Book Review: Cosmopolitan Radicalism; The Visual Politics of Beirut’s Global Sixties

In her book, Cosmopolitan Radicalism: The Visual Politics of Beirut’s Global Sixties, Zeina Maasri examines the development of Beirut as a ‘nodal city’ (p. 8), a center for radical publishing in the Arab region during the ‘long 1960s.’ The region’s “global sixties” are defined as the period marked by 1958s anticolonial struggles and Cold War politics, through to Beirut’s place in anti-imperialist and Third Worldist politics and the Palestinian revolutionary project, to the start of the Lebanese Civil War in 1975. As Maasri shows, during this time Beirut encouraged the flow of radical visual and political discourses, shaped translocal aesthetic and political subjectivities, and, in turn, was shaped by them. At the core of the book’s argument is the critical role of the mobility of printed matter—magazines, books, and ephemera—to political relations and, as such, to the development of aesthetic and political subjectivities.

https://academic.oup.com/jdh/advance-article/doi/1...