Neighborhood and Boulevard Reading through the Modern Arab City [Hardcover]

Combines the styles of memoir, history, anthropology, and theory to develop an innovative reflection on the materiality of culture. Through its style and content, the text challenges the Orientalist bifurcation between tradition and modernity in the Arab world, revealing instead tradition's own dynamism and its coexistence alongside modernity.The Plaza The Ottoman Cafe The Seaport The Christian Alley The French Zone Hill and Plain The Market Pleasure Boulevards

It is hard to exaggerate the renewed significance of Ziadeh's Neighborhood and Boulevard in its English version at a time when the city of Cairo and its Tahrir Square have entered into a renewed pact with Arab modernity. When this book was written in the mid-1990s, the Arab world was still very much in the grips of the postcolonial traumas of modern nation-building, with the years 1948 and 1967 indelibly carved as markers of catastrophe and defeat on the bodies and souls of its urbanity. Now, those traumas have yielded to a euphoric Arab Spring. The delightful narrative experiments of Ziadeh in this book yields further credence to the central function of literary imagination, not just in the sense of urbanity that he so superbly depicts in this seminal book, but of its prophetic anticipation of what is unfolding right in front of our eyes from Morocco to Syria, from Jordan to Yemen. This is a work of densely inventive literary imagination, framing a groundbreaking spatial register for alternative sites of modernity. - Hamid Dabashi, Columbia University

At once palimpsest, mosaic, collage, and meander, Neighborhood and Boulevard presents a profoundly poignant depiction. Khaled Ziadeh urges for the restoration of the historically built community that has been written and re-written into the Lebanese city s topography and demography, despite decades of Ottoman imperialism, European colonialism, Arab nationalism, and, more recently, sectarianism. Not unlike Benjamin s Parisian flaneurl“Z