Author by: Ghādah Sammān Language: en Publisher by: Quartet Books Limited Format Available: PDF, ePub, Mobi Total Read: 74 Total Download: 239 File Size: 41,8 Mb Description: Beirut Nightmares is set at the height of the Lebanese Civil War. The narrator, trapped in her flat for two weeks by street battles and sniper fire, writes a series of vignettes peopled by an extraordinary cast of characters, some drawn from the amazing waking world and others living only in the sleeping minds of those suffering in the conflict.
A pet shop next to the house is filled with terrified animals; the narrator visits them every night and finds that their sufferings parallel those of her innocent and defenceless neighbours in the city streets. A display in an abandoned shop window comes to life as the mannequins step out and join life in the cafes before coming to a terrible end.
Author by: Miriam Cooke Language: en Publisher by: Syracuse University Press Format Available: PDF, ePub, Mobi Total Read: 30 Total Download: 415 File Size: 43,5 Mb Description: This book challenges the assumption that men write of war, women of the hearth. The Lebanese war has seen the publication of many more works of fiction by women than by men. Miriam Cooke has termed these women the Beirut Decentrists, as they are decentered or excluded from both literary canon and social discourse. Although they may not share religious or political affiliation, they do share a perspective which holds them together. Cooke traces the transformation in consciousness that has taken place among women who observed and recorded the progress towards chaos in Lebanon.
During the so-called 'two-year' war of 1975-76, little comment was made about those (usually men in search of economic security) who left the saturnalia of violence, but with time attitudes changed. Women became aware that they had remained out of a sense of responsibility for others and that they had survived. Consciousness of survival was catalytic: the Beirut Decentrists began to describe a society that had gone beyond the masculinization normal in most wars and achieved an almost unprecedented femininization. Emigration, the expected behavior for men before 1975, was rejected.
A different culture, a plea for the right to free speech and a highly. Beirut: Abeer, Jana, and Yasmine. Beirut Nightmares by Ghada Samman.
Staying, the expected behavior for women before 1975, became the sine qua non for Lebanese citizenship. The writings of the Beirut Decentrists offer hope of an escape from the anarchy. If men and women could espouse the Lebanese women's sense of responsibility, the energy that had fueled the unrelenting savagery could be turned to reconstruction. But that was before the invasion of 1982. Author by: Aseel Sawalha Language: en Publisher by: University of Texas Press Format Available: PDF, ePub, Mobi Total Read: 33 Total Download: 232 File Size: 42,7 Mb Description: Once the cosmopolitan center of the Middle East, Beirut was devastated by the civil war that ran from 1975 to 1991, which dislocated many residents, disrupted normal municipal functions, and destroyed the vibrant downtown district. The aftermath of the war was an unstable situation Sawalha considers 'a postwar state of emergency,' even as the state strove to restore normalcy.
This ethnography centers on various groups' responses to Beirut's large, privatized urban-renewal project that unfolded during this turbulent moment. At the core of the study is the theme of remembering space. The official process of rebuilding the city as a node in the global economy collided with local day-to-day concerns, and all arguments invariably inspired narratives of what happened before and during the war. Sawalha explains how Beirutis invoked their past experiences of specific sites to vie for the power to shape those sites in the future. Rather than focus on a single site, the ethnography crosses multiple urban sites and social groups, to survey varied groups with interests in particular spaces. The book contextualizes these spatial conflicts within the discourses of the city's historical accounts and the much-debated concept of heritage, voiced in academic writing, politics, and journalism. In the afterword, Sawalha links these conflicts to the social and political crises of early twenty-first-century Beirut.
Author by: Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh Language: en Publisher by: Bloomsbury Publishing Format Available: PDF, ePub, Mobi Total Read: 25 Total Download: 256 File Size: 55,7 Mb Description: Writing has come face-to-face with a most crucial juncture: to negotiate with the inescapable presence of violence. From the domains of contemporary Middle Eastern literature, this book stages a powerful conversation on questions of cruelty, evil, rage, vengeance, madness, and deception.
Beyond the narrow judgment of violence as a purely tragic reality, these writers (in states of exile, prison, martyrdom, and war) come to wager with the more elusive, inspiring, and even ecstatic dimensions that rest at the heart of a visceral universe of imagination. Covering complex and controversial thematic discussions, Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh forms an extreme record of voices, movements, and thought-experiments drawn from the inner circles of the Middle Eastern region.
By exploring the most abrasive writings of this vast cultural front, the book reveals how such captivating outsider texts could potentially redefine our understanding of violence and its now-unstoppable relationship to a dangerous age. Author by: Abdelwahab El-Affendi Language: en Publisher by: Bloomsbury Publishing USA Format Available: PDF, ePub, Mobi Total Read: 81 Total Download: 905 File Size: 50,9 Mb Description: This book offers a novel and productive explanation of why 'ordinary' people can be moved to engage in destructive mass violence (or terrorism and the abuse of rights), often in large numbers and in unexpected ways. Its argument is that narratives of insecurity (powerful horror stories people tell and believe about their world and others) can easily make extreme acts appear acceptable, even necessary and heroic. As in action or horror movies, the script dictates how the 'hero' acts. The book provides theoretical justifications for this analysis, building on earlier studies but going beyond them in what amount to a breakthrough in mapping the context of mass violence.
It backs its argument with a large number of case studies covering four continents, written by prominent scholars from the relevant countries or with deep knowledge of them. A substantial introduction by the UN's Special Advisor on the Prevention of Genocide demonstrates the policy relevance of this path-breaking work. Author by: Philip Jenkins Language: en Publisher by: Oxford University Press Format Available: PDF, ePub, Mobi Total Read: 9 Total Download: 300 File Size: 46,6 Mb Description: Why did the youthful optimism and openness of the sixties give way to Ronald Reagan and the spirit of conservative reaction-a spirit that remains ascendant today? Drawing on a wide array of sources-including tabloid journalism, popular fiction, movies, and television shows-Philip Jenkins argues that a remarkable confluence of panics, scares, and a few genuine threats created a climate of fear that led to the conservative reaction. He identifies 1975 to 1986 as the watershed years. During this time, he says, there was a sharp increase in perceived threats to our security at home and abroad.
At home, America seemed to be threatened by monstrous criminals-serial killers, child abusers, Satanic cults, and predatory drug dealers, to name just a few. On the international scene, we were confronted by the Soviet Union and its evil empire, by OPEC with its stranglehold on global oil, by the Ayatollahs who made hostages of our diplomats in Iran. Increasingly, these dangers began to be described in terms of moral evil. Rejecting the radicalism of the '60s, which many saw as the source of the crisis, Americans adopted a more pessimistic interpretation of human behavior, which harked back to much older themes in American culture.
This simpler but darker vision ultimately brought us Ronald Reagan and the ascendancy of the political Right, which more than two decades later shows no sign of loosening its grip. Writing in his usual crisp and witty prose, Jenkins offers a truly original and persuasive account of a period that continues to fascinate the American public. It is bound to captivate anyone who lived through this period, as well as all those who want to understand the forces that transformed-and continue to define-the American political landscape. Author by: Ghādah Sammān Language: en Publisher by: Syracuse University Press Format Available: PDF, ePub, Mobi Total Read: 35 Total Download: 232 File Size: 44,5 Mb Description: Set in Geneva, Switzerland, around the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, this intricately plotted novel probes the emotional misfortunes of Arab men and women fleeing the horror of war only to find their ways of life constantly challenged by their foreign surroundings. The author's scalding critique of the Lebanese situation resonates with strong sociopolitical issues.
Here are telling portraits of class oppression and the role of women in Arab society, the treatments of war and sexuality, of immigration, of cultural assimilation and nationalism. Far from home and out of harm's way, Samman's Lebanese exiles repeat and replay the same conflicts that tormented them in their own land even as it is under siege. The Night of the First Billion is a reminder that the only genuine security is to be found in the courageous willingness to confront, challenge, and finally to ease suffering.
Ghada Samman's Beirut Nightmares: A Woman's Life Ghada Samman's Beirut Nightmares: A Woman's Life Sbaiti, Hanan 2009-09-01 00:00:00 Ghada Samman is a Syrian writer who lived in Beirut. Her novel Beirut Nightmares tells the story of a woman who is holed up in her house at the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil war in 1975. Her only companions are her neighbors: an old man and his son, as well as their male servant. Instead of chapters, the novel progresses through 151 episodes that the author labels “Nightmare 1” and so on which are sometimes hallucinations, at other times actual nightmares, and still other times, realities nightmarish in nature. Hanan Sbaiti traces the progression of personal destruction/construction and disempowerment/empowerment through which the narrator in Ghada Samman's Beirut Nightmares passes as a result of the isolation experienced during non-stop aggressive fighting. At the beginning of the enforced house arrest, the narrator takes the food that she has in her house and adds it to her neighbor's supply; however, with the continued house arrest, and the resulting scarcity of food and water, her will to survive results in keeping for herself the hoard of food which she discovers in one of her neighbor's rooms.
Sbaiti analyzes the narrator's transition from one mental state to another by studying the social and psychological aspects that contribute to such a change. In doing so, Sbaiti examines if such changes during conflict and war are reflections of human nature in general or if there are specific implications pertaining to women and conflict. Women's Studies International Forum Elsevier http://www.deepdyve.com/lp/elsevier/ghada-samman-s-beirut-nightmares-a-woman-s-life-ZBYZNIcxvI. Abstract Ghada Samman is a Syrian writer who lived in Beirut. Her novel Beirut Nightmares tells the story of a woman who is holed up in her house at the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil war in 1975. Her only companions are her neighbors: an old man and his son, as well as their male servant. Instead of chapters, the novel progresses through 151 episodes that the author labels “Nightmare 1” and so on which are sometimes hallucinations, at other times actual nightmares, and still other times, realities nightmarish in nature.
Hanan Sbaiti traces the progression of personal destruction/construction and disempowerment/empowerment through which the narrator in Ghada Samman's Beirut Nightmares passes as a result of the isolation experienced during non-stop aggressive fighting. At the beginning of the enforced house arrest, the narrator takes the food that she has in her house and adds it to her neighbor's supply; however, with the continued house arrest, and the resulting scarcity of food and water, her will to survive results in keeping for herself the hoard of food which she discovers in one of her neighbor's rooms.
Sbaiti analyzes the narrator's transition from one mental state to another by studying the social and psychological aspects that contribute to such a change. In doing so, Sbaiti examines if such changes during conflict and war are reflections of human nature in general or if there are specific implications pertaining to women and conflict.
Journal Women's Studies International Forum – Elsevier Published: Sep 1, 2009.