Revolutionary Songs and Leftist War of Position in Lebanon

Room 222, Nicol Hall, Beirut campus

The departments of Social Sciences and Humanities at LAU cordially invite you to a talk by Mohamad J. Hodeib titled: “Revolutionary Songs and Leftist War of Position in Lebanon”. 

In the years preceding the civil war (1975-1990), multiple factors nurtured a revolutionary leftist moment in Lebanon. By contending normative accounts that often connote the civil war as a state of artistic and cultural stagnation, Hodeib’s research focuses on the emergence and development of leftist music, underlining its connection with the war’s political culture and military conditions.

Through a Gramscian theoretical framework and methodology, Hodeib observes how leftist organizations harbored a generation of militant artists and songwriters in the context of a counter-hegemonic war of position since the 1960s. Underlining the complex interrelationship between cultural producers and political organizations, his research observes this genre as both an organic product of radical leftist political culture and an agent of its reproduction in mass media.

Mohamad J. Hodeib is currently completing an M.A. degree in Middle East Studies at the City University of New York (CUNY).