Lebanon
Quick Facts:
- Government: Unitary Parliamentary Confessionalist Constitutional Republic
- President: Michel Aoun
- Prime Minister: Najib Mikati
- Capital: Beirut
- Population: 6.85 Million (2018 estimate)
Image sources:
By Υπουργείο Εξωτερικών - Συνάντηση ΥΠΕΞ Ν. Δένδια με Πρόεδρο Λιβάνου M. Aoun (Βηρυτός, 19.02.2020),
CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=93813510
By Mueller / MSC, CC BY 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=69023593
Books & Articles
Local Music Scenes and Globalization by Call Number: ML3917.L43 B87ISBN: 9780415808132Publication Date: 2012-12-19This book offers the first in-depth study of experimental and popular music scenes in Beirut, looking at musicians working towards a new understanding of musical creativity and music culture in a country that is dominated by mass-mediated pop music, and propaganda. Burkhalter studies the generation of musicians born at the beginning of the Civil War in the Lebanese capital, an urban and cosmopolitan center with a long tradition of cultural activities and exchanges with the Arab world, Europe, the US, and the former Soviet Union. These Lebanese rappers, rockers, death-metal, jazz, and electro-acoustic musicians and free improvisers choose local and transnational forms to express their connection to the broader musical, cultural, social, and political environment. Burkhalter explores how these musicians organize their own small concerts for 'insider' audiences, set up music labels, and network with like-minded musicians in Europe, the US, and the Arab world. Several key tracks are analyzed with methods from ethnomusicology, and popular music studies, and contextualized through interviews with the musicians. Discussing key references from belly dance culture (1960s), psychedelic rock in Beirut (1970s), the noises of the Lebanese Civil war (1975-1990), and transnational Pop-Avant-Gardes and World Music 2.0 networks, this book contributes to the study of localization and globalization processes in music in an increasingly digitalized and transnational world. At the core, this music from Beirut challenges "ethnocentric" perceptions of "locality" in music. It attacks both "Orientalist" readings of the Arab world, the Middle East, and Lebanon, and the focus on musical "difference" in Euro-American music and culture markets. On theoretical grounds, this music is a small, but passionate attempt to re-shape the world into a place where "modernity" is not "euro-modernity" or "euro-american modernity," but where possible new configurations of modernity exist next to each other.
Arabic Music and the Piano: The Use of the Piano in Lebanon and Egypt During the Golden Age of Arabic Music by Call Number: Online Disssertation/Thesis- When the Music Stops; Lebanon's Economy by Call Number: Online Article
Khalil Gibran
A young Gibran, c. 1898
Image Source: The United States Library of Congress, photograph by F. Holland Day
Khalil Gibran was a Lebanese-American writer, poet, and artist. Growing up in Lebanon, he was educated both in Beirut and in Boston overseas in the United States. His writings were published during his life in both Arabic and English in the United States, and he wrote for Arabic newspapers and magazines such as Al-Funoon. Many of his sentiments were not well-received by the Ottoman Empire overseas, leading to some of his works being banned by Ottoman authorities. Alongside his visual art, he is most remembered for his novels and poetry, including The Madman (1918), The Prophet (1923), and his last book The Earth Gods (1931).
A Second Treasury of Kahlil Gibran by Call Number: PJ7826.I2 A23Kahlil Gibran, author of "The Prophet", is known throughout the world as the immortal Prophet of Lebanon and the Savant of his Age. "A Treasury of Kahlil Gibran", which sold over a hundred thousand copies, led to a wide demand for a sequel volume. The demand has been met in "A Second Treasury of Kahlil Gibran". In this magnificent volume Gibran's writing in his beloved mother tongue, Arabic, have been translated superbly into Englis by his great friend, Anthony Rizeallah Ferris. Included are four great books: "The Broken Wings", an exquisitely tender, poetic love story; "The Voice of the Master", Gibran's remarkable study of his life; "Thoughts and Meditations", containing Gibran's spiritual message to the world; and "Kahlil Gibran: A Self Portrait", in which Gibran's greatness is revealed through his letters.
Kahlil Gibran by Call Number: PJ7826.I2 Z615Drawing on masses of new and rediscovered material, the authors describe Gibran's boyhood in Lebanon, his family's impoverished years in turn-of-the century Boston, and his eventual friendship with that city's intellectual and artistic elite.
Lebanese Instruments
The Lute is an ancient stringed musical instrument. It has a pear-shaped body, a neck with a fretted (ridged) finger board, and a pegbox attached to the neck at a sharp angle. The pegs are turned to tune the 11 strings, which run along the neck to a low bridge near the bottom of the body. The player plucks the strings with the thumb and fingers of the right hand. The fingers of the left hand press down on the strings along the neck to set the pitch.
The mijwiz is a traditional Middle East musical instrument popular in Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria. Its name in Arabic means "dual," because of its consisting of two, short, bamboo pipes with reed tips put together, making the mijwiz a double-pipe, single-reed woodwind instrument.
The Tablah, called different names in various countries and is also known as a goblet drum, is a single head membranophones with a goblet shaped body used mostly in Egypt and is considered the National symbol of Egyptian Shaabi Music, also in parts of the West Asia, North Africa, South Asia, and Eastern Europe.
Daf also known as Dayereh and Riq is a Middle Eastern frame drum musical instrument, used in popular and classical music in Iran and Pakistan. It is also used in Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Caucasus, Balkans, many regions of Georgia, in parts of the Russian polar regions, and Lebanon.
The Buzuq is a long-necked fretted lute related to the Greek bouzouki and Turkish saz It is an essential instrument in the Rahbani repertoire, but it is not classified among the classical instruments of Arab or Turkish music. However, this instrument may be looked upon as a larger and deeper-toned relative of the saz, to which it could be compared in the same way as the viola to the violin in Western music.
Books on Lebanon in Our Collection
Lebanon by
Lebanonnbsp;examines the ideological, political and social underpinnings of the attempted coup against General Chihab's government in Lebanon in 1961. The author analyzes the role of the Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party, the history of the army in Lebanon and it role in Lebanese politics and the impact of the coup on Lebanese political life. This book providesnbsp;an extraordinarynbsp;insight into the mechanisms of military coups in the Arab world and will be of interest to students and researchers of the history and politics of the Middle East.
Call Number: E-Book
The Lebanese and the World by
For more than a century, people have been emigrating from countries of the Mediterranean basin - Spain, Italy, Sicily, Greece and parts of the Near East - to the New World of America and Australasia. This emigration has formed an important part of the international movement of population which is one of the features of the modern world. This book is concerned with one specific movement, that of emigrants from Lebanon who have established communities in North and South America, the Caribbean, Australia and West Africa, and more recently in the Gulf and other parts of the Middle East. The book is a collection of essays based on papers delivered at a conference on Lebanese Emigration organised by the Centre for Lebanese Studies in Oxford. The chapters are written by historians, economists, sociologists and political scientists, coming from various backgrounds and disciplines. The attempt to evaluate the impact of the emigrants from Lebanon on the host societies, the process of integration, their economic, political and cultural significance, as well as their relations with the home country and their contribution to its development. The book also touches on the more recent emigration during the recent war in Lebanon one of the pressing problems facing the country at present. Issues discussed include the effects of the war on the established immigrant communities. This is perhaps the first comprehensive attempt to make a comparative study of the life of an immigrant community of common origin in different continents and cultures.
Call Number: DS80.9 .L42 1992
The Lebanese Diaspora by
The Lebanese are the largest group of Middle Eastern immigrants in the United States, and Lebanese immigrants are also prominent across Europe and the Americas. Based on over eighty interviews with first-generation Lebanese immigrants in the global cities of New York, Montreal and Paris, this book shows that the Lebanese diaspora - like all diasporas - constructs global relations connecting and transforming their new societies, previous homeland and world-wide communities. Taking Lebanese immigrants' forms of identification, community attachments and cultural expression as manifestations of diaspora experiences, Dalia Abdelhady delves into the ways members of Lebanese diasporic communities move beyond nationality, ethnicity and religion, giving rise to global solidarities and negotiating their social and cultural spaces. The Lebanese Diaspora explores new forms of identities, alliances and cultural expressions, elucidating the daily experiences of Lebanese immigrants and exploring new ways of thinking about immigration, ethnic identity, community, and culture in a global world. By criticizing and challenging our understandings of nationality, ethnicity and assimilation, Abdelhady shows that global immigrants are giving rise to new forms of cosmopolitan citizenship.
Call Number: DS80.6 .A23 2011 and E-Book
Remember Me to Lebanon by
Evelyn C. Shakir paints tales that are rich in history and background. She sets her stories in different eras, from the 1960s to the present, peopled with Lebanese women of different ages, sometimes writing letters, often reminiscing, looking back as far as the turn of the century. In different ways, these first and second-generation women struggle with feminist issues overshadowed by the demands of dual cultures. In Young Ali a teenager tries to listen to her beloved father's time-honored tales of males in friendship and marriage. Aggie of House Calls is a deceased matriarch who returns to haunt her family with reminders of the customs she fought to uphold while alive. Shakir's other heroines include a thrice-divorced thirty-year-old woman quibbling with a modern matchmaker, an elderly non-Lebanese woman who spies on Muslim neighbors in the wake of 9/11, and a traditional wife and mother who thinks she has found a route out of Old World womanly duties. Many of the authors's women grapple with reclaiming or abandoning ancestral demands, and finessing age-old male-female relationships. In Oh, Lebanon a war-haunted Lebanese-born woman willfully departs from the mores of her upbringing, with surprising results. With agile humor and emotional truth, Shakir offers multiple perspectives on Lebanese women trying to change roles in a new landscape without surrendering cultural identity.
Call Number: PS3619.H3532 R46 2007 and E-Book
