The Accident of Atrocity: Narratives of Surviving Dispossession from Modern Lebanon
This book emerges from my premise that rather than simply a repertoire of violence, atrocity is intimately related to narrative. Atrocity is birthed from narrative; its very repertoires seek to corroborate a narrative (and make them continue to hold “true”); and it generates its own narratological aftermath—one which should be considered as much part of the atrocity itself as the event of violence to which the term usually refers. I undertake this study in the context of modern Lebanon’s 1860, 1958 and 1975-1990 civil wars, using sources both historical (e.g.: memoirs, political writing and speeches, documentary film) and literary (e.g.: fiction, theatre) in Arabic, French and English.
It is a monograph which bridges fields seldom in direct conversation despite similar objects (trauma and memory studies, war studies, perpetrator studies and literary studies) — and which seeks to re-enter the analytical power of a literary approach to the study of Lebanon’s histories. It is a book which insists on the very real, material, and lasting power of narrative.
Renée Ragin Randall 