Lebano-Pathography

This original and engaging volume offers a diagnosis of contemporary Lebanon in the aftermath of the devastating 2020 port blast in Beirut, bringing together a macro perspective on political-economic breakdown with highly personal and heartfelt life stories of personal illness amidst public pain. Lebanon's recent traumas are stark and specific, as the book attests, but they also resonate with how politics has become pathological in many parts of the world. In this context, the contributors' autobiographical narration across scales from the mind and body to the city and nation offers creative and intellectual paths towards a therapeutic reckoning with the deepening ills of our shared present. Ruben Andersson, University of Oxford Sleiman El Hajj brings together social and medical pathologies of illness which fill a lacuna in Arab Middle Eastern literature, in various ways reflecting, subverting, intoning, queering, and fragmenting ‘the dominant discourses in Lebanese patriarchy’ – along with its sexist, xenophobic, and ableist abominations of sexual blackmail, pathologised queerness, disordered memories, Alzheimer, medical malpractice, immigrant narratives, vicarious traumas, and mental health crises. This is defiant writing, persuasively putting the case for meaning making beyond the conventional diktats of verification through a lens of a reified objectivity. The book instead offers an authenticity that dares to subvert academic orthodoxies of knowledge production while bearing unflinching depictions of individual lives lived under dystopian conditions. Maria Jaschok, University of Oxford