After Amnesia: Memory and War in Two Lebanese Films

Sawalha, Aseel

doi:10.1080/08949468.2014.852871

Cited by 2 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…Due to the prominent position occupied by the "politics of amnesia" of the conflict championed by post-war elites in keeping the country a deeply divided society (Aboultaif and Tabar 2019;Haugbolle 2010), in the past two decades the question of collective memory has occupied an increasingly relevant place in the scholarship on Lebanon (Haugbolle 2010;Larkin 2012;Rabah 2017;Salloukh et al 2019a). The topic has been addressed from a variety of vantage point and disciplines, stretching from urban politics (Khalaf 1994;Makdisi 1997b;Nagel 2002) and martyrs' cultures (Volk 2010), up to cultural productions (Haugbolle 2012;Launchbury et al 2014;Sawalha 2014) and "counter-amnesic" social movements and practices (Jaquemet 2009;Nagle 2017Nagle , 2020, which all stressed the intimate relation between the deliberate lack of a shared public memory of the conflict and the reproduction of sectarian identities. Amid this rich body of scholarship, the question of nostalgia has been predominantly addressed in relation to the instrumental use of the widespread imaginary of pre-war Beirut as the "Switzerland of the Middle East" in legitimizing the making of the capital's post-war neoliberal reconstruction (Makdisi 1997a).…”

Section: Nostalgia and The Lebanon Uprisingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The topic has been addressed from a variety of vantage point and disciplines, stretching from urban politics (Khalaf 1994; Makdisi 1997b; Nagel 2002) and martyrs' cultures (Volk 2010), up to cultural productions (Haugbolle 2012; Launchbury et al. 2014; Sawalha 2014) and “counter‐amnesic” social movements and practices (Jaquemet 2009; Nagle 2017, 2020), which all stressed the intimate relation between the deliberate lack of a shared public memory of the conflict and the reproduction of sectarian identities. Amid this rich body of scholarship, the question of nostalgia has been predominantly addressed in relation to the instrumental use of the widespread imaginary of pre‐war Beirut as the “Switzerland of the Middle East” in legitimizing the making of the capital's post‐war neoliberal reconstruction (Makdisi 1997a).…”

Section: Nostalgia and The Lebanon Uprisingmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Mobilizing the Past in Revolutionary Times: Memory, Counter‐Memory, and Nostalgia During the Lebanese Uprising

Porta

Tufaro

2022

Sociological Forum

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Social movement studies have addressed the issue of nostalgia within two perspectives, focusing, respectively, on emotions and on memory. Our contribution looks at nostalgia in social movements by building upon the combination of these two streams in social movement studies. Going beyond a stereotypical vision of reactionary movements as backward looking and progressive ones as forward looking, we will suggest that while both types of movements look at some aspects of the past with nostalgia, they do it in a very different combination of emotions and memory. To compare how different movements perform their emotional and memory work, we focused on the recent uprising in Lebanon as a critical case in which mobilizations and counter‐mobilizations have been carried out by different actors at the same time. In both cases, nostalgia was strategically developed for different moments of Lebanon's history through the movements' choices of the very spaces for the performance of contentious acts, but also the symbolic meaning attributed to them and the emotional work performed around the protest events. By developing a “tick description” of some main contentious moments where nostalgia emerged in the Lebanon uprisings, we aim to understand the ways in which nostalgia intervenes in the social construction of memories and counter‐memories, in an emotionally dense environment.

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Section: Nostalgia and The Lebanon Uprisingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Nostalgia and The Lebanon Uprisingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mobilizing the Past in Revolutionary Times: Memory, Counter‐Memory, and Nostalgia During the Lebanese Uprising

Porta

Tufaro

2022

Sociological Forum

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“…I wondered which 'events' she was referring to. Could she have meant the Lebanese Civil War, commonly called 'al-ahdath' in reference to the intermittent nature of the violence (Sawalha 2014)? Or could she be referring to the July War as a series of violent events?…”

Section: Khiam Village: Humanitarian Psychiatry In Accumulated Violencementioning

confidence: 99%

Infrastructures of Suffering: Trauma, Sumud and the Politics of Violence and Aid in Lebanon

Moghnieh

2021

MAT

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This article traces the infrastructures of suffering under the governance of humanitarian psychiatry to explore how material conditions of war and aid have shaped the politics of trauma and sumud[steadfastness] in Lebanon. Based on 29 months of ethnographic fieldwork undertaken from 2011 to 2013, I look at the expert, economic, and techno-political assemblages of trauma and sumudduring the July War in 2006 and the Syrian refugee crisis in 2011. Mental health experts faced unexpected difficulties in diagnosing war trauma during the July War. This led political actors to claim that these difficulties reflected a general absence of suffering from war and a sign of Lebanese resilience, drawing on economies of sumudin postwar reconstruction. The Syrian refugee crisis however radically transformed the politics of suffering in Lebanon. A new political economy of trauma emerged where the Lebanese now competed with other aid communities to have their past suffering recognised as traumatic. Comparing the relations between violence, aid, and suffering in both instances serves to contextualise and historicise suffering beyond a particular discourse or event. It also serves to highlight the contingencies of suffering rather than its internal and psychic elements.

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After Amnesia: Memory and War in Two Lebanese Films

Cited by 2 publications

References 18 publications

Mobilizing the Past in Revolutionary Times: Memory, Counter‐Memory, and Nostalgia During the Lebanese Uprising

Mobilizing the Past in Revolutionary Times: Memory, Counter‐Memory, and Nostalgia During the Lebanese Uprising

Infrastructures of Suffering: Trauma, Sumud and the Politics of Violence and Aid in Lebanon

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