Visions of Beirut: The Urban Life of Media Infrastructure

by Hatim El-Hibri

Overview

In Visions of Beirut Hatim El-Hibri explores how the creation and circulation of images have shaped the urban spaces and cultural imaginaries of Beirut. Drawing on fieldwork and texts ranging from maps, urban plans, and aerial photographs to live television and drone-camera footage, El-Hibri traces how the technologies and media infrastructure that visualize the city are used to consolidate or destabilize regimes of power. Throughout the twentieth century, colonial, economic, and military mapping projects helped produce and govern Beirut's spaces. In the 1990s, the imagery of its post-civil war downtown reconstruction cast Beirut as a site of financial investment in ways that obscured its ongoing crises. During and following the 2006 Israel/Hizbullah war, Hizbullah's use of live television broadcasts of fighting and protests along with its construction of a war memorial museum at a former secret military bunker demonstrate the tension between visualizing space and the practices of concealment. Outlining how Beirut's urban space and public life intertwine with images and infrastructure, El-Hibri interrogates how media embody and exacerbate the region's political fault lines.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478013020
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	04/26/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	37 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Hatim El-Hibri is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at George Mason University.

Table of Contents

Note on Translation and Transliteration  vii
Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction  1
1. The Social Life of Maps of Beirut  21
2. Images of Before/After in the Economy of Postwar Construction  64
3. Concealment, Liveness, and Al Manar TV  105
4. The Open Secret of Concealment at the Mleeta Museum  144
Conclusion  178
Notes  183
References  217
Index  247

Editorial Reviews

Visions of Beirut offers a lot to its readers. It will be of great interest to scholars of global media, Middle Eastern studies, and urban studies and will make an excellent addition to many graduate-level syllabi.

International Journal of Middle East Studies - Blake Atwood

Hatim El-Hibri weaves a narrative that articulates concealment and infrastructure onto a conceptual terrain that transcends the empirical context of Lebanon. This engaging, groundbreaking, and indispensable book makes a truly meaningful and influential intervention in global media studies, Middle East studies, and urban studies.

The Naked Blogger of Cairo: Creative Insurgency in the Arab World - Marwan M. Kraidy

Visions of Beirut is a compelling work of careful analysis and creative connections that proposes a historically informed set of powerful readings about the transformations of Beirut's public(s) and spaces. Hatim El-Hibri masterfully deconstructs outmoded assumptions about Lebanon's political economy and societies, unravelling instead the everyday visual infrastructures that sustain and reproduce forces such as sectarianism and financialization. The outcome is an important contribution that implores us to think critically about how image, its mediation, and infrastructures are remaking cities in today's world.

Mona Fawaz

Visions of Beirut comes at a crucial moment for the city and for the country, coinciding with the most stringent economic crisis Lebanon has ever faced and in the aftermath of one of the largest nonnuclear explosions ever recorded.... The recent events confirm, once again, El-Hibri’s treatise and the validity of its theoretical framework."

Information & Culture - Aya Jazaierly

"Visions of Beirut offers a lot to its readers. It will be of great interest to scholars of global media, Middle Eastern studies, and urban studies and will make an excellent addition to many graduate-level syllabi."--Blake Atwood "International Journal of Middle East Studies" (9/30/2022 12:00:00 AM)

"Visions of Beirut comes at a crucial moment for the city and for the country, coinciding with the most stringent economic crisis Lebanon has ever faced and in the aftermath of one of the largest nonnuclear explosions ever recorded.... The recent events confirm, once again, El-Hibri's treatise and the validity of its theoretical framework."

--Aya Jazaierly "Information & Culture" (12/1/2021 12:00:00 AM)

"Visions of Beirut is a compelling work of careful analysis and creative connections that proposes a historically informed set of powerful readings about the transformations of Beirut's public(s) and spaces. Hatim El-Hibri masterfully deconstructs outmoded assumptions about Lebanon's political economy and societies, unravelling instead the everyday visual infrastructures that sustain and reproduce forces such as sectarianism and financialization. The outcome is an important contribution that implores us to think critically about how image, its mediation, and infrastructures are remaking cities in today's world."--Mona Fawaz, Professor of Urban Studies and Planning at the American University of Beirut

"Hatim El-Hibri weaves a narrative that articulates concealment and infrastructure onto a conceptual terrain that transcends the empirical context of Lebanon. This engaging, groundbreaking, and indispensable book makes a truly meaningful and influential intervention in global media studies, Middle East studies, and urban studies."--Marwan M. Kraidy, author of "The Naked Blogger of Cairo: Creative Insurgency in the Arab World"

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