Beirut, Imagining the City

Hayek, Ghenwa

doi:10.5040/9780755608836

Cited by 9 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…In this section, I outline some of the major critical responses to Hariri’s endeavours in order to reveal the sense of urgency that triggered cultural activists to produce work about the civil war. Much of this criticism stemmed from Solidere’s ‘blatant attempts to rewrite the urban history of Beirut’ (Hayek, 2015: 24) and for its economically driven policies that marginalized large swathes of the population. Finally, I analyse Terra Incognita and A Perfect Day in order to demonstrate the extent to which they provide a nuanced critique of postwar reality by mediating haunting as a pervasive structure of feeling in postwar Beirut and for evoking a sense of disempowerment, which stems from unjust modes of governance that are primarily invested in accumulating wealth for the ruling elite…”

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confidence: 99%

Haunting and the neoliberal encounter inTerra IncognitaandA Perfect Day

Tarraf

2017

Cultural Dynamics

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This article analyses two post–civil war Lebanese films, Ghassan Salhab’s Terra Incognita and Khalil Joreige and Joana Hadjithomas’ A Perfect Day, to examine how the conditions and valences of a particular sociocultural moment register affectively and mobilize the investments that inform memory making in the Lebanese context. In particular, I study these works as embodiments of an emerging structure of feeling specific to post–civil war Beirut, in which the haunting remnants of an unresolved violent past intersect with the neoliberal imperatives to propel Lebanon into a global market. In this sense, I build upon an exclusive concern with ‘pastness’, which often dominates discussions about post-conflict and post-colonial societies, in order to consider how an unfinished traumatic past intersects with more contemporary oppressions and the affective dimension of these intersections. Through a series of visual motifs and audio techniques, Terra Incognita and A Perfect Day track the ways that forces from the past encounter a wholesale embrace of neoliberalism and commercialism to create a kind of affective impasse that plays out either in depressed apathy or in excessive indulgence.

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confidence: 99%