Omar Al-Ghazzi, associate professor in the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), took the virtual stage as the featured speaker for the latest installment of the #IAS_NUQ AIMS Virtual Seminar Series. The seminar, titled "The Time of the State: Arrested Futurity in Lebanese Media," drew from his forthcoming book on the mediation of history in the Arab world.
Al-Ghazzi described history as a transtemporal field, a concept that serves to position political communities both in time and space. Using the case of Lebanon, he examined the "dominant meta-historic narrative," which characterizes Lebanese history as a series of temporal binaries organized around encompassing themes such as peace and war, destruction and reconstruction, suffering and resilience.
Challenging the conventional view of Lebanon and its perennial question, "Where is the state?" Al-Ghazzi posed a thought-provoking query: "When is the state?". Drawing on state and commercially produced media including TV advertising, he emphasized the critical importance of locating state narratives within mediated representations of time, expounding how ruling oligarchs perpetuate a historical and colonial vision of Lebanese exceptionalism and resilience. Central to this narrative is the pivotal role of the banking sector, which remains at the heart of Lebanon's perpetually futurized prosperity.
Supported by Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Arab Media and Information Studies (AIMS) project at #IAS_NUQ is developing the field of critical media and information studies in the Arab region, transforming it into a more interdisciplinary, multilingual, collaborative, research-oriented, and policy-relevant field.
Al-Ghazzi described history as a transtemporal field, a concept that serves to position political communities both in time and space. Using the case of Lebanon, he examined the "dominant meta-historic narrative," which characterizes Lebanese history as a series of temporal binaries organized around encompassing themes such as peace and war, destruction and reconstruction, suffering and resilience.
Challenging the conventional view of Lebanon and its perennial question, "Where is the state?" Al-Ghazzi posed a thought-provoking query: "When is the state?". Drawing on state and commercially produced media including TV advertising, he emphasized the critical importance of locating state narratives within mediated representations of time, expounding how ruling oligarchs perpetuate a historical and colonial vision of Lebanese exceptionalism and resilience. Central to this narrative is the pivotal role of the banking sector, which remains at the heart of Lebanon's perpetually futurized prosperity.
Supported by Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Arab Media and Information Studies (AIMS) project at #IAS_NUQ is developing the field of critical media and information studies in the Arab region, transforming it into a more interdisciplinary, multilingual, collaborative, research-oriented, and policy-relevant field.
