This essay analyzes some of the artistic and cultural movements and performances which arose in Beirut from the 1950s to the beginning of the Lebanese Civil War in 1975, delving into the debate over what modernism meant in the region (as determined by cultural, political and economic factors), and the way in which the «transmodernist» paradigm was conceived there; it is an essential overview that transcends the different forms of expression in modernism. It displays a different awareness that sets aside Orientalism and all the work in Postcolonial Studies, showing Lebanese artists in a complex web of international nodes in which they all make their own specific contributions and formulate their own particular responses within the global discourse on modernist thought and practice.
Beirut, Orientalism, transmodernism, global discourse.