020, NC State University), to develop a cultural-psychological framework for understanding the psychic dimensions of migration without recourse to pathologising categories. Engaging theoretically with concepts of cultural bereavement, cultural humility, generational and intragenerational trauma, identity, intersubjective experience and the non-medicalisation of human suffering, the paper argues that the meaning-making processes of Lebanese and Arab American individuals navigating diaspora constitute a distinctive psychological terrain: one characterised by layered loss, recursive belonging and emotionally dense negotiations of selfhood across time and place. Theoretical engagement with the sociology of diasporic return and nostalgia, Arab American political subjectivity as well as the critique of trauma medicalisation, and the cultural politics of emotion informs the empirical analysis. Through thematic analysis of narrated life histories, the paper identifies three interlocking phenomenological structures: the mourning of a homeland that continues to change in the narrator's absence; the transmission of memory and political consciousness across and within generations; and the formation of hyphenated, palimpsestic identities under conditions of racialisation, cultural erasure and geopolitical anxiety. The paper concludes by proposing an integrative concept: ‘diasporic intersubjectivity’ as an original contribution to the fields of cultural psychology, interdisciplinary migration studies and the cultural psychology of Arab American experience.

© 2026 The Author(s). Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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