This essay consists of three beginnings, then a deferred reading of a novel. One beginning, a theoretical beginning, reflects on the question implicit in my title: What is unstated in the state of Lebanon? Another beginning, a literary critical beginning, returns to the work of Kahlil Gibran, the most famous early-twentieth-century Arab North American writer. Gibran links modernist and postmodernist Arab North American writing and, in a historical parallel, connects the foundations of the Lebanese state under French colonial rule to its disintegration in the context of the civil war. A third beginning, a contextual beginning, evokes more recent events in Lebanon through a discussion of the July War of 2006, during which Israel bombed the country for over a month. These three points of departure, I suggest, are crucial to readings of contemporary Arab North American fiction, which is always conditioned by theories of the state, a post-Gibran literary sensibility, and the politics of the present. More specifically, I argue that Rawi Hage's representation of the civil war in Lebanon in DeNiro's Game negotiates the destruction of the Lebanese state through figures of the unstated, whose very existence questions more generally the state form as the preeminent site of political authority and contributes to unstating the state.

Why do we call certain attitudes, both individual and collective, racist? Why do we list certain discourses—admittedly a very wide range of discourses, which single out, stigmatize, threaten, or discriminate against various human and social groups—as racist? Why do we consider that practices, both spontaneous and institutional, unofficial and officially organized, that in the past and present have resulted in lasting forms of oppression, persistent hostilities and misunderstanding, and sometimes tragic violence in all sorts of societies are racist? To my surprise, this basic and preliminary question is seldom addressed in the huge scholarly and popular literature concerning racism—the old and new forms of racism, the modernity or antiquity of racism, the quantitative and qualitative variations of racism, and so on. Or, better said, the question is addressed only partially and indirectly: the category itself is taken for granted, all the more because the study of racism has become an essential sociological and political object, and what are mainly discussed are different definitions and theories and the conditions of their application. It seems that the very fact that there exists (and has long existed) something called racism, which includes a variety of manifestations, is subject to transformations, and does not purely and simply coincide with violence, not even violence based on collective hatred, need not be questioned. But isn't it necessary to discuss the reasons that we consider this fact obvious?

“Look, a Negro!” It was an external stimulus that flicked over me as I passed by. I made a tight smile.

“Look, a Negro!” It was true. It amused me.

“Look, a Negro!” The circle was drawing a bit tighter. I made no secret of my amusement.

“Mama, see the Negro! I am frightened!” Frightened! Frightened! Now they were beginning to be afraid of me. I made up my mind to laugh myself to tears, but laughter had become impossible.

—Frantz Fanon, “The Fact of Blackness” (111–12)

Far back as one may go into the past, from the northern Sudanese to the southern Bantu, the African has always and everywhere presented a concept of the world which is diametrically opposed to the traditional philosophy of Europe.

—Leopold Sedar Senghor, “Negritude: A Humanism of the Twentieth Century” (30)

Sango's history is not the history of primal becoming but of racial origin, which is historically dated.

—Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World (9)

These four epigraphs give a sense of the diversity of usages of the category of race in Africa and the discourses and practices that coalesce around these usages. I use the textual fragments to open up questions about race in Africa, to explore the various discursive economies in which race is articulated and circulates, and the registers and vocabularies in which responses to it have been conducted. The approach adopted is therefore metonymic: each fragment represents a larger body of texts and practices that broadly constitute a discourse defined by a set of shared characteristics. My purpose is not to discuss exhaustively these characteristics but rather to draw rough distinctions among the conditions that govern their articulation and circulation. In this way I can indicate the network of social, historical, and discursive relations in which the idea of race functions.

In the vigorous debate over Kara Walker's art—in particular, her life-size, black-on-white depictions of psychosexual fantasies seeded by American slavery—much attention has been paid to the objections raised by African American artists belonging to a generation older than Walker's. These older artists, including Betye Saar, Faith Ringgold, and Howardena Pindell, as well as commentators like Juliette Bowles, are often highlighted as Walker's main detractors, rendering the attack on her work a form of internecine, intergenerational warfare in African American intellectual and cultural life. This articulation of the debate obscures the extent to which themes and figures in Walker's oeuvre link it to the work of numerous African American women whose writing began to appear in the early 1970s. Walker is connected to literary counterparts like Gayl Jones, Carolivia Herron, Alice Randall, and Octavia Butler through her construction of characters marked by their sexual involvement with the master class. How these characters manage a set of exploitative relationships—in other words, how they explore their sexualities in the context of coercion—establishes them as a literary and visual sisterhood. Because Walker's silhouettes and other creations have been exhibited to large, integrated audiences in some of the most august international and domestic museums, they have provoked more comment and wider protests than the novels of contemporary African American women writers, but the differences in cultural reception mask the deep similarity between these bodies of work.