Zeina Maasri

Decolonising the Page sheds light on the design and visual culture of Arabic books from the 1950s through the 1980s, a momentous era of decolonisation in the Arab world. During this time, publishing and book arts were central to the decolonisation of knowledge, language, imagination and aesthetic sensibilities. These collaborative intellectual and artistic efforts addressed a growing Arabic readership and broader networks of transnational solidarity.

Curated as an online platform, the exhibition brings together, for the first time, a digitised collection of around 250 books,offering illustrative samples of a beguiling, yet neglected, archive. It uncovers the overlooked creative labour of designing, illustrating and sometimes co-authoring Arabic books and centres the aesthetic preoccupations and political contestations of Arab artists and designers involved in their making. The displays invite new modes of viewing postcolonial Arabic books beyond their textual imprints, offering multiple approaches to explore their visual aspects.

Through this emphatically visual lens on Arabic books, Decolonising the Page enables us to recover forgotten cultural histories of decolonisation; its thwarted projects and unfinished legacies resonate in renewed decolonial endeavours and solidarity projects today.

Decolonisation is a radical political project that carried hopes of human dignity and dreams of freedom, self-determination and social justice for colonised peoples across the Global South. Far from ending with formal independence from colonial rule, and beyond being reduced to the historical event of transferring state power, decolonisation has come to be seen as ‘an ongoing process and series of struggles’¹ that were fought on many fronts simultaneously: economic, intellectual and cultural.²  It was a revolutionary endeavour, in and through which people sought ‘to radically and holistically transform all aspects of life within an ethical global context’³. It was a struggle for postcolonial nation-building as much as it was an attempt to build connections of transnational solidarity from across the geographies of the South.⁴ It remains in many ways and many locations an unfinished political struggle.

In the Arab world, previously neglected and/or repressed archives of the intellectual history of that era are being uncovered, especially those of the Arab Left.⁵ This new scholarship shifts our attention from understanding decolonisation as state-driven, enabling a deeper knowledge of its fraught processes beyond the official triumphalist narratives of postcolonial Arab states. Historian Omnia El Shakry pertinently asks, if archives have ‘functioned as a dense locus of postcolonial [state] power’, and are today inaccessible to the historian in contexts such as Baghdad, Beirut, Cairo, and Damascus, ‘how, then, might we reimagine the archives of decolonisation?’⁶