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Walking Beirut: Intervening in the Space-Time of a "Postwar" City

Fri, May 26, 11:00 to 12:15, Hilton San Diego Bayfront, Floor: 2, Indigo Ballroom A

Abstract

Nearly 30 years after the end of Lebanon’s civil war, its capital in many respects remains divided. Beirut's “geography of fear” (Khalaf 2006) factors heavily in a confluence of social forces and institutions that ensures the city’s many ethnoreligious groups remain spatially and ideologically divided. Likewise, the literature on Beirut largely reinscribes these divisions by focusing on specific neighborhoods, histories of violence, or the contentious postwar reconstruction of downtown. Still, in the midst of this spatial and discursive division, several civil society organizations have undertaken new initiatives to quite literally bridge the gap between communities. These initiatives (e.g., a walking tour, a protest encampment/march, graffiti tours) take participants through neighborhoods and public spaces many Beirutis previously considered forbidden. This paper offers a reading of these practices – focusing on a tour called Walk Beirut and graffiti bus tours associated with an annual arts festival – through the lens of performance studies, critical geography, and urban communication scholarship. I argue that not only does movement through Beirut constitute a radical spatial intervention by disrupting the city’s polynucleated stasis, but it also offers a way to uncover common psychic terrain made up of the spatial experiences and histories prevalent across the city’s many communities. Such practices and their results (as articulated by organizers and participants) map out possible avenues for reconciliation after protracted violence, a contribution that bears the utmost urgency in a region currently beset by old and new conflicts, not least of all the civil war in Syria.

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