Visions of the South : precarity and the “good life” in the visual culture of Tyre -

Abstract

This thesis examines and unpacks the visual culture of Tyre, a city in south Lebanon, through three different sites: the material city-space; El-Buss refugee camp—a Palestinian camp that is part of the city’s urban fabric; and the online digital platform Instagram. It examines the ways in which the city and its visual landscape are imagined, re-imagined and re-assembled, highlighting two main vectors: precarity and the “good life”. Building upon the work of Judith Naeff (2018) and Lauren Berlant (2011), the thesis argues that precarity emerges on three fronts: as an experience of war and insecurity, as an identitarian struggle vis-à-vis a contested Shia milieu in the city, and as an economic and labor condition symptomatic of postwar political- sectarian frameworks. The “good life” is a similarly multi-faceted notion: it is the fantasy of upward mobility; the fantasy of clean beaches and curated leisure spaces; and the fantasy of The thesis examines elements of Tyre’s diverse visual landscape—its billboards, flags, posters, digital representations— through the vectors of precarity and the “good life”, looking at the narratives and imaginaries of the city that emerge. It finds that the city’s visual landscape is governed by complex power structures that re-shape the material and imagined space along identitarian and ideological lines. It also finds that the dialectic of the “good life” and precarity that shapes the city’s visual culture is symptomatic of a postwar, neoliberal moment in which the present feels suspended; trapped between an unresolved past and an uncertain future.