War Remains: Ruination and Resistance in Lebanon

War Remains traces the poetics of ruination and resistance in select contemporary Lebanese wartime literature, cultural production, and sites of memory. Drawing upon work from southern Lebanon and Beirut, Khayyat examines how war remains are employed as a resistant trope in the intellectual spaces of war's aftermath. She focuses on "Southern Counterpublics," a collective of poets, novelists, activists, artists, and ordinary citizens and their war-inspired creative productions that speak to the ruins' capacity to be reframed, recycled, and recontested. Khayyat argues that the ruins of war can be thought of as a generative milieu for resistant thought and action. An ambitious and provocative work, War Remains ventures to the so-called margins to archive the texture and substance rendered invisible when studies of memory rely solely on data furnished by official narratives and military accounts of war.

ISBN-13: 9780815637936

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Syracuse University Press

Publication Date: 05-15-2023

Pages: 312

Product Dimensions: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.72d

Series: Contemporary Issues in the Middle East

Yasmine Khayyat is assistant professor of Arabic Language and Literature at Rutgers University.