This chapter brings to the fore a key theme across the second part of Mandatory Madness: the considerable agency exercised by families over the management of their mentally ill relatives. This chapter focuses in particular on the petitions that flooded the mandate government from the 1930s onwards, seeking the admission of relatives to the government’s mental health institutions. These petitions are read both for what they reveal about the often-complex therapeutic strategies pursued by families, and as carefully crafted arguments about mental health illness and the state’s obligations to its subjects. Petitions make clear that Palestinian Arab families in particular were much more actively engaged with questions of psychiatric care than has been often represented, incorporating the mandate’s processes, institutions, and indeed anxieties into their strategies for managing the mentally ill. Petitions reframe our understanding of the interactions between state and society in mandate Palestine, by revealing how these played out in the intimate stretches of people’s lives.

Chapter 7 is about the attempts to relieve and rehabilitate Ottoman Armenians that had survived the genocide. It focuses on two cities, Beirut and Aleppo, and a region: Cilicia. The chapter relativizes the importance of international actions and insists on the importance of the scholarly works of historians that show how local networks and Armenian networks operated and looked after their co-religionists more and better than international humanitarian institutions.

Following a comparative approach, this chapter foregrounds transcultural translation as it examines three different productions of Sa’dallah Wannous’ play Rituals of Signs and Transformations in English, French and Arabic that were staged in Beirut, Chicago, Paris, and Cairo. The chapter argues that Wannous’ play carries a prophetic warning about the chaos that is released when rigid political, religious, and gender structures are undermined in a society deformed by a long experience of despotism.

This chapter draws on the author, Sahar Assaf's, experience directing two significant contemporary productions of Sa’dallah Wannous’ plays in English in Beirut, Rituals of Signs and Transformations and The Rape.

Building on the extensive literature related to postcolonialism and magical realism, this chapter examines how diaspora writing and magical realism are related. It focuses on alienation, the uncanny and mobility, among other elements, demonstrating that these are elements that unite and are common to both modes of writing. It argues that the case of Arab diaspora writing is particularly and uniquely suited to exploring how these modes are related. A close examination of two novels, The Night Counter by Alia Yunis and The Hakawati by Rabih Alameddine, illustrates how various forms of place, a central and key dimension of diaspora fiction, are refashioned and complicated through these novels’ engagement with and use of magical realism.

By the beginning of 1990, the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization (Untso) and its Australian observers were maintaining a well-established routine. On the Golan, the usual round of observation and patrolling continued, with little change in the level of activity. Observation duties in southern Lebanon were more challenging with low-level conflict between Hezbollah and other Muslim groups and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), but as the long Lebanon civil war had formally ended in 1989, fighting between the Lebanese factions was decreasing. Within Israel, the Intifada – the Palestinian uprising – was still running, but Untso had no role in trying to end or even moderate the violence. The Untso observers and their families tried to keep away from any Intifada-fuelled riots or bombings.