Balconies onto Beirut

Abstract

Space is a site on and through which struggles for identity and power are enacted and the nature of those struggles is reflected in the way place is constituted. This paper will consider the nature of place in Beirut by examining how place is constituted in the geography of the city and in literary and artistic work. Further, the paper will consider how Beirut functions as a mirror of other places and how other places are mirrored in Beirut by mapping a trajectory for Beirut as a travelling city. By exploring Beirut as a travelling city, the paper will explore how questions of migration and exile, in creating diasporic identities, also inform the constitution of place. In moving between the local and the global, and by extension the micro and macro view of the city, the paper hopes to maintain a tension between detail and panorama and to locate place in the movement between those spaces. This reading is made possible partially by the view from the balcony, as both a symbol and an actual place, in which meaning is created and place is constituted.