Hassan's essay "What Ensnared Us: Dramaturgy, Decolonization, and the Double Bind of Lebanese Theatre" is forthcoming with Bloomsbury Academic, examining the pressures and possibilities facing contemporary Lebanese theatre.
Below is an abstract of the essay:
The essay examines dramaturgy as a site of decolonial contestation in Lebanese theatre, arguing that the field is caught in a double bind between two internally enforced aesthetic logics. First, the sanctioned trauma narrative, which rehearses civil war, sectarianism, and displacement in theatrical languages that have become ritualized and internationally rewarded. Second, the uncritical adoption of Western form, which reproduces colonial hierarchies through aesthetic franchising and undramaturgized adaptation. Neither constraint requires external censorship — both operate through internalized logic, institutional reward, and the pressure of the international gaze. Drawing on personal practice and observation, the essay maps this double bind before turning to the practitioners whose work refuses both poles simultaneously, locating the decolonial act in a radical insistence on present-tense, community-rooted specificity.