Visiting Speaker Event with Dr Zeina Maasri
Book Arts as Archives of Decolonisation: The Visuality of Arabic Books, 1950s–1980s
Dr Maasri is a senior Lecturer in Global Visual Culture, University of Bristol
| An Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies seminar | |
|---|---|
| Date | 25 February 2026 |
| Time | 16:00 to 18:00 |
| Place | IAIS Building/LT2 |
| Organizer | IAIS |
Event details
Abstract
Dr Zeina Maasri is Senior Lecturer in Global Visual Culture at the University of Bristol. She is the author of Cosmopolitan Radicalism: The Visual Politics of Beirut’s Global Sixties (Cambridge University Press, 2020), which won the 2021 British-Kuwait Friendship Society Book Prize and the 2022 Middle East Librarians Association Book Awards, and co-editor of Transnational Solidarity: Anticolonialism in the Global Sixties (Manchester University Press, 2022). She is also the author of Off the Wall: Political Posters of the Lebanese Civil War (IB Tauris, 2009) and curator of related travelling exhibitions and online archival resource (www.signsofconflict.com). She recently held an AHRC-UK Fellowship for her new project, Decolonising the Page: The Visual Politics and Poetics of Postcolonial Arabic Publications.
I will present the research and curatorial framework behind Decolonizing the Page: A Forgotten Golden Age of Arabic Book Arts (1950s–80s), a newly launched online exhibition and digital resource. This exhibition is part of an ongoing research project that sheds light on a remarkable, yet overlooked, period in which Arabic book arts flourished, spanning from the 1950s to the 1980s. I argue that the thriving visual culture of books during this era mirrored the artistic, political, and intellectual ferment of decolonisation in the Arab world. As everyday sites of political and creative imaginings, the visuality of books was integral to decolonisation struggles. It helped shape new aesthetic sensibilities, articulate political imaginaries, and mobilise cross-border anticolonial solidarities. Crucially, the exhibition demonstrates how the aesthetic concerns and political commitments of a generation of Arab artists transformed the Arabic book in its content, form, and very conception.
Location:
IAIS Building/LT2
