Re-Membering Beirut : Performing Memory and Community Across a 'Postwar' City

Abstract: More than 20 years after the end of Lebanon’s civil war (1975-1990), reconciliation remains elusive. A number of factors contribute to this stasis. No agreed-upon historical narrative exists by which Lebanon’s 18 ethnoreligious groups can make sense of the war, and the state has interests – both economic and political – for burying common memories and erasing common spaces. In light of these erasures, the capital Beirut, like much of the country, remains divided along spatial, ideological, and mnemonic lines.The extant literature has generally considered the perils of what Samir Khalaf (2006) calls Beirut’s “geography of fear.” By contrast, this dissertation considers the city a realm of possibility. “Re-membering Beirut: Performing Memory and Community Across a ‘Postwar’ City,” fuses ethnographic research, analysis, and performative writing to introduce the ide of “re-membering,” a term I use to describe how people engage the residual material of the city-at-war – its textures, tempos, routes, and representations – to render legible the shared pasts and current political claims of historically divided communities. Through case studies including a walking tour, a protest, and street art, I argue for considering the city’s in-between spaces as loci for emergent cross-communal politics, and for movement as both object of analysis and method. The sometimes ephemeral publics that take shape around these performances and practices reconfigure how Beirutis understand themselves in relation to their city and each other, whilc simultaneously revealing the city’s persistent ideological and spatial terrain.The project contributes to a fuller picture of how people across the Middle East and North Africa (the MENA region) are using urban space and cultural production – in the wake of the Arab revolutions and most urgently in the midst of the ongoing Syrian crisis – to communicate shared pain and dissent, and to mobilize in the face of failing or oppressive political systems. As the region once again divides itself along both old and new fault lines, the study explores the perils of occluding violent histories, as well as the critical role of culture in inter-communal postwar healing.