Tamaššā: To Walk for Pleasure in an Altered (or Othered) Beirut

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Acknowledgments

Some of this material was encouraged by prior research completed under the direction of Dr. Dorian Wiszniewski, Senior Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, and while doing field research as a CAMES research affiliate at the American University of Beirut. Lastly, I’d like to thank the two anonymous reviewers whose suggestions helped improve and clarify this micro-narrative, and especially Carolina Dayer for her insightful comments.

Notes

Notes

1. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1961), 51.

2. All my talks with my seventy-eight-year-old neighbor were informal and tended to take on a life of their own. Therefore, there were not specific questions but more of a social conversation. For the purposes of this investigation, I changed her name to the “Neighbor” to respect her privacy.

3. The brother was referring to the old rent laws that were in much debate and in danger of changing, making it so he would not be able to afford their apartment.

4. In 1991, through Hariri Foundation funding, Gabriele Basilico and five other photographers were invited to visit Beirut to document the city center after twenty years of war.

5. The rest of the group was formed by important figures, such as Robert Frank, Josef Koudelka, Raymond Depardon, René Burri, and Lebanese photographer Fouad Elkoury.

6. Evelyn Accad, Sexuality and War: Literary Masks of the Middle East (New York: New York University Press, 1990), 2–5.

7. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 194.

8. For a larger conversation regarding a moment of resistance and metaspaces, see Simon Critchley, Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (London: Verso, 2007).

9. Craig Lakin, “Remaking Beirut: Contesting Memory, Space, and the Urban Imaginary of Lebanese Youth,” trans. Christine Irizarry, City & Community 9, no. 4 (December 2010): 435.

10. Jacques Derrida, On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 20.

11. Kahlil Gibran, Sand and Foam: A Book of Aphorisms (New York: Knopf, 1926), 8.

12. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 212–14.

13. Accad, Sexuality and War, 2.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Elizabeth Martin-Malikian

Elizabeth Martin-Malikian is an associate professor and chair of thesis for the Department of Architecture at Kennesaw State University. Her research explores the following question: What is an architecture of alterity? By examining an oft-hidden issue concerning an overlapping aspect of the oneness of the Other and the object over the philosophical explanatory power of alterity, Martin-Malikian is currently focusing on the hybridity of the Levant. Martin-Malikian holds a Bachelor of Architecture degree from Tulane University and a Master of Architecture degree from SCI-Arc.