Chapter 5 locates Beirut historically within the geopolitics of revolutionary Third Worldism in the aftermath of the devastating 1967 Arab–Israeli war. It investigates the aesthetic emergence of Palestinian revolutionary struggle in and through the printscapes that marked Beirut’s public culture and street life. It analyses the visual culture that reclaimed the Arab city as a revolutionary nodal site in the imagination of its inhabitants and in networks of solidarities, Arab intellectuals and artists — Palestinian, Syrian, Iraqi and Egyptian — who crossed paths in Beirut’s long 1960s. The chapter reveals how Arab artists responded to the 1967 defeat and were radicalized by the revolutionary promise of the Palestinian liberation struggle. It argues that the radicalization of the role of the Arab artist in society at this particular historical juncture was productive of new aesthetic sensibilities that were carried in and through the reproducibility of printed media. The mobility of magazines, posters, mail art and artists’ books lent visibility to the Palestinian struggle and aestheticized its revolutionary discourse in the public realm. It demonstrates how the cosmopolitanism of Beirut as the ‘Paris of the East’ was displaced into the radical cosmopolitanism of ‘Arab Hanoi’ in this revolutionary quest.

This book has demonstrated how Beirut emerged in the post-1967 Arab historical conjuncture as a radical node of modernist aesthetic encounter and solidarity in a globally expansive geography of revolutionary anti-imperialism. Central in this cosmopolitan radicalism was the displacement of a Euro-Mediterranean cosmopolitanism by Third Worldist internationalism. This radical aesthetic configuration developed historically in the interstices, overlaps and contentions of transnational printscapes and associated circuits of modernism, linking Beirut to Cairo, Damascus and Baghdad – among other capitals – in a transnational economy of publishing and artistic exchange. These fluid, yet politically entangled, fields of visuality – formed through the mobility of artists/designers, printed matter, political and aesthetic discourses – converged and contended with one another in Beirut’s long 1960s. Their convergence set the conditions of possibility for a radically articulated translocal visuality to emerge in and from Beirut in the aftermath of the 1967 Arab defeat and with the consequent rise of the Palestinian liberation movement on a global terrain of revolutionary politics.

Chapter 1 examines Lebanon’s post-independence tourism promotion and maps its relations to a wider discursive field that constituted the coastal capital Beirut as a Mediterranean site of modern leisure and tourism. It reveals how the geographic turn to the Lebanese coast is linked to a rising global economy of mass tourism on the Mediterranean and to Cold War US development funds and modernization imperatives. However, the lens of global modernity becomes complicated once Lebanon’s colonial history, its creation as a nation-state and ensuing national identity politics are brought to the fore. Thus the chapter interrogates the hegemony of a Mediterranean geography of belonging, especially in light of its antagonistic relation to contemporary politics of pan-Arab nationalism in the region. It sheds light on the visual communication strategy of the National Council for Tourism Development and the role of the graphic design department headed by artist Mouna Bassili Sehnaoui (b. 1945). The analysis reveals how Lebanon’s visual culture of tourism contributed to the formation of a Lebanese subjectivity premised on separatism from the Arab context, arguing that cosmopolitan Beirut, ‘the Paris of the East’, emerged in and through the material folds of 1960s tourism promotions, associated practices and aesthetics.

This is a study of how visuality, art, design and politics intersect under global configurations of postcolonial historical conditions. It probes the particularity of this nexus in the context of Beirut’s ‘long’ 1960s, focusing specifically on printed matter to interrogate its role in the modern everyday.

In the late 1960s and 1970s a confluence of anticolonial politics and publishing revitalized the Cairo–Beirut link, itself emblematic of the turn of the century Arab nahda. This connection saw a reverse flow, which advantaged Beirut by way of Cairo’s amassed expertise in the publishing industry. Emerging Arab nationalist Beirut-based publishers relied on expertise in the production of illustrated books and periodicals developed in Cairo. Chapter 4 examines the subsequent Cairo–Beirut circuit of graphic design modernism, while probing the political relations and cultures of the visual carried through the influx of this expertise. The analysis brings to light a visual culture that embodies a modernist double claim of aesthetic authenticity, articulating Arab socialist politics with processes of artistic decolonization in and through printed mass media. The analysis is focused on Helmi el-Touni’s move from Cairo to Beirut in 1974 and his settling there for a decade, tracing the aesthetic and political relations articulated in his graphic design practice, while analysing in particular two sustained consultancies he undertook with Beirut-based Arab nationalist institutions: Beirut’s Arabic Book Fair and the Arab Institute for Research and Publishing.

Chapter 3 is focused on the short-lived Silsilat al-Nafaʾis (Precious Books Series), published in Beirut by Dar an-Nahar between 1967 and 1971 under the direction of modernist poet Youssuf al-Khal. The series engaged prominent modern Arab artists such as Chafic Abboud, Paul Guiragossian, and Dia al-Azzawi and extended the vision of al-Khal’s journal Shiʿr to the ‘preciousness’ of art books. This publishing endeavour formed a node connecting transnational modernist art and literary circuits with book publishing and was thus paradigmatic of new forms of visuality of the Arabic book. The chapter demonstrates how this new materiality was enabled by a network of changes in the visual arts, printing technologies and the political economy of transnational publishing in late 1960s Beirut. Relations between these three fields are analysed through a multifaceted lens, focusing on the book as at once a product of intellectual and artistic practice, a translocal artefact of visual and print culture and a commodity in a capitalist economy of publishing. The analysis probes the political, intellectual and aesthetic modalities of key books from this series and maps the transnational networks of social relations and circuits of modernism that are interwoven in their undertaking.

Mobilized by radical networks of solidarity, stretching from Cuba, through Algeria and all the way to Vietnam and China, an anti-imperialist revolutionary subjectivity was constituted through a global flow of discourses and associated visuality. In this globally expansive revolutionary geography, Beirut — dubbed the 'Arab Hanoi' — acted as a nodal site in and through which an aesthetic of solidarity with the Palestinian liberation movement converged and circulated along transnational circuits. Chapter 6 focuses on the publications of Dar al-Fata al-Arabi, a vanguard pan-Arab children’s publishing house linked to the PLO, which launched from Beirut in 1974. It examines how it came to represent a radical node of transnational solidarity among Arab artists, intellectuals and writers committed to the Palestinian cause and to revolutionary change in the Arab world. In tracing the social life of a particular publication, entitled The Home, from production in Beirut to international itinerary accompanying Yasser Arafat’s landmark speech at the UN in 1974, the chapter reflects on the historical junctures and disjuncture of the Palestinian struggle with global politics of decolonization; the aesthetics of revolutionary armed struggle and the translocal figure of the freedom fighter; tensions between radical art and diplomacy; and last but not least, the utopias and disenchantment of a generation of politically committed Arab artists and intellectuals.

Chapter 2 examines Arabic literary journals published in 1960s Beirut and focuses on the controversy surrounding Hiwar (Dialogue 1962–67), which was connected to a global network of similar journals, intellectually and financially administered by the Congress of Cultural Freedom (CCF), in a covert CIA operation. In focusing on this short-lived Arabic periodical, the study is concerned with three interrelated issues that are important for our historical understanding of Beirut’s cultural production in the long 1960s and its location on the global map of that era. First, it attends to the journal itself, the modernist discourse it foregrounded and the important place accorded to the modern visual arts on its pages, shedding light on the role of its graphic designer, Waddah Faris (b. 1940). Second, using the example of Hiwar, this chapter argues that US cultural campaigns were part and parcel of a Cold War counterinsurgency apparatus in the Third World. Third, it suggests that our entry to reading Hiwar should not be the outlook of the CIA, but the aesthetic discourses and political debates of Arab intellectuals and artists at this historical conjuncture.