The Ethics of Representation in Literature, Art, and Journalism: Transnational Responses to the Siege of Beirut

This transnational collection of essays, interviews, and creative pieces on the 1982 Siege of Beirut explores literary representations of the siege by a diverse set of writers alongside journalism and other media including film, music, and photography. The book investigates and promotes an awareness of an ethics of representation on questions of extreme emotional investment, comparing representations of the siege to representations of 9/11 and similar traumatic events, visiting responses from those of different cultural backgrounds to the same event and considering implications with respect to comparative approaches. Chapters explore how literature, journalism, and art contribute to overcoming the dangers of forgetting and denial, memorial excess and fundamentalism, the radicalization of violence, and the complete breakdown of trust on international levels, asking how they challenge geopolitical, intellectual, and psychological states of siege and instead promote awareness, acknowledgement, mourning, and justice across divided communities. The book extends the use of postcolonial methodologies affiliated with history, international relations, and psychoanalysis (memory, trauma) to Middle-Eastern studies, and visits the siege's effect on different forms of memory and memorialization: selective memory, trauma, loss of Palestinian archives, gaps and fissures in historical accounts, recording of eyewitness reports, and artistic re-imaginings and realizations of alternative archives. This collection elaborates how the siege in Beirut in particular contributes to our understanding of representation, trauma and testimony, drawing attention to key psychoanalytic works and showing how siege literature attends not only to questions of trauma but to questions of collective resilience.