Jocelyne Saab's 1994 film, Kan ya Ma Kan, Bayrut (Once Upon a Time, Beirut) poses an important question. Produced shortly after the end of the Lebanese Civil War, it asks how Beirut's young residents—now approaching adulthood—will rebuild a city they have never seen outside of the destruction of war. How will they know what Beirut was before the war, and what it might become in the decades to follow? In Saab's film, the answer lies in a rich archive of moving images that date back to the 1930s, when French colonial filmmakers brought their cameras to the city for the first time, and continue through the 1970s and the Hollywood spy movies that used Beirut as their backdrop. Kan ya Ma Kan, Bayrut proposes a provocative relationship between Beirut and how it has been imagined. In the film, moving images and their political agendas not only index the city as it was but also have a role to play in how it will develop in the future. Beirut is nothing if not a contentious site of imagination.
Nearly three decades later, Hatim El-Hibri's exciting new book, Visions of Beirut: The Urban Life of Media Infrastructure, extends this line of thinking. Full of rigorous research and insightful analysis, El-Hibri's book demonstrates how various initiatives to visualize Beirut have done more than simply represent the city, instead playing an active role in how people understand and experience it. Following scholars such as Shannon Mattern and Ravi Sundaram, Visions of Beirut ambitiously brings together media studies and urban studies to explore how media representations, technologies, and institutions shape urban space—or fail to do so. For El-Hibri, stitching together these two fields requires that we attend to not only what media show us but also what they conceal. In fact, El-Hibri's discussion of concealment is his most significant contribution. El-Hibri writes that concealment is an “attempt to remain unseen or undetected, or to keep secrets selective.” It is an instance in which media practices become distinctly spatial, as “both an infrastructural modality and a relatively noncommunicative relation” (7). Thus, concealment is a material act—like when media technologies are hidden out of sight to remain undetected—but also a set of visual absences. According to the author, the urban space of Beirut is formed and reformed as much through acts of concealment as it is by attempts to visualize it.
Visions of Beirut tackles several media practices as they intersect with city-making efforts. Each of the four chapters focuses on one kind of image and explores the power relations that produced it. The book advances chronologically, starting with the 1920s and stretching into the 2010s. Chapter 1 focuses on maps, aerial photographs, and urban plans of Beirut across three distinct periods: the French Mandate (1920–43), post-independence (1943–75), and the civil war (1975–90). Based on the collection of maps housed in the Lebanese National Archive, in this chapter El-Hibri argues that maps are not objective attempts to visualize spaces but are rather concerted efforts to intervene in those spaces. As he demonstrates, sometimes maps blatantly represent large ideologies like colonialism or nationalism but, more often, they reveal the “micro-practices” that sustain these ideologies, such as taxation policies, zoning plans, and damage assessment. El-Hibri makes a compelling case for thinking through the ways in which visual representations of Beirut are always embedded in uneven power relations.
Chapters 2 and 3 extend this theory into the 1990s and 2000s, respectively. In Chapter 2 El-Hibri examines the fascinating genre of before and after images of Beirut in the 1990s. The fifteen-year civil war wreaked havoc on the city, leaving much of it in rubble. Over the next decade and a half, wealthy investors rushed to privately develop destroyed parts of the city, especially downtown, which had seen some of the severest damage. In the process, they circulated images that juxtaposed destroyed buildings with architectural renderings that showed what the future might look like with the right financial investment. Often computer generated, before-and-after images attested to the possibilities of imagining the city through digital technologies. Rather than read these images simply as a desire to erase the memory of the war, El-Hibri argues that these images—which were included in films and magazines and on billboards and television—interpellated a very specific viewer, the citizen-investor. As a figure, the citizen-investor “is a way of imagining the self in relationship to the spaces of Beirut (or images of it)” within a larger matrix of financialization, citizenship, and control (68).
In contrast to the mostly still images that animate Chapters 1 and 2, Chapter 3 focuses on live broadcasts during and after the 2006 war, particularly those of the Hezbollah-backed TV station, Al Manar. In this chapter El-Hibri elaborates on his theory of concealment. Among the many forms of concealment he analyzes, two are particularly instructive. First, during the war, Israeli forces bombed Al Manar's broadcast infrastructure, including its primary transponder. Nevertheless, Al Manar only lost signal for a few moments, before switching to a secondary transponder whose location is still unknown. Such an example demonstrates how media infrastructures must sometimes be concealed to ensure smooth functioning. This finding affirms other works in critical media infrastructure studies, including those by Lisa Parks and Nicole Starosielski, who also have examined the motivations for making the material endpoints of infrastructures invisible. The second telling example focuses on live broadcasts of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. During the 2006 war, Nasrallah went into hiding but remained visible through livestreams of his speeches on Al Manar, which were sometimes broadcast during protests. El-Hibri argues that the contrast between the visual liveness of TV broadcasts and Nasrallah's own concealment had the power to transform public spaces into sites of protest, even those that had been sanitized through the real estate development projects described in Chapter 2.
In Chapter 4 El-Hibri continues his discussion of the aftermath of the 2006 war. He examines the Hezbollah Museum of Resistance, which opened in 2010 in the southern town of Mleeta to commemorate the movement's resistance fighters during the war. The location of the museum matters. Located an hour and a half from Beirut, it was built on the site of an underground bunker used in Hezbollah's guerilla warfare. El-Hibri argues that—unlike mediations of concealment—the Museum of Resistance allows people to experience concealment by guiding visitors through the underground tunnels that concealed actual fighters during the war. Admittedly, it is hard to place this chapter in a book purportedly about Beirut. However, El-Hibri suggests that visual culture outside the capital city matters, too, and can even help us understand Beirut's visuality and spatiality better. Indeed, he claims that the Mleeta museum, with its aesthetics of resistance, provides an alternative to the neoliberal economy of images that have shaped contemporary Beirut.
Visions of Beirut builds a compelling case for its detailed study of images, media, and the city of Beirut. The book makes two important contributions to the study of media in the Middle East. First, it provides a provocative theory of concealment to understand the relationship between images and absences. This line of thinking extends broader discussions in media studies that have attempted to understand the politics of visibility. Second, in Visions of Beirut El-Hibri takes a sweeping view of media, examining everything from photographs to maps to television to cinema to billboards to museums. Studies of media in the Arab world often have been confined to a limited number of technologies and forms. I hope that Visions of Beirut will serve as an invitation for more scholars of the Middle East to analyze a wide range of media, including objects that may not seem like media at first glance.
It is only natural that a book as ambitious as Visions of Beirut leaves something minor to be desired. In this case, I had hoped the book would deliver more on its subtitle: The Urban Life of Media Infrastructure. Although El-Hibri claims an infrastructural approach, there could have been a more systematic attempt to understand Beirut's media infrastructure, including fiber-optic cables, satellite dishes, electrical grids, antennas, and cellphone towers. He depends, for example, on Brian Larkin's oft-cited definition of infrastructure as “matter that enable the movement of other matter” (5). Yet the two ideas at the heart of this definition—materiality and circulation—do not figure prominently in the book. Thinking about how media as lived, material objects have helped shape Beirut would have been an interesting addition.
Ultimately, Visions of Beirut offers a lot to its readers. It will be of great interest to scholars of global media, Middle Eastern studies, and urban studies and will make an excellent addition to many graduate-level syllabi. I have already begun imagining how I can use it in my own graduate teaching at the American University of Beirut. One thing is certain, Visions of Beirut has changed how I see the city that I have called home for the better part of a decade.
