Affective Landscapes: Re-negotiating the Ordinary in Contemporary Lebanese Cultural Production

• Author / Creator

  Tarraf, Zeina

• This dissertation examines contemporary Lebanese cultural production and its shifting relationship to the everyday/ordinary as a site that unfolds in the midst of or in proximity to violence. I argue that attention to the ordinary is an effective mode through which to approach societies, like Lebanon, that are plagued by protracted conflicts. To this end, I advance an investigation of affect across a rich corpus of Lebanese cultural production, including novels, films, memoirs, documentaries, and art, to sidestep the rhetoric of exceptionality that inflects some work in trauma studies, and to illuminate how crisis in Lebanon becomes embedded in quotidian experience. As a result, I move away from centralizing the memory of the Lebanese civil war as the focal referent in studies on Lebanese culture to foreground the present as a dominant framework. Primarily, I thoroughly tease out the relationship between affect and literary form to show how literary works capture the ways the civil war radically reconfigured the contours of everyday life. Next, I turn to postwar films that represent everyday life to explore how the unfinished nature of the past intersects with contemporary oppressions and violences. I then turn to popular cultural productions, which I situate within a larger discursive context, to examine nostalgia as an ordinary affect in the postwar era and as fundamental to structures of belonging forming in the wake of loss. Finally, I think through cultural works that emerged in the wake of former prime minister Rafic Hariri’s assassination and the violent events that followed it. These works, I argue, evoke an understanding of how the violences of this period are profoundly sutured to the everyday. Such attention to the ordinary, as a continuing process of negotiation, ultimately positions me to accentuate the nexus of various temporalities, attunements, and realities that mediates representations wherein the past intersects with the flows and impulses of modernity.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • The Ordinary/Everyday
  • Memory
  • Trauma
  • Lebanon
  • Affect

• Graduation date

  Spring 2018

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Doctor of Philosophy

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R3BN9XJ08

• License

  This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Libraries with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.