Dispossession by nostalgia Yara M Damaj

Format:

Book

Thesis/Dissertation

Author/Creator:

Damaj, Yara M., author.

Contributor:

University of Pennsylvania. Political Science., degree granting institution.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Political science.

Mental health.

Social psychology.

0615.

0347.

0451.

Local Subjects:

Political science.

Mental health.

Social psychology.

0615.

0347.

0451.

Genre:

Academic theses

Physical Description:

1 online resource (230 pages)

Contained In:

Dissertations Abstracts International 87-12B

Place of Publication:

Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations and Theses, 2026

Language Note:

English

Summary:

This dissertation reconceptualizes nostalgia as an affective and ideological infrastructure that constitutes political subjectivity in Lebanon. Against accounts that treat nostalgia as episodic, reactive, or merely cultural, it argues that nostalgia operates as an ambient structure of attachment through which subjects come to inhabit political life. In Lebanon, nostalgia is not a response to rupture but its organizing logic. It produces a subject oriented toward a lost or imagined past and renders the present intelligible through that attachment. Drawing on affect theory, critical theory, and psychoanalysis, the dissertation conceptualizes nostalgia as both structure and infrastructure. As structure, it organizes desire through attachment to a lost object that never fully existed. As infrastructure, it is reproduced through material practices that circulate and sediment this attachment over time. This dual framework makes it possible to analyze how nostalgia captures political energy, including grief, rage, and desire, and redirects it away from transformation and toward the reproduction of an idealized past, thereby foreclosing alternative political futures. The argument is developed across three empirical sites: the Rahbani-Fairuz cultural formation as the production of hegemonic nostalgic subjectivity; Emmanuel Macron's 2020 visit to Beirut as a moment in which this infrastructure becomes legible under pressure; and diasporic circuits through which nostalgia is actively produced, circulated, and sustained across space. By theorizing from Lebanon, this dissertation offers a generalizable account of affective infrastructure and political subject formation. It argues that critique must shift from demystification to mapping the circuits of attachment through which political life is organized and identifying the points at which they might be interrupted

Notes:

Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 87-12, Section: B.

Advisors: Euben, Roxanne L.; Norton, Anne Committee members: Green, Jeffrey E.; Troutt Powell, Eve M.; Kraidy, Marwan M.

Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania 2026

Vendor supplied data

Local Notes:

School code: 0175

ISBN:

9798247973546

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license