Posthumous Images

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

“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.”