Posthumous Images

“Chad Elias's thoughtful analysis of artistic activity under 'state-sanctioned amnesia' in the Lebanese context is eye-opening and a source of inspiration for anyone interested in the long-lasting effects of imperial violence. The Lebanese Civil War and the amnesia it continues to generate are not assumed as a background against which Lebanese art is studied, or as a source of an un-presentable trauma. Amnesia is conceived as orchestrated by the state and integral to an entire economy of violence, desires, and mistranslations. Elias ingeniously shows art to be both a product of and a medium for this economy, but also a form of resistance to it.” - Ariella Azoulay, author of Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography

“Offering a compelling overview of contemporary Lebanese art, Posthumous Images is a welcome addition to cutting-edge scholarship on the Middle East, critically addressing the relationship between media and performance, and the formation of experimental memory cultures following periods of state violence and military conflicts.” - T. J. Demos, author of Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology

"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