The Beirut Coffeehouse and Café

Abstract

Beirut, a city with multiple histories, multiple profiles, and contested cultural identities, remains at the heart of cultural production. I argue that the Beirut coffeehouse and cafe shed light on Beirut’s identity, serving as a place that both represents and reflects culture, and a place that produces and informs culture. This thesis aims to study the arrival and history of coffee and the coffeehouse in Beirut, the transformation of the urban space, the significance and importance of the coffeehouse, and the multilayered representations of the coffeehouse and cafe through film and literature in Lebanon. The introduction of coffee in Beirut predates this paper by a few centuries, as this paper focuses on the 1950s through the 1980s, with a special emphasis on the 1960s and 1970s.

The reasons behind this chosen time period include Lebanon’s independence in 1943 and the importance of looking at Lebanon through the lens of its nation-building period, the second Arab Nahda that speaks volumes of the cultural production in the region, and the years leading up to and leading through the first half of the Lebanese civil war, which begs the questions of national identity and national representation. To reiterate, I argue that coffeehouses serve as a lens in which to study the culture of Beirut and attempt to define the culture of Beirut as I study the movements that came out of these spaces.

In order to take one step further in understanding cultural production, I will highlight a few case studies which will look at national icons, films, and historic moments.