Join us for an in-person book talk on War Remains: Ruination and Resistance in Lebanon with author Yasmine Khayyat and scholar Nikolas Kosmatopoulos. 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.
This event will be held in-person at The People’s Forum and streamed on our YouTube page. Please be prepared to show proof of vaccination at the door if attending in person.
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NIKOLAS KOSMATOPOULOS is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Studies and the Department of Anthropology, Sociology, and Media Studies at the American University of Beirut. He is co-founder of the research collectives Floating Laboratory of Action and Theory at Sea and Decolonize Hellas. His research and teaching fields of interest include political anthropology, policy expertise and global institutions, and in particular peacemaking, statebuilding and crisis resolution in the Middle East, and as of late, the politics of solidarity and resistance at sea and the political economies of ships. He is currently finalizing a manuscript called Master Peace: Violence, Experts, Lebanon for Penn University Press – Series of Ethnographies of Violence. His research has been published in Peacebuilding, Social Anthropology / Anthropologie Sociale, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Public Culture, Third World Quarterly, Social Analysis, Millenium, and Anthropology Today, among others.
