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Book Lebanon reborn

    Book Details:
  • Author : United States. Congress. House. Committee on International Relations
  • Publisher :
  • Release : 2006
  • ISBN :
  • Pages : 72 pages

Download or read book Lebanon reborn written by United States. Congress. House. Committee on International Relations and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 72 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book Beirut  Imagining the City

    Book Details:
  • Author : Ghenwa Hayek
  • Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
  • Release : 2014-10-29
  • ISBN : 0857725327
  • Pages : 288 pages

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 288 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.

Book Heart of Beirut

Download or read book Heart of Beirut written by Samir Khalaf and published by Saqi. This book was released on 2013-10-04 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Bourj in central Beirut is one of the world's oldest and most vibrant public squares. Named after the mediaeval lookout tower that once soared above the city's imposing ramparts, the square has also been known as Place des Canons (after a Russian artillery build-up in 1773) and Martyrs' Square (after the Ottoman execution of nationalists in 1916). As an open museum of civilizations, it resonates with influences from ancient Phoenician to colonial, post-colonial and, as of late, postmodern elements. Over the centuries it has come to embody pluralism and tolerance. During the Lebanese civil war (1975-90), this ebullient entertainment district, transport hub and melting-pot of cultures was ruptured by the notorious Green Line, which split the city into belligerent warring factions. Fractious infighting and punishing Israeli air raids compounded the damage, turning the Bourj into a no-man's-land. In the wake of former Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri's assassination (14 February 2005), the Bourj witnessed extraordinary scenes of popular, multi-faith and cross-generational protest. Once again, Samir Khalaf argues, the heart of Beirut was poised to re-invent itself as an open space in which diverse groups can celebrate their differences without indifference to the other. By revisiting earlier episodes in the Bourj's numerous transformations of its collective identity, Khalaf explores prospects for neutralizing the disheartening symptoms of reawakened religiosity and commodified consumerism. 'A timely and informative study on Beirut's pre-eminent patch of public space.' The Daily Star 'Khalaf has arguably contributed more fine studies on the history and sociology of modern Lebanon than has any other scholar alive.' Foreign Affairs 'A spirited guide to Beirut's (re)development, lively in style, rich in illustration and perceptive in analysis.' Frederick Anscombe, Birkbeck College, University of London

Book Post War Anglophone Lebanese Fiction

Download or read book Post War Anglophone Lebanese Fiction written by Syrine Hout and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2012-09-30 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the phenomenon of the post-civil war Anglophone Lebanese fictional narrative. The texts chosen for study have been produced in, and are substantially about, life in exile. They therefore deal not only with the brutal civil strife in Lebanon (1975-1990) but with one of its crucial and long-standing by-products: expatriation. Syrine Hout shows how these texts characterise a distinctly new literary and cultural trend and have founded an Anglophone Lebanese diasporic literature.The authors discussed in the book are Rabih Alameddine, Tony Hanania, Rawi Hage, Nada Awar Jarra, Patricia Sarrafian Ward and Nathalie Ab-Ezzi. In her exploration of their writings Hout teases out the different meanings and reformulations of home, be it Lebanon as a nation, a house, a host country, an irretrievable pre-war childhood, a state of in-between dwelling, a portable state of mind, and/or a utopian ideal.

Book Lebanese Cinema

    Book Details:
  • Author : Lina Khatib
  • Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
  • Release : 2008-08-30
  • ISBN : 0857714287
  • Pages : 241 pages

Download or read book Lebanese Cinema written by Lina Khatib and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2008-08-30 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modern Lebanese cinema can best be explored in the context of the Civil War, in part because almost all the Lebanese films made since its outset in 1975 have been about this war. Lina Khatib takes 1975 Beirut as her starting point, and takes us right through to today for this, the first major book on Lebanese cinema and its links with politics and national identity.She examines how Lebanon is imagined in such films as Jocelyn Saab's "Once Upon a Time, Beirut", Ghassan Salhab's "Terra Incognita", and Ziad Doueiri's "West Beirut". In so doing, she re-examines the importance of cinema to the national imagination. Also, and using interviews with the current generation of Lebanese filmmakers, she uncovers how in the Lebanese context cinema can both construct and communicate a national identity and thereby opens up new perspectives on the socio-political role of cinema in the Arab world.

Book Precarious Imaginaries of Beirut

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.

Book Modernism and the Middle East

Download or read book Modernism and the Middle East written by Sandy Isenstadt and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2011-03-01 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This provocative collection of essays is the first book-length treatment of the development of modern architecture in the Middle East. Ranging from Jerusalem at the turn of the twentieth century to Libya under Italian colonial rule, postwar Turkey, and on to present-day Iraq, the essays cohere around the historical encounter between the politics of nation-building and architectural modernism's new materials, methods, and motives. Architecture, as physical infrastructure and as symbolic expression, provides an exceptional window onto the powerful forces that shaped the modern Middle East and that continue to dominate it today. Experts in this volume demonstrate the political dimensions of both creating the built environment and, subsequently, inhabiting it. In revealing the tensions between achieving both international relevance and regional meaning, Modernism in the Middle East affords a dynamic view of the ongoing confrontations of deep traditions with rapid modernization. Political and cultural historians, as well as architects and urban planners, will find fresh material here on a range of diverse practices.

Book Citizen Hariri

    Book Details:
  • Author : Hannes Baumann
  • Publisher : Oxford University Press
  • Release : 2017-06-01
  • ISBN : 0190862629
  • Pages : 266 pages

Download or read book Citizen Hariri written by Hannes Baumann and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-06-01 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rafiq Hariri was Lebanon's Silvio Berlusconi: a 'self-made' billionaire who became prime minister and shaped postwar reconstruction. His assassination in February 2005 almost tipped the country into civil strife. Yet Hariri was neither a militia leader nor from a traditional political family. How did this outsider rise to wield such immense political and economic power? Citizen Hariri shows how the billionaire converted his wealth and close ties to the Saudi monarchy into political power. Hariri is used as a prism to examine how changes in global neoliberalism reshaped Lebanese politics. He initiated urban megaprojects and inflated the banking sector. And having grown rich as a contractor in the Gulf, he turned Lebanon into an outlet for Gulf capital. The concentration of wealth and the restructuring of the postwar Lebanese state were comparable to the effects of neoliberalism elsewhere. But at the same time, Hariri was a deeply Lebanese figure. He had to fend against militia leaders and a hostile Syrian regime. The billionaire outsider eventually came to behave like a traditional Lebanese political patron. Hannes Baumann assesses not only the personal legacy of the man dubbed 'Mr Lebanon' but charts the wider social and economic transformations his rise represented.

Book Art and the City

    Book Details:
  • Author : Jason Luger
  • Publisher : Taylor & Francis
  • Release : 2017-05-18
  • ISBN : 1315303027
  • Pages : 267 pages

Download or read book Art and the City written by Jason Luger and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-05-18 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a global perspective on the political agency of arts in place. International and leading scholars and artists themselves present critical theory and practice of contemporary art as a politicised force. This book extends thinking on contemporary arts practices in the urban and political context of protest and social resilience and offers the prism of a ‘critical artscape’ in which to view the urgent interaction of arts and the urban politic.

Book The Emerging Asian City

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.

Book Cultural Resource Management in Contemporary Society

Download or read book Cultural Resource Management in Contemporary Society written by Alf Hatton and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-05-20 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This innovative collection of essays from an international range of contributors describes various means of preserving, protecting and presenting vital cultural resources within the context of economic development, competing claims of "ownership" of particular cultural resources, modern uses of structures and space, and other aspects of late twentieth-century life.

Book Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation

Download or read book Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation written by Ian Stevenson and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 1980 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cases of responsive xenoglossy thus add to the evidence concerning the survival of human personality after death.

Book Beirut

    Book Details:
  • Author : Samir Kassir
  • Publisher : Univ of California Press
  • Release : 2010
  • ISBN : 0520271262
  • Pages : 654 pages

Download or read book Beirut written by Samir Kassir and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 654 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beirut is a tour de force that takes the reader from the ancient to the modern world, offering a dazzling panorama of the city's Seleucid, Roman, Arab, Ottoman, and French incarnations. Kassir vividly describes Beirut's spectacular growth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, concentrating on its emergence after the Second World War as a cosmopolitan capital until its near destruction during the devastating Lebanese civil war of 1975-1990. --from publisher description.

Book Standing by the Ruins

Download or read book Standing by the Ruins written by Ken Seigneurie and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2011-10-03 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the mid-1970s, Lebanon has been at the center of the worldwide rise in sectarian extremism. Its cultural output has both mediated and resisted this rise. Standing by the Ruins reviews the role of culture in supporting sectarianism, yet argues for the emergence of a distinctive aesthetic of resistance to it. Focusing on contemporary Lebanese fiction, film, and popular culture, this book shows how artists reappropriated the twin legacies of commitment literature and the ancient topos of “standing by the ruins” to form a new “elegiac humanism” during the tumultuous period of 1975 to 2005. It redirects attention to the critical role of culture in conditioning attitudes throughout society and is therefore relevant to other societies facing sectarian extremism. Standing by the Ruins is also a strong intervention in the burgeoning field of World Literature. Elaborating on the great Arabist Hilary Kilpatrick’s crucial insight that ancient Arabic forms and topoi filter into modern literature, the author details how the “standing by the ruins” topos—and the structure of feeling it conditions—has migrated over time. Modern Arabic novels, feature films, and popular culture, far from being simply cultural imports, are hybrid forms deployed to respond to the challenges of contemporary Arab society. As such, they can take their place within a World Literature paradigm: they are cultural products that travel and intervene in the world.

Book The City in the Islamic World  2 vols

Download or read book The City in the Islamic World 2 vols written by Salma Khadra Jayyusi and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2008-06-30 with total page 1520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The purpose of this book is to draw attention to the sites of life, politics and culture where current and past generations of the Islamic world have made their mark. Unlike many previous volumes dealing with the city in the Islamic world, this one has been expanded not only to include snapshots of historical fabric, but also to deal with the transformation of this fabric into modern and contemporary urban entities. Salma Khadra Jayyusi was awarded Cultural Personality of the Year by the Sheikh Zayed Book Award for her profound contribution to Arabic literature and culture in 2020. The paperback edition of The City in the Islamic World was published to celebrate the occasion.

Book 306090 09  Regarding Public Space

Download or read book 306090 09 Regarding Public Space written by Design Bureau for Public Space and published by Princeton Architectural Press. This book was released on 2005-12 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The journal 306090 continues to garner acclaim throughout the architecture and design world as an essential forum for issues of architectural practice and theory. Its role as a voice for young architects, designers, and academics is reinforced by its knack for approaching broad topics from unique perspectives and synthesizing multiple points of view. 306090 09: Regarding Public Space explores the conception, production, and operation of contemporary public space in the city from the vantage of its design, development, construction, and use. Rather than dwell on what public space is, 306090's guest editors identify it as the material manifestation of intersecting forces (economics, program, sustainable land-use) whose formation involves a complex set of manipulations in both physical space and managerial aptitude. The articles in this volume, by contributors from cities across the globe, test the ways in which we articulate the built environment to make public space, interrogating it through examples from practice and theoretical developments alike.