Download or read book Memorials and Martyrs in Modern Lebanon written by Lucia Volk and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2010-10-21 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lebanese history is often associated with sectarianism and hostility between religious communities, but by examining public memorials and historical accounts Lucia Volk finds evidence for a sustained politics of Muslim and Christian co-existence. Lebanese Muslim and Christian civilians were jointly commemorated as martyrs for the nation after various episodes of violence in Lebanese history. Sites of memory sponsored by Maronite, Sunni, Shiite, and Druze elites have shared the goal of creating cross-community solidarity by honoring the joint sacrifice of civilians of different religious communities. This compelling and lucid study enhances our understanding of culture and politics in the Middle East and the politics of memory in situations of ongoing conflict.
Download or read book Street Art in the Middle East written by Sabrina de Turk and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-06-27 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the 2011 Arab Spring street art has been a vehicle for political discourse in the Middle East, and has generated much discussion in both the popular media and academia. Yet, this conversation has generalised street art and identified it as a singular form with identical styles and objectives throughout the region. Street art's purpose is, however, defined by the socio-cultural circumstances of its production. Middle Eastern artists thus adopt distinctive methods in creating their individual work and responding to their individual environments. Here, in this new book, Sabrina De Turk employs rigorous visual analysis to explore the diversity of Middle Eastern street art and uses case studies of countries as varied as Egypt, Tunisia, Lebanon, Palestine, Bahrain and Oman to illustrate how geographic specifics impact upon its function and aesthetic. Her book will be of significant interest to scholars specialising in art from the Middle East and North Africa and those who bring an interdisciplinary perspective to Middle East studies.
Download or read book Power Sharing after Civil War written by John Nagle and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-11-29 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a wide-ranging exploration of the legacy of Lebanon’s peace agreement in the 30 years since it was signed. The chapters in this edited volume have been written by leading scholars and provide in-depth analyses of key issues in postwar Lebanon, including the performance of power-sharing, human rights, communal memory and sectarianism, conflict and peace, militias, political parties and elections. A core strength of the book is the multidisciplinary approach to understanding postwar Lebanon, ranging from political science, international relations, sociology, conflict and peace studies, history and memory studies. The multidisciplinary character of the book allows for a rich and detailed evaluation of the ongoing legacy and consequences of Lebanon’s postwar settlement. The book will be of interest to scholars, students and people interested in contemporary Lebanese politics and society. It will also be attractive for a wider international audience interested in the consequences of postwar power-sharing systems and peace processes. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics.
Download or read book Martyr Cults and Political Identities in Lebanon written by Sabrina Bonsen and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-10-24 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sabrina Bonsen sheds light on political cults of martyrs in Lebanon and reconsiders the context of their emergence, development and distinct characteristics since 1920. She examines how the honouring of martyrs became an established practice in Lebanese politics and is crucial to grasp the logic of violence and conflict. Drawing on the case of the Amal movement, the author analyses central narratives to the group’s discourse and practices concerning martyrdom to show how identity construction and strategies of legitimizing power are intertwined. Moreover, the book provides insides into political competition strategies, especially in regards to the two major Shiʿite political actors, Amal and Hizbullah, and takes a new look on martyrdom by going beyond cultural-religious explanations.
Download or read book Winning Lebanon written by Dylan Baun and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-22 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the mid-twentieth century, youth movements around the globe ruled the streets. In Lebanon, young people in these groups attended lectures, sang songs, and participated in sporting events; their music tastes, clothing choices and routine activities shaped their identities. Yet scholars of modern Lebanon often focus exclusively on the sectarian makeup and violent behaviors of these socio-political groupings, obscuring the youth cultures that they forged. Using unique sources to highlight the daily lives of the young men and women of Lebanon's youth politics, Dylan Baun traces the political and cultural history of a diverse set of youth-centric organizations from the 1920s to 1950s to reveal how these youth movements played significant roles in the making of the modern Middle East. Outlining how youth movements established a distinct type of politics and populism, Winning Lebanon reveals that these groups both encouraged the political socialization of different types of youth, and, through their attempts to 'win' Lebanon - physically and metaphorically - around the 1958 War, helped produce sectarian violence.
Download or read book Visions of Beirut written by Hatim El-Hibri and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-26 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Visions of Beirut Hatim El-Hibri explores how the creation and circulation of images have shaped the urban spaces and cultural imaginaries of Beirut. Drawing on fieldwork and texts ranging from maps, urban plans, and aerial photographs to live television and drone-camera footage, El-Hibri traces how the technologies and media infrastructure that visualize the city are used to consolidate or destabilize regimes of power. Throughout the twentieth century, colonial, economic, and military mapping projects helped produce and govern Beirut's spaces. In the 1990s, the imagery of its post-civil war downtown reconstruction cast Beirut as a site of financial investment in ways that obscured its ongoing crises. During and following the 2006 Israel/Hizbullah war, Hizbullah's use of live television broadcasts of fighting and protests along with its construction of a war memorial museum at a former secret military bunker demonstrate the tension between visualizing space and the practices of concealment. Outlining how Beirut's urban space and public life intertwine with images and infrastructure, El-Hibri interrogates how media embody and exacerbate the region's political fault lines.
Download or read book Beirut Imagining the City written by Ghenwa Hayek and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2014-10-29 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beirut is the cultural, commercial and economic hub of Lebanon. But to what extent has the city affected and shaped the formation and perceptions of Lebanese national identity? Ghenwa Hayek here explores how anxieties over the past, present and future of Beirut have been articulated through a sense of dislocation present in Lebanese writing since the 1960s. Drawing on theories of cultural studies, geography and history, the author uses an interdisciplinary framework to explore the role that spaces - from rural to urban - have played and continue to play in the defining, and re-defining, of national identity in the seventy years since the creation of the Lebanese nation state. This theoretical perspective coupled with a close reading of little-explored contemporary writings lead Hayek to question the predominant assumption that Lebanese novelists only became engaged in discourses about place identity and individual and social belonging with the start of the fifteen-year civil war and the destruction of Beirut's city centre. Instead, the book shows that particular geographical imaginaries have been mobilized to describe, question and debate Lebanese identity since the 1960s and that some go back even further into the late nineteenth century. This re-reading calls for a re-evaluation of some of the most predominant assumptions about Lebanon and the processes of Lebanese identity formation across the country's modern history. Examining a wide range of modern and contemporary literature, Hayek charts the rise to cultural prominence of the city of Beirut as a significant player in shaping perceptions of Lebanese culture and identity.
Download or read book Power Sharing in Lebanon written by Eduardo Wassim Aboultaif and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-01-15 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book studies the origins and evolution of power sharing in Lebanon. The author has established a relationship between mobilization, ethnurgy (ethnic identification), memory and trauma, and how they impact power sharing provisions. The book starts with the events in the 1820s, when communities began to politicize their identities, and which led to the first major outbreak of civil violence between the Druze and the Maronites. Consequently, these troubled four decades in Lebanon led to the introduction of various forms of power-sharing arrangements to establish peace. The political systems introduced in Lebanon are: the Kaim-Makamiya (dual sub-governorship), a quasi-federal arrangement; the Mutassarifiya, the prototype of a power-sharing system; the post-independence political system of Lebanon which the book refers to as semi-consociation, due to the concentration of executive powers in the Presidential office; and finally, the full consociation of the Taif Republic. In each of these phases, there was a peculiar interaction between the non-structural elements that had a direct impact on power sharing; this led at times to instability, and at other times it brought down the system, as in 1840–1860 and 1975. Power Sharing in Lebanon is the first academic work that emphasizes the influence of the non-structural elements that hinder power sharing. This volume is now a key resource for students and academics interested in Lebanese Politics and the Middle East.
Download or read book Architecture Power and Religion in Lebanon written by Ward Vloeberghs and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2015-11-24 with total page 477 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Architecture, Power and Religion in Lebanon, Ward Vloeberghs explores Rafiq Hariri’s patronage and his posthumous legacy to demonstrate how religious architecture becomes a site for power struggles in contemporary Beirut. By tracing the 150 year-long history of the Muhammad al-Amin Mosque – Lebanon’s principal Sunni mosque – and the subsequent development of the site as a commemoration venue, this account offers a unique illustration of how architecture, religion and power become discursively and visually entangled. Set in a multi-confessional society marked by social inequalities and political fragmentation, this interdisciplinary study analyses how architectural practice and urban reconfigurations reveal a nascent personality cult, communal mourning, and the consolidation of political territory in relation to constantly shifting circumstances.
Download or read book Ways of Seeking written by Emily Drumsta and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2024-02-20 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. In Ways of Seeking, Emily Drumsta traces the influence of detective fiction on the twentieth-century Arabic novel. Theorizing a “poetics of investigation,” she shows how these novels, far from staging awe-inspiring feats of logical deduction, mock the truth-seeking practices on which modern exercises of colonial and national power are often premised. Their narratives return to the archives of Arabic folklore, Islamic piety, and mysticism to explore less coercive ways of knowing, seeing, and seeking. Drumsta argues that scholars of the Middle East neglect the literary at their peril, overlooking key critiques of colonialism from the intellectuals who shaped and responded through fiction to the transformations of modernity. This book ultimately tells a different story about the novel’s place in the constellation of Arab modernism, modeling an innovative method of open-ended inquiry based on the literary texts themselves.
Download or read book Milieus of ReMemory written by Norman Saadi Nikro and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2019-01-15 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Milieus of ReMemory concentrates on how people in Lebanon situate and work on memories of violence and trauma, as well as exchanges of voice. Developing a critical phenomenology of social material practices, a relational notion of community and subjectivity outlines thematic discussions of intergenerational memory, gender, temporality, and transactions between personal and public memory. While emphasizing conduits and channels by which material and imaginary resources circulate as differential circuits of power and authority, the book focuses on how memory activism and memory projects constitute emergent milieus of social exchange and ethical responsibility to self and circumstance, to both publics and political cultures.
Download or read book Precarious Imaginaries of Beirut written by Judith Naeff and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-12-01 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates a shared experience of time and space in the post-civil-war city of Beirut: “the suspended now”. Based on the close analysis of a large corpus of cultural objects; including visual art, literature, architecture and cinema; the book argues that last decades have witnessed a gradual shift in understanding this temporality from being a transitional phase to a more durable experience of precariousness. The theoretically rich analyses take us on a journey through Beirut’s real and imagined geographies, from garbage dumps to real estate advertisements, and from subterranean spaces to martyr’s posters. For scholars of cultural analysis, urban studies, cultural geography and critical theory, the case of post-1990 Beirut offers a fascinating case of neoliberal urban renewal, which challenges existing theories. For scholars of Lebanon and Beirut, this study complements existing work on post-civil-war Lebanese cultural production rooted in trauma studies by its focus on the city’s continual exposure to violence.
Download or read book The Emerging Asian City written by Vinayak Bharne and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Asian cities create concomitant imagery - polarizations of poverty and wealth, blurry lines between formality and informality, and stark juxtapositions of ancient historic places with shimmering new skylines. With Asia's re-emergence on the global stage, there is an acute focus on its multifarious urban issues and identities: What are Asian cities going to become? Will they surpass the economic and environmental debacles of the West? This collection of twenty-four essays surveys the most dominant issues shaping the Asian urban landscape today. It offers scholarly reflections and positions on the forces shaping Asian cities, and the forces that they in turn are shaping.
Download or read book The Shi ites of Lebanon written by Rula Jurdi Abisaab and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2014-12-09 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The complex history of Lebanese Shi‘ites has traditionally been portrayed as rooted in religious and sectarian forces. The Abisaabs uncover a more nuanced account in which colonialism, the modern state, social class, and provincial politics profoundly shaped Shi‘i society. The authors trace the sociopolitical, economic, and intellectual transformation of the Shi‘ites of Lebanon from 1920 during the French colonial period until the late twentieth century. They shed light on the relationship of contemporary Islamic militancy with traditions of religious modernism and leftism in both Lebanon and Iraq. Analyzing the interaction between sacred and secular features of modern Shi‘ite society, the authors clearly follow the group’s turn toward religious revolution and away from secular activism. This book transforms our understanding of twentieth-century Lebanese history and demonstrates how the rise of Hizbullah was conditioned by Shi‘ites’ consistent marginalization and neglect by the Lebanese state.
Download or read book Conflict on Mount Lebanon written by Rabah Makram Rabah and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2020-08-18 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Druze and the Maronites, arguably the two founding communities of modern Lebanon, have the reputation of being primordial enemies. Makram Rabah attempts to gauge the impact of collective memory on determining the course and the nature of the conflict between these communities in Mount Lebanon. He takes as his focus 'the War of the Mountain' in 1982, reconstructing the events of this war through the framework of collective remembrance and oral history.He challenges the idea that these group identities were constructed by their respective centres of power within the Maronite and Druze community, providing an alternative to the prevailing meta-narrative. Telling the stories of the many people who took part in these events, or who simply suffered as a consequence, helps to expose the intrinsic motives which led to this conflict and makes a valuable contribution to the field of Lebanese historical scholarship.
Download or read book The Fragmenting Force of Memory written by Norman Saadi Nikro and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2012-04-25 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study is about experimental forms of cultural production that situate and work through personal experiences of the civil war in Lebanon. It addresses selected works of literature, autobiography and memoir by Jean Said Makdisi, Rashid al-Daif, Elias Khoury and Mai Ghoussoub, and the civil war trilogy of documentary films by Mohamed Soueid. From a phenomenological hermeneutic perspective, the book is concerned with how they give accounts of themselves as remnants, leftovers and undigested remains of the civil war, and of related trajectories of ideological attachment to symbolic mandates. Constrained to reposition their sense of self from an agent of history to a casualty of history, their acutely personal works of cultural production initiate an unraveling of both self and circumstance through the fragmenting force of memory. Drawing on a broad range of phenomenological critical theory (within the research fields of postcolonial, memory, psychoanalytic, gender and literary studies) attuned to subjectivity as a field of social production and exchange, emphasis is given to how the writers and filmmaker employ a non-presentist, anachronic or paratactic register of memory to excavate both a historical understanding of self and related modalities of social viability. This concerns how the symptomatic style of their work embodies, and creatively and critically situates, a refusal to package and normailze any idealized account of the war, related assemblages of temporal succession, or a presentation of self as discrete and omniscient.
Download or read book The Social Life of Memory written by Norman Saadi Nikro and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-11-19 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited volume addresses memory practices among youth, families, cultural workers, activists, and engaged citizens in Lebanon and Morocco. In making a claim for ‘the social life of memory,’ the introduction discusses a particular research field of memory studies, elaborating an approach to memory in terms of social production and engagement. The Arab Spring is evoked to draw attention to new rifts within and between history and remembrance in the regions of North Africa and the Middle East. As authoritarian forms of governance are challenged, official panoramic narratives are confronted with a multiplicity of memories of violent pasts. The eight chapters trace personal and public inventories of violence, trauma, and testimony, addressing memory in cinema, in newspapers and periodicals, as an experience of public environments, through transnational and diasporic mediums, and amongst younger generations.
