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Notably, studies on the Arabic novel tend to focus on canonical writers, like the Egyptian novelist and Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz (1911–2006), and leave out or just mention en passant the work of others. This book is not concerned with the ways in which the Arabic novel breaks away from or reproduces Mahfouz’s approach and techniques, but focuses instead on the way in which the authors in question engage with the phenomena of nationalism, feminism, post- and neo-colonialism, civil war, and social change in the Arab world using an urban scenario as their privileged point of observation. The Arabic city is privileged as a focal point because it is the space where the struggles over issues of nation-building, gender, religion, and class, as well as the patriarchal, colonialist, Zionist, and sectarian violence linked to these issues, manifest themselves most evidently. To this end, From Damascus to Beirut: Contested Cities in Arab Writing brings together four novels published between 1969 and 1989, which have never been approached from this perspective nor put in this kind of dialogue before. Ulfat Idilbi’s Damascus, Ghassan Kanafani’s Haifa, Ahlam Mosteghanemi’s Constantine, and Elias Khoury’s Beirut are social and historical products, and, as such, as Henri Lefebvre maintains, are deeply rooted in politics and affected by ideology. The cities discussed here, in fact, display the ebbs and flows of political and social life in their respective countries and in the Arab world in general. Each city stands at a crucial point in the history of the Arab world, and the way in which they are represented by their respective authors sets the stage for, and sometimes even foreshadows, an upcoming defeat or disappointment. Albeit for different reasons, Damascus, Haifa, Constantine and Beirut are all expressions of failures either on national, political, social, or economic levels. Paradoxically, however, they are also the repositories of their people’s hopes and aspirations, as well as of their disappointments. Analysing these novels as such, this book will be of particular interest to postcolonial readers and, more importantly, to English-speaking readers who are interested in the study of modern Arabic literature. Its close textual analysis offers the reader new tools not only for understanding themes and narrative techniques pertaining to the Arabic novel, but also the contemporary political, cultural and social issues that produced them.
A CINEMATIC DEBUT OF A PROMISING YOUNG NOVELIST FROM LEBANON--A FAUX-THRILLER ABOUT A RECLU­SIVE BOTANIST WHO WIT­NESS­ES A POLIT­I­CAL MUR­DER AND IS DRAWN INTO A PER­SON­AL INVES­TI­GA­TION--A captivating thriller that reveals a family’s intergenerational secrets, a nation’s deepest fears, and an underground world of politics, religion, and society. Beirut at dawn. A bus leaves the Charles Helou station en route to Damascus. Seven passengers are on board, one of whom is a prominent Lebanese politician. Before crossing the border, the bus is accosted and derailed. All seven passengers are gunned down. A botanist studying a rare occurrence of acacias nearby witnesses the horror. While the nation around him plunges into conspiracy theories and chaos, the botanist realizes he holds the only clue to the mystery: his injured Acacia. This sends him on a quest for answers, through a minefield of national fears and family secrets, deep into a private underworld.
Lebanon - Current Issues & Background
Postwar Beirut conjures up contradictory images of remarkable openness and inconceivable violence, of great antiquity and a bright future. The Lebanese capital stands for Arab cosmopolitanism and cultural effervescence but also for its tragedies of destruction. This book examines the historical formation of Beirut as a multiply contested Mediterranean city. Fin de Siècle Beirut is a landmark contribution to the growing literature in Ottoman studies, in Arab cultural history and on Mediterranean cities. Combining urban theory, particularly Henri Lefebvre's work on cities and capitalism, with postcolonial methodology, the central thesis of this book is that modern Beirut is the outcome of persistent social and intellectual struggles over the production of space. The city of Beirut was at once the product, the object, and the project of imperial and urban politics of difference: overlapping European, Ottoman, and municipal civilising missions competed in the political fields of administration, infrastructure, urban planning, public health, education, public morality, journalism, and architecture. Jens Hanssen offers a comprehensive, original account of the emergence of modern Beirut out of an economic shift away from Acre in the wake of the Napoleonic wars. He argues that the Ottoman government's decision to heed calls for the creation of a new province around Beirut and grant it provincial capital status in 1888 paved the way for fundamental urban and regional reconfigurations long before colonial policies during the French Mandate period. This new Ottoman province came to constitute the territorial embodiment of regional self-determination for Arab nationalists in Beirut until the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. Drawing on published and unpublished Ottoman government documents, Arabic sources, and European archival material, Hanssen's book traces the urban experience of modernity in the Ottoman Empire. The transformation of everyday life in late nineteenth-century Beirut and the concomitant policies of urban management is vividly set against the devastating civil war in Mount Lebanon and Damascus in 1860.
Lebanon seems a country in the grip of permanent crisis. In recent years it has suffered blow after blow, from Rafiq Hariri's assassination in 2005, to the 2006 July War, to the current Syrian conflict, which has brought a million refugees streaming into the country. This is an account not just of Lebanon's high politics, with its endless rows, walk-outs, machinations and foreign alliances, but also of the politics of everyday life: all the stresses and strains the country's inhabitants face, from electricity black-outs and uncollected rubbish to stagnating wages and property bubbles. Andrew Arsan moves between parliament and the public squares where protesters gather, between luxury high-rises and refugee camps, and between expensive nightclubs and seafront promenades, providing a comprehensive view of Lebanon in the twenty-first century. Where others have treated Lebanon's woes as exceptional, a by-product of its sectarianism and particular vulnerability to regional crises, Arsan argues that there is nothing particular about Lebanon's predicament. Rather, it is a country of the age--one of neoliberal economics, populist fervor, forced displacement, rising xenophobia, and public disillusion. Lebanon, in short, offers us a lens through which to look on our times.