This event will be conducted in-person in Room 315F and through Zoom. 

For in-person attendance, please register in advance here.
For Zoom attendance, please register here.

In his poem Phosphorus, Bread, Coffee (2009), published in As-Safir, Hilal Chouman writes: “I discovered that my skin is not white. I became certain of this when I saw the white spots [of phosphorus] trickle through my skin... The fire reached my bones. Whiteness consumed me.” This lecture confronts the joint onslaught of military and white supremacy on southern Lebanon as a stark manifestation of the global expansionist project aimed at dominating the contemporary night. Specifically, it reveals how farmers and shepherds, recognizing the mounting conflict between light and life in their homeland, aimed their spades at their oppressors and wielded darkness into their arsenal of life-making tools. For even their strongest walls had been destroyed, and with them the delusion that architecture, in its traditional sites and forms, could protect from the enemy’s weapons, systems, and environments. By examining how they learned to carve liberated spaces from their fertile nights, this lecture aims to foreground a new practice of darkness, a new alliance with the night, one that molts architecture’s colonial imprints by confronting the discipline from its shadows. Moving between research, built, and decimated projects, it aims to highlight a history, especially an environmental history, that falls outside documented episodes of territorial expansion. To read it at night is to stretch these colonial outbursts so thinly, so delicately that they allow for glimpses into the labor of those committed to the pursuit of life in the brightness of imperialism.

The lecture will be followed by a Q&A moderated by Ralph Karam.

Mohamad Nahleh is Assistant Professor of architecture at The Ohio State University. His research and practice engage the fields of environmental history, cultural anthropology, and postcolonial literature in expanding the role and imagination of the night in architecture. Recognizing the night as a space rather than a time, Nahleh’s work unsettles the current interchangeability between ‘night design’ and ‘light design’ by charging architecture with the urgency to overcome the Western metaphors of light and darkness. His forthcoming book, Design After Dark, studies the transformation of the night in the Middle East following the expansion of Ottoman, French, and Zionist colonial projects. It reveals, in particular, how the people of Jabal ‘Amil in Lebanon collaborated with the night to design their liberation. His writing has been published in several journals and magazines, including Places, Thresholds, the Journal of Architectural Education, and The Funambulist. Nahleh is also a practicing architect in Lebanon.  

This event is free and open to the public. Registration is required.

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Image Credits: 

Slide 1: Image by author

Slide 2: Barry Drogin, Flickr (edited)

Slide 3: Town of Taybeh Facebook Page (edited)

Slide 4: Mehmet Seyit, Facebook (edited)

Slide 5: Mehmet Seyit, Facebook (edited)

Slide 6: Town of Taybeh Facebook Page (edited)

Slide 7: Getty Images, The Economist (edited)

Slide 8: Bryn Colton, Getty Images (edited)

Slide 9: Israeli Air Force.

Slide 10: Image by author

Slide 11: Image by author

Slide 12: Jalaa Marey, AFP via Getty Images (edited)

Slide 13: Menachem Begin, White Nights

Slide 14: Menachem Begin, White Nights

Slide 15: Menachem Begin, The Revolt

Slide 16: Menachem Begin, The Revolt

Slide 17: Netanyahu 2017 United Nations speech

Slide 18: Ammar Awad, Reuters (edited)

Slide 19: Andreas Cellarius, Harmonica Macrocosmica

Slide 20: Maurice Leloir, Louis XIV Costumed as the Sun (edited)

Slide 21: Isaac Newton, Treatise of the Reflections of Light

Slide 22: B.O. Flower, Civilization’s Inferno: or Studies in the Social Cellar (edited)

Slide 23: City of New York, A Law for Regulating Negroes and Slaves in the Nighttime

Slide 24: Image by author

Slide 25: Image by author

Slide 26: Menachem Begin, The Revolt

Slide 27: Wikipedia (edited)

Slide 28: The Beirut Massacre, The New York Times (edited)

Slide 29: Sabra and Shatila Poster, Palestinian National Alliance (edited)

Slide 30: Iran attack on Israel, Reuters (edited)

Slide 31: Joseph Eid, AFP (edited)

Slide 32: Diego Ibarra Sánchez, NPR (edited)

Slide 33: As-Safir June 30, 1994 (edited)

Slide 34: Image by author

Slide 35: United Nations Photo, Flickr (edited)

Slide 36: Yasmine Khayyat, War Remains: Ruination and Resistance in Lebanon (edited)

Slide 37: Factfile: Cluster Bombs, Aljazeera (edited)

Slide 38: UNIFIL Map (edited)

Slide 39: Lebanese Army (edited)

Slide 40: UNIFIL, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFeFKxkG5CQ

Slide 41: Mahmoud Zayyat, AFP via Getty Images (edited)

Slide 42: Mahmoud Zayyat, AFP via Getty Images (edited)

Slide 43: Munira Khayyat, Of Goats and Bombs (edited)

Slide 44: Munira Khayyat, A Landscape of War

Slide 45: Joāo Sousa, New Lines Magazine (edited)

Slide 46: Munira Khayyat, Of Goats and Bombs (edited)

Slide 47: Joāo Sousa, New Lines Magazine (edited)

Slide 48: Joāo Sousa, New Lines Magazine (edited)

Slide 49: Image by author

Slide 50: Google Earth

Slide 51: Map of Taybeh, The Palestinian Museum Digital Archive

Slide 52: TRT World, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkRu6Zm0fWs(edited)

Slides 53 to 71: Images by author

Slide 72: Rabih Daher, AFP (edited)

Slide 73: Google Earth

Slide 74: Mahmoud Zayyat, AFP via Getty Images (edited)

Slide 75: Town of Taybeh Facebook Page (edited)

Slide 76: Image by author

Slide 77: Najah Taher, Al-Hajr (edited)

Slide 78: Jabal Amelah Blogspot (edited)

Slide 79: Sarah Graham-Brown, Images of Women (edited)

Slide 80: Najah Taher, Al-Hajr (edited)

Slide 81: Najah Taher, Al-Hajr (edited)

Slide 82: Image by author

Slide 83: Israeli Aerospace Industries via Getty Images (edited)

Slide 84: Israeli Aerospace Industries via Getty Images (edited)

Slide 85: Diego Ibarra Sánchez, NPR (edited)

Slide 86: IDF Twitter

Slide 87: Image by author

Slide 88: Esa Alexander, Reuters (edited)

Slide 89: Image by author

Slide 90: Image by author

Slide 91: How Warplanes Were Spotted Before Radar, CNN

Slide 92: Image by author

Slide 93: Image by author

Slide 94: Amal Poster (edited)

Slides 95 to 99: Images by author

Slide 100: Susan Kassem, The Tahrir Institute

Slide 101: Image by author

Slide 102: American Colony (Jerusalem). Photo Department, Library of Congress

Slide 103: John D Whiting, Jerusalem’s Locust Plague: With 25 Illustrations and Map

Slide 104: American Colony (Jerusalem). Photo Department, Library of Congress

Slide 105: American Colony (Jerusalem). Photo Department, Library of Congress

Slide 106: John D Whiting, Jerusalem’s Locust Plague: With 25 Illustrations and Map

Slide 107: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA (edited)

Slide 108: As-Safir Archives

Slide 109: William Christou, The Public Source (edited)

Slide 110: Hasan Fneich, AFP (edited)

Slide 111: As-Safir Archives

Slide 112: Munzir Jaber, The Occupied Lebanese Zone

Slide 113: Tamar Group, Bio Explorer System, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ovOS0GV_kA (edited)

Slide 114: Munzir Jaber, The Occupied Lebanese Zone

Slide 115: William Christou, The Public Source (edited)

Slide 116: The New York Times

Slide 117: Jabal Amelah Blogspot (edited)

Slide 118: Jabal Amelah Blogspot (edited)

Slide 119: Qudratullah Razwan/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock (edited)

Slide 120: Rimawi Anadolu, Getty

Slide 121: Hussein Malla, AFP

Slides 122 to 124: Images by author

Slide 125: Yasmine Khayyat, War Remains: Ruination and Resistance in Lebanon

Slide 126: Jabal Amelah Blogspot (edited)

Slides 127 to 144: Images by author

Slide 145: The New York Times

Slide 146: The New York Times

Slide 147: Karamallah Daher, Reuters (edited)