:The Politics of Art: Dissent and Cultural Diplomacy in Lebanon, Palestine, and Jordan

Abstract

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 fiberoptic 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.