This essay reviews two publications that center on the agency of visual culture in shaping modern life and subjectivity in 1950-70s Lebanon. Rooted in cultural anthropology, Zeina Maasri’s Cosmopolitan Radicalism: The Visual Politics of Beirut’s Global Sixties (2020) and Kirsten Scheid’s Fantasmic Objects: Art and Sociality from Lebanon, 1920-1950 (2022) depart from poststructuralist models of visual studies, emphasizing instead the concrete materiality and affective strength of the art...
