Artistic Fallout from the July 2006 War: Momentum, Mediation, and Mediatization

Syrine Hout, null

doi:10.13169/arabstudquar.39.2.0793

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Arab Studies Quarterly

Volume 39, Issue 2

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Artistic Fallout from the July 2006 War: Momentum, Mediation, and Mediatization

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Author(s): Syrine Hout

Publication date (Print): Spring 2017

Journal: Arab Studies Quarterly

Publisher: Pluto Journals

Keywords: July 2006 war, Lebanon, Israel, literature, digital media, journalism, photography

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Abstract

A decade after the end of Israel's 2006 war on Lebanon, I spotlight the hitherto under-researched literary portrayals of the conflict. Following an overview of the immediate and (then-) innovative media tools and techniques used to capture its momentum—blogging, video-making, and online comics—and of Arabic-, French-, and English-language literary writings referring to the war, I focus on how literature, which requires time for its “contents” to be distilled into a form removed from emotional immediacy, succeed not only in reflecting it but also in reflecting on it through various fictional(izing) prisms. I do so by comparing the methodologies adopted by Nada Awar Jarrar's A Good Land and Abbas El-Zein's Leave to Remain: A Memoir, both published in 2009, and by arguing that they share a sense of guilt and hence exhibit an ethical exigency by incorporating particular discourses to mediate and mediatize this war as crisis: the social/humanitarian in A Good Land and the visual/photographic in Leave to Remain.

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Journal

Journal ID (doi): 10.13169

Journal ID (publisher-id): arabstudquar

Title: Arab Studies Quarterly

Publisher: Pluto Journals

ISSN (Print): 02713519

ISSN (Electronic): 20436920

Publication date (Print): Spring 2017

Volume: 39

Issue: 2

Pages: 793-814

Article

Publisher ID: arabstudquar.39.2.0793

DOI: 10.13169/arabstudquar.39.2.0793

SO-VID: 6bb89da3-232c-4b0c-b58c-384952aff878

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History

References

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Abd Alrahman, Lana (2011). Ughniah li Margeurite . Beirut: Al-dar al-ʿarabiya lilʿulum.
Abu Hasna, Nafeth (2016). ʿAsal al-maraya . Beirut: Difaf Publications.
Adams, Timothy Dow (1994). Introduction: Life Writing and Light Writing: Autobiography and Photography. MFS: Modern Fiction Studies , 40(3), 459–492.
Alameddine, Rabih (2013). An Unnecessary Woman . New York: Grove.
Alyan, Hala (2012). Atrium . New York: Three Rooms Press.
Balaa, Luma (2015). Exile, Return, and Nationalism In A Goodland. Antipodes , 29(1), 91–104.
Banita, Georgiana (2013). Cosmopolitan Suspicion: Comics Journalism and Graphic Silence. In Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives: Comics at the Crossroads , eds. Daniel Stein, Shane Denson, and Christina Meyer, 49–65. London: Bloomsbury.
Barthes, Roland (1981). Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography . Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill & Wang.
Bazzi, Youssef (2013). Al-riwaya al-lubnaniya al-jadida min “troma” tammuz 2006 w ayyar 2008 [The New Lebanese Novel from the Traumas of July 2006 and May 2008]. Al-Mustaqbal . July 1. Web. Accessed July 18, 2016. <http://www.almustaqbal.com/v4/Article.aspx?Type=np&Articleid=585254>.
Beydoun, Bana (2015). Pizza Delivery. In Beirut Noir , trans. Michelle Hartman, ed. Iman Humaydan, 47–67. New York: Akashic Books.
Boulad, Antoine (2008). Le journal de la guerre . London: Saqi.
Bugeja, Norbert (2012). Postcolonial Memoir in the Middle East: Rethinking the Liminal in Mashriqi Writing . New York: Routledge.
Caruth, Cathy (1991). Introduction to Psychoanalysis, Trauma and Culture I. American Imago , 48(1), 1–12.
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Chreiteh, Alexandra (2015). Ali and His Russian Mother . Trans. Michelle Hartman. Northampton, MA: Interlink.
Eakin, Paul John (1992). Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Eid, Hoda (2009). Rukam . Beirut: Dar al-farabi.
Al-Khansa, Narmine (2008). Sa'at marmoura . Beirut: Saqi.
El-Kadi, Dania (2010). Summer Blast: When War Threatens Lebanese Women's Plans . Beirut: Turning Point.
El Khalil, Zena (2009). Beirut, I Love You: A Memoir . London: Saqi.
El Khalil, Zena (2006). War Is Becoming a Way of Life. Web. Accessed March 20, 2017. https://electronicintifada.net/content/war-becoming-way-life/6301.
El-Zein, Abbas (2009a). Interpreting Oneself: On Memoirs, Essays, Fiction and Travel Writing. Talk at Macquarie University English Department Seminars Series, May 11, Sydney, Australia.
El-Zein, Abbas (2009b). Leave to Remain: A Memoir . St Lucia: University of Queensland Press.
Fadda-Conrey, Carol (2010). Writing Memories of the Present: Alternative Narratives about the 2006 Israeli War on Lebanon. College Literature , 37(1), 159–173.
Gavriely-Nuri, Dalia (2008). The “Metaphorical Annihilation” of the Second Lebanon War (2006) from the Israeli Political Discourse. Discourse & Society , 19(1), 5–20.
Haddad, Joumana (2010). I Killed Scheherazade: Confessions of an Angry Arab Woman . London: Saqi.
Hammad, Suheir (2008). Breaking poems . New York: Cypher Books.
Harb, Zahera (2009). The July 2006 War and the Lebanese Blogosphere: Towards an Alternative Media Tool in Covering Wars. Journal of Media Practice , 10(2–3), 255–258.
Haugbolle, Sune (2007). From A-lists to Webtifadas: Developments in the Lebanese Blogosphere 2005–2006. Arab Media & Society . 1–24. Web. Accessed December 20, 2016. <http://www.arabmediasociety.com/?article=40>.
Hayek, Ghenwa (2015). Beirut, Imagining the City: Space and Place in Lebanese Literature . I.B. Tauris.
Hirsch, Marianne (2008). The Generation of Postmemory. Poetics Today , 29(1), 103–128.
Hirsch, Marianne and Nancy K. Miller (2011). Rites of Return: Diaspora Poetics and the Politics of Memory . New York: Columbia University Press.
Hordvik, Elin (1999). What Is Psychological Trauma? Methods of Treatment. In Childhood and Trauma: Separation, Abuse, War , eds. Elisabeth Ullman and Werner Hilweg; trans. Mary Heaney Margreiter and Kira Henschel, 23–30. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Hovsepian, Nubar, ed. (2007). The War on Lebanon: A Reader . Ithaca, NY: Olive Branch Press.
Jarrar, Nada Awar (2009). A Good Land . London: HarperCollins.
Jarrar, Sana’ Mahmoud (2015). Nada Jarrar's A Good Land: A Multilateral Trauma. Studies in Literature and Language , 10(3), 50–55.
Jurkiewicz, Sarah (2011). Blogging as Counterpublic? The Lebanese and the Egyptian Blogosphere in Comparison. In Social Dynamics 2.0: Researching Change in Times of Media Convergence , eds. Nadja-Christina Schneider and Bettina Gräf, 27–47. Berlin: Frank & Timme GmbH.
Kacimi, Mohamed (2007). Introduction. In Les belles etrangères: Douze écrivains libanais , ed. Mohamed Kacimi, 9–16. Paris: Verticales/Phase Deux.
Khatib, Lina (2013). Image Politics in the Middle East: The Role of the Visual in Political Struggle . London: I Tauris.
Lang, Felix (2016). The Lebanese Post-Civil War Novel: Memory, Trauma, and Capital . Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Leibrandt, Isabella (2006). El weblog, un nuevo género de la cultura popular digital. Culturas Populares. Revista Electrónica , 3, 1–18. Web. Accessed July 15, 2016. <http://culturaspopulares.org/textos3/articulos/leibrandt.pdf>.
Moghnieh, Lamia (2015). Humanitarian Therapeutics of War and the Politics of Trauma and Violence in Lebanon. Web. Accessed April 24, 2015. <http://civilsociety-centre.org/paper/humanitarian-therapeutics-war-and-politics-trauma-and-violence-lebanon>.
Mohsen, Ahmad (2013). Sane’ al-al'ab . Beirut: Hachette-Antoine-Naufal Books.
Nikro, Saadi (2012). The Fragmenting Force of Memory: Self, Literary Style, and Civil War in Lebanon . Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Nikro, Saadi (2013). The Arab Australian Novel: Situating Diasporic and Multicultural Literature. In The Edinburgh Companion to the Arab Novel in English: The Politics of Anglo Arab and Arab American Literature and Culture , ed. Nouri Gana, 298–320. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Nikro, Saadi (2015). Memory in a Paratactic Register: Abbas El-Zein's Leave to Remain . Web. Accessed December 5, 2016. <http://southerlyjournal.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/70.1_LP-Saadi-Nikro-on-Abbas-El-Zein.pdf>.
Nora, Pierre (1989). Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire. Representations , 26, 7–24.
Poletti, Anna and Julie Rak (2014). Introduction. In Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online , eds. Anna Poletti and Julie Rak, 3–22. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Ruchatz, Jens (2009). Photography as Externalisation of Trace. In Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Hand Book , eds. Astrid Erll, Ansgar Nünning, and Sara B. Young, 47–65. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Sawalha, Aseel (2010). Reconstructing Beirut: Memory and Space in a Postwar Arab City . Austin: University of Texas Press.
Schack, Todd (2014). “A Failure of Language”: Achieving Layers of Meaning in Graphic Journalism. Journalism , 15(1), 109–127.
Seigneurie, Ken (2003). Introduction: A Survival Aesthetic for Ongoing War. In Crisis and Memory: The Representation of Space in Modern Levantine Narrative , ed. Ken Seigneurie, 11–32. Wiesbaden: Reichert.
Shearer, David and Francine Pickup (2007). Still Falling Short: Protection and Partnerships in the Lebanon Emergency Response. Disasters , 31, 336–352. doi:10.1111/j.1467-7717.2007.01012.x.
Sidawi, Rafif Rida (2015). Al-riwaya al-lubnaniyah ila ayn? [The Lebanese Novel, Whereto?] An-Nahar . October 10. Web. Accessed August 10, 2016. <http://newspaper.annahar.com/>.
Sontag, Susan (2004). Regarding the Pain of Others . New York: Picador.
Ward, Will (2007). Uneasy Bedfellows: Bloggers and Mainstream Media Report: The Lebanon Conflict. Arab Media and Society 1 . Web. Accessed December 20, 2016. <http://www.arabmediasociety.com/articles/downloads/20070312144654_AMS1_Will_Ward.pdf>.
Whitehead, Anne (2004). Trauma Fiction . Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Wilson-Goldie, Kaelen (2007). The War Works: Video under Siege, Online and in the Aftermath, Again. Art Journal , 66(2), 68–82.
Yared, Hyam (2009). Sous la tonnelle . Paris: Sabine Wespieser.

Comments

Comment on this article

[1] Abd Alrahman, Lana (2008). Talamus . Beirut: Al-dar al-ʿarabiya lilʿulum.

[2] Abd Alrahman, Lana (2011). Ughniah li Margeurite . Beirut: Al-dar al-ʿarabiya lilʿulum.

[3] Abu Hasna, Nafeth (2016). ʿAsal al-maraya . Beirut: Difaf Publications.

[4] Adams, Timothy Dow (1994). Introduction: Life Writing and Light Writing: Autobiography and Photography. MFS: Modern Fiction Studies , 40(3), 459–492.

[5] Alameddine, Rabih (2013). An Unnecessary Woman . New York: Grove.

[6] Alyan, Hala (2012). Atrium . New York: Three Rooms Press.

[7] Balaa, Luma (2015). Exile, Return, and Nationalism In A Goodland. Antipodes , 29(1), 91–104.

[8] Banita, Georgiana (2013). Cosmopolitan Suspicion: Comics Journalism and Graphic Silence. In Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives: Comics at the Crossroads , eds. Daniel Stein, Shane Denson, and Christina Meyer, 49–65. London: Bloomsbury.

[9] Barthes, Roland (1981). Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography . Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill & Wang.

[10] Bazzi, Youssef (2013). Al-riwaya al-lubnaniya al-jadida min “troma” tammuz 2006 w ayyar 2008 [The New Lebanese Novel from the Traumas of July 2006 and May 2008]. Al-Mustaqbal . July 1. Web. Accessed July 18, 2016. <http://www.almustaqbal.com/v4/Article.aspx?Type=np&Articleid=585254>.

[11] Beydoun, Bana (2015). Pizza Delivery. In Beirut Noir , trans. Michelle Hartman, ed. Iman Humaydan, 47–67. New York: Akashic Books.

[12] Boulad, Antoine (2008). Le journal de la guerre . London: Saqi.

[13] Bugeja, Norbert (2012). Postcolonial Memoir in the Middle East: Rethinking the Liminal in Mashriqi Writing . New York: Routledge.

[14] Caruth, Cathy (1991). Introduction to Psychoanalysis, Trauma and Culture I. American Imago , 48(1), 1–12.

[15] Caruth, Cathy (1995). Introduction. In Trauma: Explorations in Memory , ed. Cathy Caruth, 3–12. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

[16] Caruth, Cathy (1996). Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History . Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

[17] Chouman, Hilal (2013). Limbo Beirut . Beirut. Dar al- tanweer.

[18] Chouman, Hilal (2016). Limbo Beirut . Trans. Anna Ziajka Stanton. Austin: University of Texas Press.

[19] Chreiteh, Alexandra (2009). Ali wa ummuhu al-rusiyah . Beirut: Al-dar al-ʿarabiya lilʿulum.

[20] Chreiteh, Alexandra (2015). Ali and His Russian Mother . Trans. Michelle Hartman. Northampton, MA: Interlink.

[21] Eakin, Paul John (1992). Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

[22] Eid, Hoda (2009). Rukam . Beirut: Dar al-farabi.

[23] Al-Khansa, Narmine (2008). Sa'at marmoura . Beirut: Saqi.

[24] El-Kadi, Dania (2010). Summer Blast: When War Threatens Lebanese Women's Plans . Beirut: Turning Point.

[25] El Khalil, Zena (2009). Beirut, I Love You: A Memoir . London: Saqi.

[26] El Khalil, Zena (2006). War Is Becoming a Way of Life. Web. Accessed March 20, 2017. https://electronicintifada.net/content/war-becoming-way-life/6301.

[27] El-Zein, Abbas (2009a). Interpreting Oneself: On Memoirs, Essays, Fiction and Travel Writing. Talk at Macquarie University English Department Seminars Series, May 11, Sydney, Australia.

[28] El-Zein, Abbas (2009b). Leave to Remain: A Memoir . St Lucia: University of Queensland Press.

[29] Fadda-Conrey, Carol (2010). Writing Memories of the Present: Alternative Narratives about the 2006 Israeli War on Lebanon. College Literature , 37(1), 159–173.

[30] Gavriely-Nuri, Dalia (2008). The “Metaphorical Annihilation” of the Second Lebanon War (2006) from the Israeli Political Discourse. Discourse & Society , 19(1), 5–20.

[31] Haddad, Joumana (2010). I Killed Scheherazade: Confessions of an Angry Arab Woman . London: Saqi.

[32] Hammad, Suheir (2008). Breaking poems . New York: Cypher Books.

[33] Harb, Zahera (2009). The July 2006 War and the Lebanese Blogosphere: Towards an Alternative Media Tool in Covering Wars. Journal of Media Practice , 10(2–3), 255–258.

[34] Haugbolle, Sune (2007). From A-lists to Webtifadas: Developments in the Lebanese Blogosphere 2005–2006. Arab Media & Society . 1–24. Web. Accessed December 20, 2016. <http://www.arabmediasociety.com/?article=40>.

[35] Hayek, Ghenwa (2015). Beirut, Imagining the City: Space and Place in Lebanese Literature . I.B. Tauris.

[36] Hirsch, Marianne (2008). The Generation of Postmemory. Poetics Today , 29(1), 103–128.

[37] Hirsch, Marianne and Nancy K. Miller (2011). Rites of Return: Diaspora Poetics and the Politics of Memory . New York: Columbia University Press.

[38] Hordvik, Elin (1999). What Is Psychological Trauma? Methods of Treatment. In Childhood and Trauma: Separation, Abuse, War , eds. Elisabeth Ullman and Werner Hilweg; trans. Mary Heaney Margreiter and Kira Henschel, 23–30. Aldershot: Ashgate.

[39] Hovsepian, Nubar, ed. (2007). The War on Lebanon: A Reader . Ithaca, NY: Olive Branch Press.

[40] Jarrar, Nada Awar (2009). A Good Land . London: HarperCollins.

[41] Jarrar, Sana’ Mahmoud (2015). Nada Jarrar's A Good Land: A Multilateral Trauma. Studies in Literature and Language , 10(3), 50–55.

[42] Jurkiewicz, Sarah (2011). Blogging as Counterpublic? The Lebanese and the Egyptian Blogosphere in Comparison. In Social Dynamics 2.0: Researching Change in Times of Media Convergence , eds. Nadja-Christina Schneider and Bettina Gräf, 27–47. Berlin: Frank & Timme GmbH.

[43] Kacimi, Mohamed (2007). Introduction. In Les belles etrangères: Douze écrivains libanais , ed. Mohamed Kacimi, 9–16. Paris: Verticales/Phase Deux.

[44] Khatib, Lina (2013). Image Politics in the Middle East: The Role of the Visual in Political Struggle . London: I Tauris.

[45] Lang, Felix (2016). The Lebanese Post-Civil War Novel: Memory, Trauma, and Capital . Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

[46] Leibrandt, Isabella (2006). El weblog, un nuevo género de la cultura popular digital. Culturas Populares. Revista Electrónica , 3, 1–18. Web. Accessed July 15, 2016. <http://culturaspopulares.org/textos3/articulos/leibrandt.pdf>.

[47] Moghnieh, Lamia (2015). Humanitarian Therapeutics of War and the Politics of Trauma and Violence in Lebanon. Web. Accessed April 24, 2015. <http://civilsociety-centre.org/paper/humanitarian-therapeutics-war-and-politics-trauma-and-violence-lebanon>.

[48] Mohsen, Ahmad (2013). Sane’ al-al'ab . Beirut: Hachette-Antoine-Naufal Books.

[49] Nikro, Saadi (2012). The Fragmenting Force of Memory: Self, Literary Style, and Civil War in Lebanon . Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

[50] Nikro, Saadi (2013). The Arab Australian Novel: Situating Diasporic and Multicultural Literature. In The Edinburgh Companion to the Arab Novel in English: The Politics of Anglo Arab and Arab American Literature and Culture , ed. Nouri Gana, 298–320. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

[51] Nikro, Saadi (2015). Memory in a Paratactic Register: Abbas El-Zein's Leave to Remain . Web. Accessed December 5, 2016. <http://southerlyjournal.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/70.1_LP-Saadi-Nikro-on-Abbas-El-Zein.pdf>.

[52] Nora, Pierre (1989). Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire. Representations , 26, 7–24.

[53] Poletti, Anna and Julie Rak (2014). Introduction. In Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online , eds. Anna Poletti and Julie Rak, 3–22. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

[54] Ruchatz, Jens (2009). Photography as Externalisation of Trace. In Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Hand Book , eds. Astrid Erll, Ansgar Nünning, and Sara B. Young, 47–65. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

[55] Sawalha, Aseel (2010). Reconstructing Beirut: Memory and Space in a Postwar Arab City . Austin: University of Texas Press.

[56] Schack, Todd (2014). “A Failure of Language”: Achieving Layers of Meaning in Graphic Journalism. Journalism , 15(1), 109–127.

[57] Seigneurie, Ken (2003). Introduction: A Survival Aesthetic for Ongoing War. In Crisis and Memory: The Representation of Space in Modern Levantine Narrative , ed. Ken Seigneurie, 11–32. Wiesbaden: Reichert.

[58] Shearer, David and Francine Pickup (2007). Still Falling Short: Protection and Partnerships in the Lebanon Emergency Response. Disasters , 31, 336–352. doi:10.1111/j.1467-7717.2007.01012.x.

[59] Sidawi, Rafif Rida (2015). Al-riwaya al-lubnaniyah ila ayn? [The Lebanese Novel, Whereto?] An-Nahar . October 10. Web. Accessed August 10, 2016. <http://newspaper.annahar.com/>.

[60] Sontag, Susan (2004). Regarding the Pain of Others . New York: Picador.

[61] Ward, Will (2007). Uneasy Bedfellows: Bloggers and Mainstream Media Report: The Lebanon Conflict. Arab Media and Society 1 . Web. Accessed December 20, 2016. <http://www.arabmediasociety.com/articles/downloads/20070312144654_AMS1_Will_Ward.pdf>.

[62] Whitehead, Anne (2004). Trauma Fiction . Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

[63] Wilson-Goldie, Kaelen (2007). The War Works: Video under Siege, Online and in the Aftermath, Again. Art Journal , 66(2), 68–82.

[64] Yared, Hyam (2009). Sous la tonnelle . Paris: Sabine Wespieser.

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Artistic Fallout from the July 2006 War: Momentum, Mediation, and Mediatization

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