How does a generation without personal memory begin to grapple with its urban past in a nation that has silenced its memories? Moreover, how are symbolic sites of memory recovered and represented by such a generation? Much recent scholarship on post-war Lebanon has studied the memory culture of the decades following the declared end of civil war in 1990. This scholarship deals with the implications of Lebanon's 'amnesiac' political culture on the social and political landscape. In the meantime, Lebanon-and especially Beirut's-urban landscape has been altered beyond recognition by post-war reconstruction, mostly by private real estate holding companies, the most notorious of which is Solidere. In the early 2000s, as Solidere's activity picked up speed, a slew of historical novels about Lebanon and especially Beirut was published in both Arabic and French. In this article, I will focus exclusively on the strategies of urban commemoration in Rabīʿ Jābir's trilogy. I argue that the genre of historical fiction is used in these novels to re-create the downtown life of Beirut in and around Martyrs' Square from the 19th and early 20th century, a commemoration of a cityscape and an urban lifestyle that its author recreates using the tools of the archive (documents, bibliographies, etc.). This post-memorial fiction-here, I use Marianne Hirsch's definition of postmemory as "second-generation memories of cultural and collective traumas and experience" (22)-attempts to recover Beirut's repressed Ottoman urban history, and to re-write Solidere's narrative of the city center. By intertwining downtown Beirut's past with its present, in a clever back-and-forth palimpsestic act that superimposes the historical city upon the present city-site of capitalist consumption-Jābir's novels map out the old upon the new, and thus refuses the erasure of the ancient city by its newest urbanists. In Jābir's novels, a new, contestatory commemorative narrative of Beirut's history and-more significantly, its present-emerges.

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This article argues that in reading comparatively the Arabic and English versions of Hanan al-Shaykh's 1980 H  ikāyat Zahra, a pattern of omitting race and racial language emerges in the English version, published in 1986. I use a close reading of the translation's selective appropriation of the original's racial and political language to argue for a more intersectional approach to Arabic women's writing, even as I acknowledge the structural and institutional contexts and constraints under which they operate and circulate in the global market of "world literature." First published in 1980, Hanan al-Shaykh's H  ikāyat Zahra is a novel that has transcended its Arabic origins and established itself as a world literary text, 1 in the Damroschian sense of a work that has had an "effective life within a literary system beyond that of its original culture." 2 The novel tells the story of a troubled young Lebanese woman named Zahra in the early years of Lebanon's civil war. It has been critically acclaimed and hailed as an indictment of Lebanese (and Arab) patriarchal culture, as well as a text that lays bare the horrors of violence, war, and trauma. 3 The novel is divided into two distinct parts; its Arabic version names them "part one" and "part 2," with numbered, untitled chapters in the first part, and one continuous chapter in the second. 4 The first part of the novel is taken up by Zahra's life in an unnamed country in sub-Saharan Africa in which she seeks refuge from her life in Lebanon by traveling to visit her uncle, who is in political exile. While there, she meets and marries a young man from southern Lebanon. This part of the novel has three distinct first-person voices: Zahra's, her uncle Hashem's, and her husband Majed's. The second part of the novel recounts Zahra's return to Beirut upon the breakup of her marriage, and her affair with and ultimate death at the hands of a neighborhood sniper who murders her after she has revealed her pregnancy to him. Al-Shaykh's novel has been a commercial and critical success since its publication. In Arabic, it has gone into several print runs; the most recent edition in 2009 is its fifth. Like much of Hanan al-Shaykh's other writing, Zahra is a text that has also circulated easily in the global literary sphere. 5 The novel has been translated into many languages,

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