The Undercommons of Beirut

This article explores the urban worlds of African and Asian migrant domestic workers living in Beirut, Lebanon. Over the last two decades, many women who first arrived in the country as domestic workers have fled domestic confinement and entered Lebanon’s informal labor market, where after 2011 they were also joined by hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees fleeing war across the country’s eastern border. Together with their male counterparts as well as diverse Lebanese citizens, migrant domestic workers have created a thriving underground layer to the city that includes religious and commercial establishments, mechanisms of informal service provision, and spaces of leisure, desire, and politics. Through an ethnographic analysis of intimate relations within these spaces, I designate this the “undercommons” of Beirut, drawing the term from Moten and Harney’s theorization of fugitivity and Black life. Forged in flight of the oppressive kafala system that regulates temporary migrant labor in much of the Middle East, the layered interdependences of this world constitute an undercommons of globalization itself.