This presentation compares the different expressions and formations of collective feeling during the 2019 October uprisings in Lebanon in order to explore how affective nationalism was reconfigured and remediated during this time and to show how political action and public feeling are deeply entangled. If Rancière describes dissent in aesthetic terms, as that which is able to “expand the field of the sensible” (Adami), I would also characterize it in affective terms as that which creates space for new feelings to be felt. While the uprisings were initially triggered by a grossly unjust tax law, the monumental nature and stubborn endurance of the movement reflected the crossing of an affective threshold that burst open the doors to a radically new felt reality and historical present in Lebanon. The eruption of what many called the ‘October Revolution’ reflected an affective breaking point with the decades of corrupt, kleptocratic political rule, and the series of crises that have gripped Lebanon since the abrupt end of its fifteen-year civil war. This presentation explores how we can account for this collective affect by comparing its mediation and expression across a range of figures and embodied practices that animated the uprisings. From the iconicity of the “kick queen” photograph and the videos of mothers protesting for unity, to the restructuring of the sensorial landscape through pot-banging and multi-neighborhood marches, these examples offer a rich site to compare the various ways affect suffuses practices of dissent, as well as the different politics that these affects engender.
Zeina Tarraf is an assistant professor of media studies at the American University of Beirut where she teaches courses on Arab Media and Society, War and Media, Visual Culture Studies, and Popular Culture. Her current research project focuses on the affective dynamics of perpetual crisis in Lebanon and its imbrication with various mediating processes.