ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to tease out the intersection of displacement and reconstruction in a specific urban setting: The shopping mall in post-Civil War Beirut. Drawing upon cultural critique of late capitalist urbanism, the chapter argues that its design inspires a sense of loss and disorientation that resembles a condition of displacement. In the specific context of Beirut, this is entangled with other, often more violent, forms of displacement.
The chapter proceeds to confront this bleak picture of the amnesiac mall with ethnographic studies that describe modes of conviviality in shopping malls in the wider Middle Eastern region. Far from denying their decontextualized architecture and exclusivist class dynamics, these studies show that shopping malls also form sites where social life can thrive. Attention to social liveliness in an otherwise alienating environment will subsequently be used as a ground for the analysis of literary representations of Beirut's consumerist urbanism. The chapter argues that in these works, written by Rabee Jaber and Hassan Daoud, the liveliness of spaces of consumption are presented as a source of solace in the face of loss. The narratives thus offer a glimpse of what urban recovery may look like, even if situated within an exclusive urbanism that continues to deserve our critique.
