This dissertation is a history of efforts to develop the Litani River in Lebanon. Under French rule (1920–43), development projects shaped an unequal distribution of infrastructure that privileged Christian and urban regions. A cohort of nationalist Lebanese engineers advocated developing the Litani River, in Lebanon’s Shi‘a-majority southwest, as a means to foster national unity by resolving inequalities among Lebanon’s religious communities. The resulting Litani project (1955–65) was Lebanon’s first grand-scale hydroelectric project. The United States, France, and the World Bank made the project central to their respective strategies in the decolonizing Middle East. Lebanese engineers competed and collaborated with European and American experts to design infrastructure that connected the Litani, and Lebanon’s hinterland, with the capital, Beirut. Economists, religious leaders, farmers, and communists debated infrastructure designs in Beirut’s bourgeoning public sphere. The completed infrastructure generated electricity for Beirut’s consumers by extracting water from the impoverished rural margins. The World Bank deemed the project a qualified success as an investment. But most in Lebanon considered it a monumental failure because the infrastructure did not meet urgent needs. Rather, the infrastructure materialized preexisting inequalities between Beirut and its peripheries, which provided a visible injustice that a rural Shi‘i political-religious movement mobilized to demand equal rights. Unlike familiar histories of development in which rural communities resist state intrusion, in Lebanon, rural actors and engineers sought to build a larger and more equitable state by constructing socially just infrastructure.

In Outside the Metropolitan Frame: The Nouvelle Vague and the Foreign, 1954-1968 I examine the significance of the Nouvelle Vague directors’ engagement with the world beyond metropolitan France, through formal analyses of seminal films by Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, and Jean Rouch, as well as close readings of archival documents pertaining to their promotion and reception. I contend that the directors of the Nouvelle Vague were concerned with the shifts in national, transnational and colonial dynamics that marked their era. I demonstrate that their texts and films are structured by a dialectical relationship between a gaze turned outwards onto the world beyond metropolitan France, and a gaze turned inwards, onto the French. In my first three chapters, I inscribe the Nouvelle Vague in a cultural longue durée by examining its formal and thematic continuities with the tradition of French ethnography; the inter-war artistic movement, Surrealism; and the cinéma vérité documentary tradition of the early 1960s. I illustrate that the films of the Nouvelle Vague were fundamentally shaped by their directors’ engagement with the decolonization of the French empire. In my final chapter, I reexamine the most conspicuous example of foreign influence on the Nouvelle Vague, American cinema, in light of my preceding demonstrations. I determine that there are two levels of foreign influence on the Nouvelle Vague, and that the influence of American cinema was above all textual and superficial, whereas a grappling with the end of the French empire was, though far less conspicuous, fundamental to the form of the Nouvelle Vague films themselves.