Towards a Translocal Graphic Design History: Beirut in the Global Sixties

This paper examines the intersection of visual culture, design and politics in global configurations of the 1960s, shedding light on understudied graphic design practices from the Arab East. In doing so, it argues for a double decentring in design history: the first, through a postcolonial lens, displaces the West in understanding global modernity; and the second, through a translocal framework, attends to the dislocation of the nation from a site of cultural particularity. It critically engages design history against the grain of nationally circumscribed frameworks of analysis and complicates a bipolar interface between ‘global’ and ‘local’ approaches. Likewise, it seeks to trouble any putative binary between the ‘West’ and the ‘non-West’, destabilising understandings of these notions — and indeed that of the nation — as bounded localities wherein design is firmly sealed and homogenously practiced. The analysis instead situates graphic design within the disjunctive flows of the global 1960s — at the interface of new modes of consumption and leisure with cultural revolutions, amidst shifting geographies of imperial power and emerging processes of decolonisation, revolutionary anti-imperialism and transnational solidarity. It demonstrates how fluid, yet politically articulated, transnational circuits of modernism — formed through the movement of artists/designers, image-objects, political, economic and aesthetic discourses — converged and contended with one another in the context of Beirut (Lebanon), from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s.