Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor's Foreword
- Acknowledgments
- Note on Transliteration
- Introduction
- 1 The Rural–Urban Divide: Subverted Boundaries
- 2 The Rhetoric of Walking: Cartographic versus Nomadic Itineraries
- 3 Sexualizing the City: The Yoking of Flesh and Stone
- 4 Traffic between the Factual and the Imagined: Beirut Deferred
- 5 Excavating the City: Exterior and Interior Relics
- Inconclusive Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2016
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor's Foreword
- Acknowledgments
- Note on Transliteration
- Introduction
- 1 The Rural–Urban Divide: Subverted Boundaries
- 2 The Rhetoric of Walking: Cartographic versus Nomadic Itineraries
- 3 Sexualizing the City: The Yoking of Flesh and Stone
- 4 Traffic between the Factual and the Imagined: Beirut Deferred
- 5 Excavating the City: Exterior and Interior Relics
- Inconclusive Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
[N]one of us is completely free from the struggle over geography.
Said, Culture and Imperialism (1993: 7)[T]he present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein.
Foucault, “Of Other Spaces” (1986: 22)Your gaze scans the streets as if they were written pages: the city says everything you must think, makes you repeat her discourse.
Calvino, Invisible Cities (1974: 14)Beirut. Who could point it out to me?
Wazin, “Bayrut” (2010: 390)Coffee is geography.
Darwish, Memory for Forgetfulness (1995: 20)In an interview, the poet Adonis (cAl/ Aḥmad Sac/d) describes Beirut as “an open project that is never complete” and refers to it as the city of “exploration” rather than “certainty” (1987: 45). What indeed is Beirut? Is it a village, a town, a city? Is it ancient, contemporary, traditional, modern? Is it feminine, masculine, androgynous? Is it secular, religious, sectarian? Is it flesh, stone, cadaver? What is more, where is Beirut located? In private spaces? In public spaces? In the street, the mind? Above ground, underground? Is it visual, aural, olfactory? Is it real or imagined? These are some of the questions that this study will explore in an attempt to navigate a volatile, ubiquitous and contradictory city.
Beirut has been the focus of many academic and scholarly studies. Among such works are architectural studies, such as Peter Rowe and Hashim Sarkis's Projecting Beirut: Episodes in the Construction and Reconstruction of a Modern City (1998) and Jad Tabet's Beyrouth: La brulûre des rêves (2001); historical works, notably Samir Kassir's Histoire de Beyrouth (2003); sociological studies, such as Samir Khalaf's Heart of Beirut: Reclaiming the Bourj (2006) and Samir Khalaf and Philip Khoury's Recovering Beirut: Urban Design and Post- War Reconstruction (1993); ethnographic studies, such as Aseel Sawalha's Reconstructing Beirut: Memory and Space in a Postwar Arab City (2010) and Sune Haugbolle's War and Memory in Lebanon (2010);.
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- Information
- Writing BeirutMappings of the City in the Modern Arabic Novel, pp. 1 - 30Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2015