States of Precarity: Rawi Hage’s De Niro’s Game as a Postcolonial Picaresque Novel

Abstract

This essay examines Rawi Hage’s De Niro’s Game (2006) as a postcolonial picaresque novel. Hage’s novel addresses the unpredictability of life in the precarious space of civil-war Lebanon, migration to Europe, and the role of a traumatizing past that is present in photographic images of loss and death. Through its focus on migration and cultural encounters, the novel places its protagonist Bassam in histories of the Lebanese diaspora and Mediterranean mobility and in the related precariousness and trauma generated by the legacies of colonialism and neocolonialism.