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Public Feeling and Perpetual Crisis in Lebanon
Abstract by Dr. Zeina Tarraf On Session XII-27  (Traversing the World)

On Sunday, November 5 at 11:00 am

2023 Annual Meeting

Abstract
This presentation compares the different expressions and formations of collective feeling during and in the aftermath of the 2019 October uprisings in Lebanon in order to explore what public modes of belonging become prominent at different moments of crisis in Lebanon and how the affective public of the nation is reconfigured and renegotiated across these historical moments. While the uprisings were initially triggered by a grossly unjust tax law, the monumental nature and stubborn endurance of the movement reflected the crossing of an affective threshold that burst open the doors to a radically new felt reality and historical present in Lebanon. The eruption of what many called the ‘October Revolution’ reflected an affective breaking point with the decades of corrupt, kleptocratic political rule, and the series of crises that have gripped Lebanon since the abrupt end of its fifteen-year civil war. This paper, which is part of a larger project that examines how affective and temporal regimes are imbricated in the dynamics of perpetual crisis in Lebanon, is invested in exploring how processes of mediation are implicated in collective affect, and how collective affect becomes entangled with systems of power. To this end, I examine a range of viral figures and practices that animated the uprisings and that circulated during the subsequent economic crisis to explore the relationship between visceral (or embodied) and mediated forms of collective affect and the kinds of politics they enable. From the iconicity of the “kick queen” photograph to the videos of mothers protesting for unity, to the viral images/videos of gas and bakery queues, these examples offer a rich site to compare how processes of mediation are reciprocally implicated in the production and circulation of public feeling.
Discipline
Media Arts
Geographic Area
Lebanon
Sub Area
None