Social Science Research Council

"Paradoxes of a ‘Defeatist’ Imagination: Lebanese Journalistic and Literary Writing Post-1967"

Contrary to the general tendency in postcolonial cultural histories of “the Arab world,” which are punctuated primarily by the Arab Defeat of 1967, my project offers an alternative (updated) cultural history of the Arab postcolonial critique of nationalism. This critique takes into account not only recent cultural responses to the growing dissonance between nationalism and nationhood, but also responses to the perceived consolidation of neoliberalism in the post-Soviet era. I trace the mutual transformation of the ideas “home” and “world” in particular cultural debates by Lebanese cultural journalists from 1940 to the present, analyzing them alongside consonant shifts in spatiotemporal constructions of the Lebanese social landscape in fictional accounts of the same period. By doing so, my aim is to analyze the cultural signs of an emergent geographic imagination—its historical causes, structural logic and social formation.

My analysis of Lebanese social texts and forms—both essayistic and literary—will be juxtaposed with research completed in 2005-2006 on literary works and cultural criticism from South Africa and Egypt. Placed in juxtaposition, these case-studies illuminate apparent cultural paradoxes such as the “national worldview”—a geographic outlook devised to grapple not with the “defeat” of national regimes and ideologies, but with the growing, ambiguous embrace of an ecumenical social order. This project intervenes in the globalization debates by proposing the intrinsic analysis of socio-cultural texts and forms as a method for the study of world-scale phenomena, thereby offering a critique of the “scale question” as defined in current interdisciplinary debates by social scientists and humanists.