The Production of Space, Time, and Subjectivity in Lebanese Civil War Culture
Panel 236, 2018 Annual Meeting
On Sunday, November 18 at 11:00 am
Panel Description
The Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) has been a site of inquiry into the causes and ramifications of sectarian conflict within a postcolonial state for history, anthropology, sociology, and other studies. Resultantly, Lebanese history can be bound up in a teleological narrative of sectarian violence that excludes different ways of understanding the self and nation spatially, temporally, and subjectively. Our panel looks towards recent works that do not assume the a priori framing of sectarianism within Lebanese history and look towards other configurations of the nation and its peoples (Hashemi and Postol, 2017; Salloukh, 2015; Weiss, 2010). Building upon these studies, we aim to excavate how cultural productions reflect and produce lifeworlds modulated by violence and its aftermaths. We analyze how cultural productions not only represent the encounter with violence but also provide alternative modelings of the self, society, and the nation. The panel discusses works from the earliest stages of the Lebanese Civil War up until the 2010s with a particular focus of accounting for the multivalent nature of the examined cultural productions and positionalities of their creators and audiences.
Collectively, the papers in this panel use the Lebanese Civil War to investigate cultural productions in wartime. Using films, novels, and music, we focus on contextualizing emerging forms of representation and their contingencies with shifting power dynamics and violence. By using cultural productions, it becomes possible to situate the ramifications of violence in wartime and postwar periods as an encounter that reverberates and continuously reconfigures senses of space, time, and identity. More specifically, the first paper examines representations of violence and identity in songs written by militant leftist songwriters with changing military, political, and cultural power dynamics during the civil war years and into the post-war 1990s. The second paper analyzes Maroun Baghdadi's 1991 Kharij al-Hayat [Out of Life] and Samir Habchi's 1992 al-I'sar [The Tornado] to interrogate the aftermaths of the Lebanese Civil War. In particular, it examines the war's temporalization and contextualization, its violence, and the pessimism in cultural and intellectual productions of the left. Finally, the third paper investigates how ordinary social subjects negotiate and experience spaces of violence and exclusion by exploring their everyday socio-spatial practices as represented in civil war and post-war Lebanese literature. These papers taken together seek to explore the spatial, temporal, and subjective capacities of culture from and after the Lebanese Civil War.
Disciplines
History
Literature
Media Arts
Participants
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Mr. Ziad Dallal
-- Discussant
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Mr. Jeremy Randall
-- Presenter
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Nour MJ Hodeib
-- Organizer, Presenter
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Farah Aridi
-- Presenter
Presentations
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Nour MJ Hodeib
Violence in the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) is often understood as the main determinant of how people remember the war and how social and cultural formations are shaped in Lebanon today. Though most accounts of this violence often emphasize its sectarian-political dimension, such views have been contested in recent scholarship (Salloukh, 2015; Traboulsi, 2017). My paper builds upon such studies by examining the conceptualization and representations of violence in songs associated with leftist political discourse. Songs by artists then-affiliated with the leftist Lebanese National Movement such as Ziad Rahbani, Khaled Habre, and Marcel Khalife are often excluded from accounts of Lebanon’s cultural history because of their militancy and association with violent wartime memories (Basha, 2015). My paper highlights songs produced by those artists, examining their violent components and contextualizing the rationale that informed them. Contesting a unidimensional understanding of violence, I argue that its meaning was continually being negotiated.
In the songs, violence appears in an often contradictory manner. One is of a transformative nature, as a process of creating a new identity, while the other is a means for resisting colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism. For example, Khaled Habre’s song “Oghniyat al-Shayyah” and Ziad’s “al-Sha’b al-Maskin” both propose violence as means for liberation. At times, however, violence is also depicted as meaningless, senseless, and disruptive to the lives of ordinary people, like in Habre’s “Mosh Hayyin” or Ziad’s “Ya Noor ‘Inayya.” Nonetheless, the fractious military and political conditions in Lebanon’s civil war inevitably impacted the ways people perceived themselves and their surroundings. The leftist camp in alliance with the PLO initially spearheaded the armed insurgency in West Beirut. In later years, the left suffered multiple defeats due to the 1977 Syrian intervention, the 1982 Israeli invasion, and the rise of sectarian agents on the local and regional scene. The positions held by leftist intellectuals towards the war and violence were not immune to these changing contexts. This mutability is most apparent in the shift from celebrating violent “revolutionary” action during the 1970s towards disenchantment and retreat - and sometimes repudiation- during the late 1980s and the post-war period. My paper aims to contextualize the multifaceted notions of violence in the songs within contingent military and political conditions that did not always match the expectations of “committed” leftist artists.
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Mr. Jeremy Randall
In the early stages of the Lebanese Civil War, the Lebanese left understood the unfolding violence as a necessary step for ending the structural inequalities of the state and bringing about a just society. The revolutionary euphoria did not last as interventions by Syria and Israel against the left and its allies made the war seem interminable. As the Lebanese Civil War dragged on, much of the left rejected the revolutionary capacities of violence and embraced a defeatist position towards what the war was and what its aftermaths would be. Even though some prominent figures such as leftist philosopher Madhi ‘Amil pushed back against this pessimism, despondency towards revolution predominated. The destructiveness of the war and the restoration of the old order appeared to foreclose the possibility of a revolutionary present and future. Lebanon, following the conflict, did not undergo a period of self-examination, reflection, and contextualization of the war. Instead, the state evaded examining the socioeconomic contingencies undergirding the war and pushed towards a neoliberal future. Cinema became a means to explore the war’s aftermaths and despair brought about by destructive violence and the failed revolutionary project.
My paper explores how two films grapple with the aftermaths of the war and attempt to contextualize the violence that destroyed the sense of futurity and revolutionary politics. French-trained Maroun Baghdadi’s 1991 Kharaj al-Hayat [Out of Life] presents a fictionalized account of a French kidnapping victim. The narrative from the Frenchman’s point of view refracts the war’s inanity into fragments that show how violence pushes Lebanese individuals into desperate circumstances. Throughout this film, the Frenchman encounters individuals ravaged by the war and people grappling with their lost hopes. Soviet-trained Samir Habchi’s 1992 al-Is‘ar [The Tornado] tells the story of a young man returning from a study abroad who was subsumed by the war’s banal violence. The expatriate’s pessimistic view of the war lay in the manner in which war destroyed the potentiality of a better future. Both films examine the role of militias and the cyclic violence that renders the war pointless. Both films take place during the war and present the disjointed time experienced in postwar Lebanese society and civil society’s ongoing attempts to recapture a sense of progressive time.
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Farah Aridi
This paper will investigate the everyday social and spatial practices of an ordinary character, Jacob, the protagonist of The Angel of History, the latest novel by the Lebanese-American, Rabih Alameddine. Through this study, I attempt to understand how Jacob negotiates and experiences the spaces he inhabits in Cairo, Beirut, Stockholm, and San Francisco, all of which are portrayed as spaces of violence and exclusion. In these spaces, Jacob struggles to make himself invisible wherever he goes as his visibility is never to his advantage. In addition to having to deal with haunting memories of war, Jacob is othered for being gay, a refugee, and an Arab – in addition to having to deal with memories and experiences of war and civil conflict. As a result, Jacob, a poet, cannot write. In a final act of defiance, and after being refused entry to a psychiatric ward, Jacob starts writing on all the spaces that have excluded him, starting with him own body.
This act of defiance and transgression is a reclamation of space denied, an agentive action towards claiming his right to the city, and against a violent space that only includes him in the social space he inhabits as the excluded. My paper will explore how Jacob’s everyday life as “othered” is experienced through his relationship to and position in the spaces around him. I will then investigate his socio-spatial transgressive practice to show the importance of studying spaces of conflict and violence which carry within them their very negation: the possibility of appropriation and social transformation, the potential of challenging the dominant established order through politicised action. I will be distinguishing between the terms space and place using Yi-Fu Tuan and Tim Cresswell. Michel Foucault will be employed to expound on the relationship between power and space, while the power of space will be investigated through the works of Giorgio Agamben and Henri Lefebvre.
