Hizbullah and the Politics of Remembrance

'Through his focus on Hizbullah's cultural production, Bashir Saade has provided a wonderful intellectual discursion into what sets it apart from almost any other contemporary Arab politico-military movement. Central to this book is the notion that ideas are sticky, and tend to survive political changes: Hizbullah has turned them into traditions of doing, of action, through what [Saade] calls archival processes, a politics of remembering, and writing strategies that [Hizbullah's] secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah, familiar to us all, both synthesizes and epitomizes with remarkable precision.' Yezid Sayigh, Carnegie Middle East Center
'A bold and profound treatment of Hizbullah, which is at once a postcolonial cultural and political history of modern Lebanon. A politics of remembrance enables Hizbullah to shape its understanding of the state, its relations with the Christian political other and his claims to history, and its engagement with the Palestinian resistance and liberation movements. This book offers unique insights into self-representation, and Hizbullah's urge to reshape a history of resistance against Israel. It also delineates Hizbullah's ambivalent representation of the state. By analyzing the elaboration of a style, a mode of thinking, a code of conduct disseminated and enacted by party members, this work offers the reader a rich and multifaceted account of ideological production.' Rula Abisaab, McGill University, Montréal
'Saade offers a compelling account of how Hizbullah's ideologues and intellectuals address history - both their own and that of others - to continually rearticulate a common political project. Along the way, this work unsettles prevailing accounts of Hizbullah's ideological development and of the writing of the Lebanese nation and provides the most theoretically sophisticated analysis of Hizbullah writings yet published in English.' Michaelle Browers, Wake Forest University, North Carolina