Achrafiyeh Invaded: The Politics of Fear in a Visual Representation of the Lebanese Factionalism

In February 2013, a short film appeared on the Internet commemorating the looting of the Danish Embassy in Achrafiyeh, the heartland of the Christian Beirut, following the publication of the Prophet’s cartoons. Posted by an activist of the Free Patriotic Movement – a party mainly recruiting among Christian – the video plays on various temporalities to stage a memory of fear. I discuss how this representation is articulated around the tropes of territorial invasion and struggle for survival, embodied by the continual evocation of Martyrs. In doing so, I argue that the clip activates an affectivity of communion addressed to the Lebanese Christians, the images working as witnesses of their past suffering, of the memory of their internal strife, and of their precarious common fate in a region politically dominated by Islam. This representation ultimately sustains a present-day actualization of politics as factionalism: an alleged existential confrontation between everlasting identities.