Nour Dados: Lost and Found in Beirut: Memory and Place in Narratives of the City
PhD Humanities and Social Sciences
Project Title: Lost and Found in Beirut: Memory and Place in Narratives of the City
Principal Supervisor: Dr Devleena Ghosh
Email: nour.dados@student.uts.edu.au
Web site: Words Without Borders
Lost and Found in Beirut: Memory and Place in Narratives of the City deals with the production of space, place and memory in narrative and non-narrative form in post civil-war Beirut. The thesis examines the ways in which Beirut is constructed in post-war literature, art and architecture. This project is a 'spatial' study of Beirut; it examines the spatial aspects of memory and place and aims to extend theories of space, place and memory in cultural studies to contemporary literature, architecture and art in and about Beirut.
The notions of memory and place have been critical for Lebanon's post-war reconstruction and have often been strategically used in place of 'history', particularly in projects for the reconstruction of Beirut's city centre. This kind of institutionalized collective memory however, has often been one of reversion to the pre-war past at the expense of war-time memory. In discourses about Beirut's future that accompanied the reconstruction of the city's central business district at the end of the civil war in 1990, for example, the imaginary of space was largely ahistorical. It was envisioned that Beirut would be rebuilt in the eternal shape of its golden past as a glitzy, cosmopolitan city. This vision was encapsulated in the reconstruction motto: 'Beirut: ancient city of the future.' The desire of the reconstruction project to build a city of the future in the shape of its past assumed that the city's past was both real, and accessible. Far from being a future face of the past, perhaps Beirut today is still in the process of assigning meanings to these rebuilt spaces, particularly in terms of their cultural value for Lebanese civil society.
In relation to these and other related issues, the project raises a number of questions: How is memory used in literature to constitute Beirut as a particular kind of space? How do architectural accounts and agendas draw Beirut as a 'place' both within the spaces of the city and outside it? How do the competing claims of 'official history' and of 'private memory' work to unsettle any definitive knowledge of the spaces of the city and of Beirut as a city and a symbol. In light of Lebanon's civil war and the proliferation of accounts in both narrative and visual forms which sought to engrave private memory onto the spaces of the city, the spatial politics of narrative and war have particular resonance in Beirut. Further, the intersection of 'place' and 'memory' has special significance in defining the city as a social space particularly as the city becomes a collection of places with different, often conflicting, memories. As such, memory becomes a marker of a change in place, both literally and figuratively, and vice versa. By reading the official and unofficial intersections of place and memory, the project attempts to invoke a new sense of place for Beirut.
Past and Forthcoming Conference Papers
'English, and the Rest: Textual Cartographies between Cultural Studies and Literary Translation' Translation Beyond Dichotomy Conference, University of Melbourne, 26-27 October 2007
'Beirut Cosmopolitan: Imaging the Past in the Shape of the Future', Cosmopolitan Civil Societies Conference, University of Technology Sydney, 4-5 October 2007
'Postcards from Beirut, Australia: On doing/not doing Arab cultural studies in a transnational context' Cultural Studies Now Conference, University of East London, 19-22 July 2007
'Re-visiting Martyrs' Square Again...Absence and Presence in Cultural Memory' From Moment to Monument: Cultural Memory and Canonization Processes Conference, University of Basel, Switzerland, 31 May-2 June 2007
"Balconies Onto Beirut: Spatiality in the Traveling City," 3rd International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities, 2-5 September 2005, University of Cambridge
Book Chapters/Refereed Publications
'Re-visiting Martyrs' Square Again...Absence and Presence in Cultural Memory' in From Moment to Monument ed. (University of Basel: forthcoming 2008)
'Balconies Onto Beirut: Spatiality in the Travelling City', International Journal of the Humanities, 3:8 (2005/2006), pp247-264
Published Translations (From Arabic)
Bilal Khbeiz, Tragedy in a Moment of Vision, Sharjah Festival, UAE 2007