Please join HSS for a Spring 2025 Faculty Focus with Nour MJ Hodeib, Adjunct Instructor. 

This talk examines Lebanon’s “culture industries” during the Civil War period (1975–1990), focusing on songs by leftist artists such as Ziad Rahbani, Marcel Khalife, Omayma Khalil, and Khaled Habre, who emerged during this phase as embodiments of revolutionary counter-cultural expression. As heralds of the “new song,” Hodeib explores their works not as a genre but as an ethos of militant political commitment that informed the cultural production of leftists during the 1970s, amidst a surge of radical mobilization and counter-cultural activism in Lebanon.

Hodeib situates at Beirut as a site of the “active transnational” to analyze how leftist artists (un)consciously translated global trends into their own context. Hodeib argues that while their music responded to both local and international forms of “mainstream art,” it was not a passive reception but an active participation in the transnational flow of ideas and sounds. Leftist artists sought to position themselves within a global aesthetic, at the intersection of pop cultural phenomena and Third World revolutionism, by adapting styles as diverse as Rock ‘n’ Roll, Disco, Funk and Soul, Brazilian Bossa Nova, and contemporaneous forms of cultural dissent, including French political songs, the American Folk Revival, Latin American Nueva Cancion, and Egyptian political songs. By doing so, they engaged with technological and aesthetic trends from around the world to contrive a language specific to their particular experiences.

Hodeib proposes the concept of a “rock ‘n’ roll sound economy” as a productive framework to contextualize their cultural production, relating it to trends in songwriting and creative approaches characteristic of the 1960s counterculture in practice, sentiment, and attitude, while diverging from it in form, content, and aesthetic.

Nour MJ Hodeib's historical scholarship focuses on leftist sonic counter-cultures in the Middle East. Hodeib explores elements of pop culture and musical dissent during the period commonly referred to as the “global sixties.” He is currently a Doctoral Candidate in the history program, Graduate Center (CUNY), writing a dissertation on leftist sonic counter-cultures of the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990). Hodeib earned an M-Phil (History), MA (History), and MA (Middle East Studies) from the Graduate Center, CUNY (2017) and a BA degree in Political Science/International Affairs from the Lebanese American University (2012).  Aside from academic work, Hodeib is a writer, artist and performer, active in arts communities in and between Brooklyn and Beirut since 2010.