Visions of Beirut

“Hatim El-Hibri weaves a narrative that articulates concealment and infrastructure onto a conceptual terrain that transcends the empirical context of Lebanon. This engaging, groundbreaking, and indispensable book makes a truly meaningful and influential intervention in global media studies, Middle East studies, and urban studies.” - Marwan M. Kraidy, author of The Naked Blogger of Cairo: Creative Insurgency in the Arab World

“Visions of Beirut is a compelling work of careful analysis and creative connections that proposes a historically informed set of powerful readings about the transformations of Beirut's public(s) and spaces. Hatim El-Hibri masterfully deconstructs outmoded assumptions about Lebanon's political economy and societies, unravelling instead the everyday visual infrastructures that sustain and reproduce forces such as sectarianism and financialization. The outcome is an important contribution that implores us to think critically about how image, its mediation, and infrastructures are remaking cities in today's world.” - Mona Fawaz, Professor of Urban Studies and Planning at the American University of Beirut

“Visions of Beirut comes at a crucial moment for the city and for the country, coinciding with the most stringent economic crisis Lebanon has ever faced and in the aftermath of one of the largest nonnuclear explosions ever recorded.... The recent events confirm, once again, El-Hibri’s treatise and the validity of its theoretical framework."

“Visions of Beirut is a substantial book that offers an interdisciplinary approach to the visual culture that has shaped the urban life of Beirut. . . . [It] cultivates an outside the box insight of how media technologies and infrastructures can consolidate or destabilize regimes of power.” - Maria Bou Zeid, Eurasian Geography and Economics

“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.” - Blake Atwood, International Journal of Middle East Studies