'Cultural Aspects of Hizbullah's Politics'

PSPA cordially invites you to a lecture entitled "Cultural Aspects of Hizbullah's Politics" by AUB PSPA Professor Bashir Saade. All are welcome.

Abstract:

Hizbullah as a political organization can be viewed as a field of cultural production that informs and shapes social action. Different forms of writings, from declarations, speeches, books, newspaper articles, to video clips, songs, rituals, parades, are marks of the presence of that party and the different representations it projects to the world at large. This inquiry starts from the idea that this proliferation of cultural idioms signals various ideological claims that have a "performative" dimension and are constantly renegotiated.
Rather than focus on 'what is being said', the content and what it means, it may be better to look at 'how it is being said', the form, where it emerges from, and how it strives to produce statements of knowledge or truth.

This approach to textual analysis drops the traditional 'political science' unified sense that a political party has one monolithic and clearly thought of ideology and focuses on what will be called the various 'writing strategies' Hizbullah's related intellectuals are involved in at various points in time and in different context. An on-going and constantly re-negotiated sense of what various political social realities mean triggers all kinds of claims to knowledge, validity and truths. In this talk, after explaining this methodological approach to studying politics, I will focus on one of its application: how remembering the human legacy claimed by the party (martyrs, militants, clerics, and leaders) has led to a specific conception of time conducive to militant action, and imaginary senses of belongings.