Why We Must Rethink How We Value Local Arts and Culture in Lebanon
Lebanon’s artists and cultural workers live under the pressure of collapse, war, and State neglect. Yet beneath these visible struggles lies a quieter, more insidious challenge: a mindset shaped by what Edward Said once called the “hierarchy of cultures,” where the "West" is positioned as the universal reference point, while our productions are relegated to the margins. This is the psychology of the neocolonized, where validation is sought through external gazes, where a "Western" award or a foreign label confers prestige, while local works are seen as lesser, provincial, or incomplete.
Said, in Culture and Imperialism, showed how empires do not only dominate politically or economically but also through narratives that organize the world into center and periphery. These narratives linger long after independence, internalized by societies that measure their worth against the supposed universality of "Western" culture. In psychology, this resonates with what is known as “internalized oppression”: the tendency to adopt the very categories that diminish one’s identity. In Lebanon, this takes the shape of equating prestige with imported goods, imported education, imported art, etc., a reflex that leaves little room for recognizing the richness of what is made here.
Yet culture, as philosophy and art studies remind us, is not a ladder where some expressions are “higher” and others “lower.” It is a field of dialogues, encounters, and mutual reshaping. Contemporary art theory even celebrates “hybridity”, the very fusion of traditions, geographies, and histories that Lebanese creativity embodies so powerfully. From Said’s lens, this hybridity is not weakness but strength, because it resists the essentialism that colonial discourse imposed. It insists that identity is not a pure essence imported from elsewhere but an unfolding, interpenetrated, evolving practice.
At Kulturnest, this is precisely the battle we have taken on: to create spaces where local creativity is not treated as a copycat, not forced into proving itself against "Western" standards, but recognized on its terms while still being open to dialogue. Our work in cultural studies, memory, and activism has shown us how essential this is for decolonizing the imagination. We are not interested in isolation or a parochial celebration of the “local” for its own sake. What matters is breaking the automatic reflex that “foreign” equals “better,” so that fusions can occur from a place of equality, not inferiority.
How can this shift happen? Psychology suggests it begins with re-narration: exposing ourselves and others to new stories that destabilize inherited hierarchies. Philosophy asks us to question the categories through which value is assigned. Contemporary art practice shows us that by curating works side by side - a Lebanese textile piece next to a European installation, a Beirut mural alongside a Berlin photograph - we make visible the fact that value is not dictated by geography but by resonance, depth, and imagination.
Every choice matters. Choosing to attend a local exhibition, to cite a Lebanese writer, to value a neighbourhood performance as much as a glamorous international festival ... these are not small acts. They are gestures of resistance against a neocolonial logic that thrives on invisibility. Said’s work reminds us that the empire’s most lasting victory is convincing the colonized that their stories are secondary. Our task is to insist otherwise.
Lebanon’s uncertainty will not vanish anytime soon. But in this fragile landscape, acknowledging, celebrating, and supporting local arts & interpenetrating cultures is more than cultural policy. It is a philosophical and ethical stance. It is saying: we will not measure our imagination against imported scales. We will narrate ourselves, with all the fusions, tensions, and possibilities that this entails. And in doing so, we make space for a dialogue with the world that is finally horizontal, not vertical, equal, not subordinate.
Dr. Pamela Chrabieh