Public Talk by Rohit Goel at Ashkal Alwan

Ashkal Alwan is holding a public talk with Rohit Goel about Lebanon and the aftermath of its civil war. Rohit Goel is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of Chicago. His dissertation, War and Peace in Lebanon, proposes a global theory of “aspirational nationalism” through an analysis of post-war Lebanese politics, law, violence, and aesthetics.

Abstract: The talk analyzes the absences that sustain post-war citizen desires for a fully realized nation-state. To survive indefinitely, the aspirational process that is Lebanese nationalism requires a permanent series of obstacles to overcome. I suggest, first, how these roadblocks for survival have taken the form of lack, the absence of a strong state, people who died or went missing during the war, assassins on the run, random violence, memory of the past, and stability more generally. Second, I analyze how scholars, journalists, NGOs, policy-makers, politicians, and citizens interested in Lebanon have worked to perpetuate these voids in their very efforts to fill them. As a result, they have sustained a Lebanese national imaginary that sits anxiously between a desire for lasting peace and the haunting specter of civil violence. Finally, in the moments when post-war Lebanese have verged on experiencing the presence of what is ordinarily absent—the return of a missing loved one, the public viewing of a censored film, the proliferation of civil war memory projects—anxiety has set in, prompting the re-presentation of the everyday conditions of absence crucial to the survival of Lebanon.

Free entrance