Precarious Imaginaries of Beirut: A City's Suspended Now

by Judith Naeff

Overview

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 thecity’s continual exposure to violence.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783319659329
Publisher:	Springer International Publishing
Publication date:	12/19/2017
Edition description:	1st ed. 2018
Pages:	254
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x (d)

About the Author

Judith Naeff is Assistant Professor in Cultures of the Middle East at Leiden University, Netherlands. With a background in Arabic Studies and Literary Studies, she completed her PhD at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis in 2016.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction.- ​2. Beirut’s Suspended Now.- 3. The Disposable City.- 4. Surface City.- 5. Excavation and Mourning Conclusion: Ethics in the Precarious City (The Case of You Stink).- 6. Conclusion.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“A remarkable exploration of urban precarity and creativity through the fraught relationship between the past and the present. Naeff draws the portrait of a city constantly struggling to come to terms with itself. Though it offers a fascinating vignette of Beirut, this book is about much more than one particular city. Scholars and students of urban culture, violence and memory, identity and temporality, and the Middle East, will find this book informative.” (Marwan M. Kraidy, Annenberg School for Communication, USA, and author of The Naked Blogger of Cairo)

"Judith Naeff has written a highly original and compelling study of the ‘suspended now’ of Beirut. While examining the roots of post-civil war trauma, she takes her project well beyond this to address the implications neoliberalism has had and is having on both the urban space and as it manifests in the precariousness subjecthood of the urban participant. Using deftly applied theoretical approaches, she analyses fascinating case studies ranging from debris and waste to mirrors and martyrs.” (Claire Launchbury, Independent Scholar, UK)