“We, the Growers of the South”: Resituating the Transgressive Activation of South Lebanon’s Tobacco Growers (1964–1973)

This article explores the process of transgressive activation of Jabal ʿAmil’s (Ǧabal ʿĀmil) tobacco growers, in South Lebanon, during the decade preceding the outbreak of the Civil War (1975–1990). Prompted by the material backlashes of the coeval reengineering of the tobacco economy by the Régie monopoly, the mobilization rapidly evolved from a collective demand for better purchase prices and licensing policies to a broad-based confrontation against the state’s marginalizing policies and the organic relation between economic and political power defining Lebanon’s hegemonic power relations. Building from Antonio Gramsci’s methodological criteria for the study of subaltern groups to reconstruct growers’ transgressive activation, the article challenges the dominant assimilationist narratives that frame this history as part of the broader “Shia awakening” under the leadership of the Imam Musa al-Sadr (Mūsà al-Ṣadr, 1928–1978) or leftist movements. In so doing, it aims at resituating tobacco growers in their own history of mobilization against landowners and the state, and recentralize the role of their agency on the political agendas of al-Sadr and the Lebanese Communist Party.