In Visions of Beirut Hatim El-Hibri explores how the creation and circulation of images have 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 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 Beirut's 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.

Note on Translation and Transliteration  vii
Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction  1
1. The Social Life of Maps of Beirut  21
2. Images of Before/After in the Economy of Postwar Construction  64
3. Concealment, Liveness, and Al Manar TV  105
4. The Open Secret of Concealment at the Mleeta Museum  144
Conclusion  178
Notes  183
References  217
Index  247