Description
Book SynopsisChad Elias analyzes a generation of artists working in Lebanon who interrogate Lebanon's civil war (1975–1990), showing how their appropriation and creation of images challenge divisive political discourse, give a voice to those silenced and forgotten, and provide the means to reimagine Lebanon's future.
Trade Review"Sophisticated and carefully researched . . . . The significance of [Elias's] book for current Anglophone art history is its in-depth and rewarding analysis of a context outside the usual terms of reference." -- Tom Snow * Art Monthly *
"
Posthumous Images is a welcome contribution to the study of contemporary art from the Middle East, significant in its substantive engagements with a generation of artists in Lebanon that has been championed around the world for its theoretically sophisticated responses to a devastating conflict and its tense, inconclusive afterlives. Elias offers important provocations for further study of cultural production in Lebanon, through his identification of a tension between a ‘politics of representation’ and a ‘politics of truth’, his attention to ‘communities of witnessing’ that contest a state-imposed post-war condition of forgetting, and his analysis of the role of media technologies in circulating images of contested histories." -- Kareem Estefan * Third Text *
"Elias’s erudite and thoughtful writing, self-reflexively aware of the failures of translation, offers a refreshing alternative to this starved corpus. . . .
Posthumous Images generates a valuable dialogue between theory and art, whereby they complicate and complement one another." -- Foad Torshizi * Arab Studies Quarterly *
"
Posthumous Images is a rigorous work of scholarship that offers a timely intervention into existing discourses on lens-based media and memory. The book offers a clear and important route to thinking beyond the widely accepted inadequacies of the visual without recourse to conventional models of documentary truth." -- Kimberly Schreiber * Object *
"
Posthumous Images is, in sum, a brilliant book, sparkling with ambition and insight but also a couple of squibs in judgement that may be attributed more to the confidence of an exuberant intellect at work than to any lack of sensitivity." -- Ken Seigneurie * Journal of Arabic Literature *
"This is a stimulating study, impressive in its writing. Because Elias builds his chapters upon a culled selection of work, there is space for him to construct his claims through elegant constellations of references to theorists rather than direct citations of historical studies. The result is a book that gives air to both its readings and possible gaps in those readings’ explanatory power." -- Anneka Lenssen * Art Journal *
“Using a variety of contemporary Lebanese works of art..., Elias analyzes and illustrates how contemporary art plays a critical role in attempting to evoke the past and recreate the future under conditions of amnesia, violence, and unresolved war.... [
Posthumous Images] is clearly written; its arguments are convincingly constructed and structured.” -- Elsa El Hachem-Kirby * Mashriq & Mahjar *
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction 1
1. Captive Subjects: On the Geopolitics of Sex and Translation in Walid Raad's
Hostage: The Bachar Tapes 27
2. Resistance, Video Martyrdom, and the Afterlife of the Lebanese Left 55
3. Latent Images, Buried Bodies: Mourning Lebanon's Disappeared 93
4. Suspended Places: The Void and the Monument in Post-Civil War Beirut 131
5. Images of Futures Past: The Lebanese Rocket Society 159
Coda. Time Bomb 177
Notes 193
Bibliography 225
Index 239
