Writing a history of the war through its visual and material culture and its artifacts, how the everyday discourses and imaginaries of the warring factions were articulated in these posters and how they changed over time, is also a way of trying to understand political subjectivities, in their formation and transformation through war time. The civil war raged officially from 1975 for 16 years. ZEINA MAASRI : In my book on the political posters of the civil war in Lebanon I begin to think of visual culture, and specifically the political posters of the civil war, as symbolic sites of struggle in the war. Maybe we could begin by discussing some of these complex hegemonic struggles which your work is situated within? HELEN MACKREATH: Your work positions the cross-border visual and print cultures and aesthetics of solidarity in the Arab world as discursive sites of a complex hegemonic struggle where imaginaries of antagonistic political subjectivities were visually articulated and contested. Maasri draws attention to the mobility of modernist cultural forms, discourses, and practices how solidarity was conceived by Arab revolutionaries in the “long” 1960s and what different print and visual archives from that period tell us about everyday forms of resistance and transnational solidarity networks. She is working on a new co-edited volume, Transnational Solidarity: Decentring the Sixties, forthcoming with Manchester University Press in 2022. She is the author of Off the Wall: Political Posters of the Lebanese Civil War (2008) and curator of the online archival resources. Maasri works across the field of visual and cultural politics and design history with an emphasis on postcolonial Lebanon and the Arab world. Our second interview is with Dr. Zeina Maasri, author of the recently published Cosmopolitan Radicalism: The Visual Politics of Beirut’s Global Sixties (2020) and senior lecturer at the University of Brighton. These are revolutionary solidarities anchored in the intersectionality of freedom struggles, the collective product of movement and contradiction, rather than abstract notions of what it means to be human.
From the settler colonialism in Gaza and the West Bank and in the occupied territories of Rojava and Kashmir to the structural racism and police violence in the streets of Ferguson and Baltimore, the messy work of envisioning and building coalitions of solidarity is underway.
But is solidarity, indebted to the shared conditions of catastrophe, as much as we can hope for, without an imagination of something better? On the other hand, solidarity based on a notion of global sameness invokes an ambiguous “we” that disguises social and material injustices. “It’s in hell where solidarity is important, not in heaven,” said John Berger.
#Ask and it is given reviews series#
This new LARB series on the Foundations of Solidarity draws together thinkers from the loosely defined region of the Middle East to discuss the topic from creative, historical, and political perspectives. IN THE WAKE of the intensifying resistance to the occupation of Palestine, the Black Lives Matter protests in the United States (and beyond), and such movements as #StandWithStandingRock, appeals for solidarity with the plight of migrants, occupied populations, racialized minorities, and Indigenous peoples have become culturally pervasive.