Zeina Maasri is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Brighton and a former faculty member at the American University of Beirut. Her work is concerned with the histories and politics of visual culture and design in the modern Middle East. She is the author of Off the Wall: Political Posters of the Lebanese Civil War (2009) and the curator of related exhibitions and online archival resources. She is also the co-editor of Mapping Sitting: On Portraiture and Photography (2002).

• Introduction. Beirut in the global Sixties: design, politics and translocal visuality; 1. Dislocating the nation: Mediterraneanscapes in Lebanon's tourist promotion; 2. The hot Third World in the cultural Cold War: modernism, Arabic literary journals and US counterinsurgency; 3. The visual economy of 'precious books': publishing, modern art and the design of Arabic books; 4. Ornament is no crime: decolonising the Arabic page from Cairo to Beirut; 5. Art is in the 'Arab street': the Palestinian revolution and printscapes of solidarity; 6. Draw me a gun: radical children's books in the trenches of 'Arab Hanoi'; Conclusion.

'Maasri's account of the changing landscape of visual culture in 1960s Beirut provides immense insight into a critical moment in the shifting local, regional, and global dynamics animating post-colonial Lebanon. She challenges exceptionalist and teleological narratives while offering a historically grounded and analytically rigorous account of that period and its legacies.' Ziad M. Abu-Rish, Ohio University