Conclusion

Summary

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.