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ABSTRACT
In this article, I explore how national belonging in Lebanon is (re)negotiated in the aftermath of a protracted civil war. More particularly, I investigate the nostalgic underpinnings of Lebanese popular culture, mainly Ziad Doueiry’s hit film, West Beyrouth and the revered singer, Fairouz, to examine what their popularity and deep resonance within Lebanese society reveal about the collective, affective negotiations of living with loss in the Lebanese context. I situate these works within a larger discourse on nostalgia in postwar Lebanon to complicate earlier assertions about nostalgia as an uncritical and insidious affective mode operating largely in service of unjust power relations. While I do not dismiss these earlier theorizations, I argue that an attention to the consumption and circulation of Lebanese popular culture reveals how nostalgia is not only fundamental to the way power operates as a top-down phenomenon, but it is simultaneously embedded within a more diffuse network of narratives and discourses that shape national publics and that unfold as affective negotiations of loss.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes on contributor
Zeina Tarraf is an assistant professor of media studies at the American University of Beirut where she teaches courses on war and media, Arab media and society, and visual culture. Her current research considers the affective dimensions of mediated nationalisms in the Lebanese context.
Notes
1 For more on the elitist dimensions of nostalgia in the Lebanese context, see Anja Peleikis (Citation2006) and Abou Ghaida and Al Zougbi (Citation2005).
2 Lebanon has undergone a series of crises since the end of its civil war that have fundamentally reshaped ordinary life in the country. Most significantly are the massive and unprecedented anti-government uprisings that swept the country in October 2019 and arguably ushered Lebanon into a new historical present.
3 Sedgwick’s distinctions here are influenced largely by Melanie Klein’s articulation of the paranoid/schizoid position and the depressive position. Unlike the paranoid position that is characterized by a ‘terrible alertness to the dangers posed by … the world around’ (Citation1997: 7), the depressive or reparative position seeks to repair ‘the murderous part-objects into something like a whole’ (Citation1997: 7).
4 For more on how paranoid and reparative readings are implicated in one another, see Wiegman (Citation2014) and Love (Citation2010).
5 Despite Jameson’s critique of nostalgia that functions as a condemnation of mass culture, his own work along with the larger body of critical theory operate according to ‘a mode of thought [that is] necessarily nostalgic’ (Stauth and Turner Citation1988).
6 Here I rely on Karyn Ball’s (Citation2014: 182) articulation of affect as ‘differing degrees of intra- and intersubjective reactivity to and investment in ideational or external sources’. Ball’s definition makes space for conceptualizing affect within a discursive context and a larger field of political and cultural relations. More specifically, by conveying affect in terms of reactivity to or investments in ideational or external sources, Ball allows us to think about nostalgia, on the one hand, as a collective or individual investment in certain images or ideas about the past that are invoked as part of an attachment to a national ideal. On the other hand, her articulation provides a framework for thinking about nostalgia as a reaction to the disappointments of modernity that contribute to the idealization of a former moment.
7 A stringed instrument resembling a lute or mandolin.
8 A flute like instrument that is the main wind instrument of the Middle East.
9 One of Fairouz’s song is actually featured in West Beyrouth during a scene depicting the Ain El Remmeneh bus massacre in which 28 Palestinians were killed by Christian Phalangists. This incident is largely credited for instigating the civil war.
10 Dima Issa’s (Citation2019) recent work makes a similar claim in relation to how people in the Arab diaspora use Fairouz’s music to negotiate their distance from home. In making this argument, however, Issa dismisses attempts to ground Fairouz in a particular national context. She relies here on a new materialist understanding of nostalgic affect that is removed from particular temporal or spatial boundaries. While it is true that Fairouz’s music often transcends national boundaries, we cannot overlook the extent to which Fairouz functions as a vehicle of attachment to Lebanon and the central role that her project has played in constituting the idea of the nation.
11 Interestingly enough, Halwani’s repertoire also includes a mural depicting two characters from West Beyrouth. Halwani depicts Tarek and May and the inter-religious love story they connote in a mural near the former green light that previously divided west and east Beirut. Once again, Halwani remediates thenostalgic evocations of certain cultural figures to re-appropriate public space and thus serve as a platform through which national identity isnegotiated.