Sonallah Ibrahim’s 1988 novel, Beirut, Beirut, presents a paradigmatic case of failed cultural translation challenging the emergent consensus among the standard bearers of “world literature”: Casanova, Damrosch, Moretti and even late comers such as the Warwick Research Collective (WREC), who resurrect a form of marxist determinism as universality. Upon its publication in English translation (2015), reviews uniformly panned Beirut, Beirut for its clumsy narrative structure, which, so we are told, sacrifices the dramatic drive of plot to journalistic didacticism and dull historical facts. Yet, for readers aware of literary and cultural networks of reference, Beirut, Beirut sparks laughter and bitter appreciation with its veiled references to Egyptian film noir (Bab el hadid 1958), U.S. hardboiled fiction (Chandler/Hammett/Himes), and the French nouveau roman. At issue, it seems, is the novel’s extreme practice of ekphrasis/wasf or verbal sketch of a silent object, here, the scene-by-scene description of an epic documentary of the Palestinian revolution that is the only job an itinerant and cynical Egyptian journalist and would-be novelist can find in the Beirut of 1980. Reading only for the colorful depiction of a known reality, the anglophone reviews intuitively assert what the gatekeepers of world literature “know”: novels of the global south must offer snapshots of tragic realities. Against the grain of this market sensibility, Ibrahim crafts a literary text that plays upon the affective knowledge of a reader engaged in and by the text. This, in turn, requires a theory of the affective relation to the extensive ekphrasis that envelops the narrator and reader alike. Beirut, Beirut demands a theory of reading as an engagement with: nationalist (a)morality; genre literature; and the militant politics of the image. Unlike the social realism of his longer works, Beirut, Beirut uses ekphrasis to reflect on our ruined postcolonial fate where political morality travels along the axis of description created by a character so empty he fails to “comment” at all: allegory of the Arab subject of biopolitics whether citizen, exile or refugee? Stasis as civil war (Loraux) finds its contemporary expression not in the events narrated but in static description drained even of the power of lament. Ibrahim’s novel enacts the call for aesthetic education