Stone C. Popular Culture and Nationalism in Lebanon: The Fairouz and Rahbani Nation

Routledge, 2008. — 241 p.Based on an award-winning thesis, Popular Culture and Nationalism in Lebanon is a pioneering study of musical theater and popular culture and its relation to the production of identity in Lebanon in the second half of the twentieth century.In the aftermath of the departure of the French from Lebanon and the civil violence of 1958, the Rahbani Brothers (Asi and Mansour) staged a series of folkloric musical-theatrical extravaganzas at the annual Baalbeck Festival which highlighted the talents of Asi’s wife, the Lebanese diva Fairouz, arguably the most famous living Arab singer. The inclusion of these folkloric vignettes into the Festival’s otherwise European-dominated cultural agenda created a powerful nation-building combination of what Partha Chatterjee calls the “appropriation of the popular” and the “classicization of tradition.” This musical-theatrical movement coincided with the confluence of increasing internal and external migration in Lebanon, as well as with the rapid development of mass-media technology, of which the Baalbeck Festival can be seen as an extension. Employing theories of nationalism, modernity, globalism, and locality, the book shows that these factors combined to give the project a potent, if not always constructive, identity-forming power. Small wonder then that with the start of the civil war in 1975 would come the collapse of this project. In the ashes of these events Ziad Rahbani, the son of Fairouz and Asi, began to author, compose, and star in his own series of exceedingly popular musical plays. These works comically and parodically confronted the gap between his parents’ Lebanon and the Lebanon of brutal internecine war. Ziad’s plays portray a much more heteroglossic and complex Lebanon than that of his parents. He achieves this, however, without completely breaking free from the strong pull of his parents’ project. In the space of intertextual connections and the interpersonal and intergenerational relationships among the figures in question, one can see how the nation comes to be debated, imagined, and represented.