Zeina Maasri’s new book Off the Wall: Political Posters of the Lebanese Civil War was reviewed in today’s The National.
The reviewer, Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, describes it as:
The first sustained study of Beirut’s poster wars, and the first serious and comprehensive investigation of the way that fifteen years of fighting left an indelible mark on the city’s visual culture – one that persists to this day.
Maasri draws on Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Stuart Hall, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe to argue that these political posters in Lebanon are not propaganda campaigns but constitute sites of discursive struggle.
She reads the signs, symbols, texts and images of the political posters that were produced during the civil war as evidence of how different communities and factions fought to define, assert and articulate themselves on Lebanon’s social, cultural and political landscape.
