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Precarious Imaginaries of Beirut

A City's Suspended Now

  • Book
  • © 2018

Overview

Authors:
  1. Judith Naeff

    1. Leiden Institute for Area Studies, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

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  • Uniquely straddles visual culture studies, cultural geography, memory studies, literary studies, Middle Eastern studies and urban studies
  • Challenges the more common approach of trauma studies to understand cultural representations of Beirut
  • Advances an original concept of a particular temporality, “the suspended now” to make sense of how the urban environment is experienced and imagined

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Table of contents (6 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xiv
    Download chapter PDF

  2. Introduction

    • Judith Naeff
    Pages 1-34

  3. Beirut’s Suspended Now

    • Judith Naeff
    Pages 35-83

  4. The Disposable City

    • Judith Naeff
    Pages 85-137

  5. Surface City

    • Judith Naeff
    Pages 139-190

  6. Excavation and Mourning

    • Judith Naeff
    Pages 191-238

  7. Conclusion: Ethics in the Precarious City—The Case of YouStink

    • Judith Naeff
    Pages 239-249

  8. Back Matter

    Pages 251-254
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Keywords

About this book

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.

Reviews

“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)


Authors and Affiliations

  • Leiden Institute for Area Studies, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

    Judith Naeff

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.

Bibliographic Information

  • Book Title: Precarious Imaginaries of Beirut

  • Book Subtitle: A City's Suspended Now

  • Authors: Judith Naeff

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65933-6

  • Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham

  • eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)

  • Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

  • Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-65932-9Published: 19 December 2017

  • Softcover ISBN: 978-3-319-88134-8Published: 04 September 2018

  • eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-65933-6Published: 01 December 2017

  • Edition Number: 1

  • Number of Pages: XIV, 254

  • Number of Illustrations: 1 b/w illustrations, 20 illustrations in colour

  • Topics: Middle Eastern Culture, Fine Arts, Conflict Studies

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