media studies | middle east studies | visual culture
Visions of Beirut The Urban Life of Media Infrastructure
HATIM EL-HIBRI
Aerial photograph from damage assessment study, 1991. Photo courtesy of Belal Hibri.
May 288 pages, 40 illustrations paper, 978-1-4780-1077-7 $26.95/£20.99 cloth, 978-1-4780-1044-9 $99.95/£83.00
In Visions of Beirut Hatim El-Hibri explores how the creation and circulation of images has shaped the urban spaces and cultural imaginaries of Beirut. Drawing on fieldwork and texts ranging from maps, urban plans, and aerial photographs to live television and drone-camera footage, El-Hibri traces the histories of how the technologies and media infrastructure that visualize the city are used to consolidate or destabilize regimes of power. Throughout the twentieth century, colonial, economic, and military mapping projects helped produce and govern its spaces. In the 1990s, the imagery of its post-civil war downtown reconstruction cast Beirut as a site of financial investment in ways that obscured its ongoing crises. During and following the 2006 Israel/Hizbullah war, Hizbullah’s use of live television broadcasts of fighting and protests along with its construction of a war memorial museum at a former secret military bunker demonstrate the tension between visualizing space and the practices of concealment. Outlining how Beirut’s urban space and public life intertwine with images and infrastructure, El-Hibri interrogates how media embody and exacerbate the region’s political fault lines. Hatim El-Hibri is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at George Mason University.
queer studies | middle east studies | sociology
Sexual Politics
Queer in Translation
under
Sexual Politics under Neoliberal Islam
Neoliberal
EVREN SAVCI
Islam
Evren Savcı
January 256 pages paper, 978-1-4780-1136-1 $25.95/£20.99 cloth, 978-1-4780-1031-9 $99.95/£83.00
In Queer in Translation, Evren Savcı analyzes the travel and translation of Western lgbt political terminology to Turkey in order to illuminate how sexual politics have unfolded under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s akp government. Under the akp’s neoliberal Islamic regime, she shows, there has been a stark shift from a politics of multicultural inclusion to one of securitized authoritarianism. Drawing from ethnographic work with queer activist groups to understand how discourses of sexuality travel and are taken up in political discourse, Savcı traces the intersection of queerness, Islam, and neoliberal governance within new and complex regimes of morality. Savcı turns to translation as a queer methodology to think Islam and neoliberalism together and to evade the limiting binaries of traditional/modern, authentic/colonial, global/local, and East/West—thereby opening up ways of understanding the social movements and political discourse that coalesce around sexual liberation in ways that do justice to the complexities both of what circulates under the signifier Islam and of sexual political movements in Muslim-majority countries. PERVERSE MODERNITIES A series edited by Jack Halberstam and Lisa Lowe
Evren Savcı is Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University.
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