Decolonising the Page: The Visual Politics and Poetics of Postcolonial Arabic Publications

'Decolonising the Page' investigates the significant, yet understudied, political role of graphic design and visual culture during processes of decolonisation and anti-imperialist liberation struggles from the 1950s to the 1980s. Focussed on postcolonial Arabic publications, the study is concerned with how their design, visuality and materiality helped articulate political imaginaries, mobilise cross-border anticolonial solidarities and shape new aesthetic sensibilities. While urgently shedding light on the modern Arab world -- under-represented in the historiography of graphic design and visual culture -- this project also draws comparisons with shared historical conditions of modernity and (post)coloniality in the Global South.
As reproducible and mobile objects of print culture, illustrated books and periodicals were important sites for the decolonisation of knowledge, imagination and affect, and thus crucial for the construction of postcolonial identity, aimed at a growing Arabic readership and broader networks of transnational solidarity. Pivotal to this project is how Arabic publications emerged as platforms for modernist aesthetic experimentation and creative editorial collaborations between visual artists, writers, poets, intellectuals and activists. As media technologies, books and periodicals are products of global modernity's standardising effects on print cultures and visual economies. Nonetheless, publications are also artefacts of particular linguistic conventions and cultures of reading and writing, as well as products of creative labour that lend themselves to translocal creative adaptations. In particular, as artefacts within a rich Islamic heritage of bookmaking, applied arts and calligraphic traditions, Arabic publications presented ideal sites for 'decolonising the page' in and through aesthetic revivals and modernist interpretations of Arab cultural traditions of the book. Central to this decolonising endeavour, amongst Arab artists and further afield across the Global South, is how modernism, as a travelling cultural form, was creatively reconfigured to serve decolonial futures.
The study is focussed on the works of a group of academically trained emerging artists from Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine and Syria who have creatively explored the visuality and materiality of Arabic publications, including Dia al-Azzawi (b. 1939, Baghdad), Kamal Boullata (b. 1942 Jerusalem - 2019 Berlin), Mohieddine Ellabbad (1940-2010 Cairo), Helmi el-Touni (b. 1934 Cairo), Waddah Faris (b. 1940 Aleppo), Seta Manoukian (b. 1945 Beirut) and Mona Saudi (b. 1945 Amman). A number of them understood themselves as activists in Arab decolonisation struggles and strove to revolutionise and democratise art's place within society by hyphenating their art with graphic design and illustration practices for the Arabic press and radical publishing projects. While some artists are now recognised in modern Arab art history, their work in printed publications remains to be documented and examined.
It is the project's central contention that this rich archive enables us to recover a suppressed history and heritage of Arab decolonisation processes; one that takes on board the postcolonial imagination, aesthetic preoccupations and political contestations of Arab artists and designers of this generation. In doing so, 'Decolonising the Page' contributes to understanding histories of decolonisation: its thwarted projects and unfinished legacies resonate in renewed decolonial endeavours and solidarity projects today.
The project will build collaborative research networks and produce academic, creative and digital humanities outputs which advance knowledge in the fields of Art and Design History and Middle East Studies and directly benefit academics, creative practitioners and the living communities for whom this constitutes an important cultural heritage of immediate relevance.