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Beirut’s Suspended Now

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Precarious Imaginaries of Beirut

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Abstract

This chapter develops the concept of the “suspended now” as a shared experience of contemporary Beirut. The suspended now seems like an eternally stretched out present, now, which is suspended between a past and a future that remain out of reach. The word “suspended” simultaneously evokes the meaning of dangling in a void and of delay and postponement. The present can be understood as an unequal overlapping of an unresolved space of experience (developed in the first section) and a volatile horizon of expectation (developed in the second section). The chapter proceeds to unpack the notion of the chronotope to relate this peculiar temporality to Beirut’s urban space as well as to distinguish various frameworks of understanding Beirut’s suspended now—in particular the chronotope of the city in transition and the chronotope of the precarious city, which are used throughout this book to grasp a gradual transformation in Lebanese cultural production. The third section summarizes three recurrent narratives of the chronotope of the city in transition. The last two sections relate the suspended now to global dynamics of urban renewal and pracaritization to forward the alternative chronotope of the precarious city.

Beirut and its denizens are famously and infamously unpredictable.

—Rabih Alameddine (2013: 52).

They do not dare to look behind them, nor project themselves forward.

—Ghassan Salhab (synopsis Terra Incognita, 2003).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The number of non-governmental organizations in Lebanon has been growing exponentially since the 1990s. I have found no statistics, but the United Nations Development Programme Lebanon publishes a regularly updated list here http://www.undp.org.lb/partners/NGOs/GeographicArea.pdf.

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  1. Leiden Institute for Area Studies, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

    Judith Naeff

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Naeff, J. (2018). Beirut’s Suspended Now. In: Precarious Imaginaries of Beirut. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65933-6_2

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