Article:

This panel examines the entanglements of design with political processes of decolonization and nation-building post-1945. It presents three historical case studies that cut across differ-ent fields of design and compares disparate postcolonial contexts. The three papers critically analyse the role of design discourses, practices, artefacts and institutions in postcolonial iden-tity formations. The first looks at graphic design in the context of 1960s Beirut and, by exten-sion, the Arab East at a tumultuous global moment to probe design’s role in articulating trans-national political subjectivities and aesthetic sensibilities. The second investigates the archi-tectural discourse of the Commonwealth Institute in London and associated exhibition dis-plays, where ideas about modernity, national identity and transnational relationships were formed and communicated during Britain’s turn from Empire. The third considers the ways in which fashion and textiles were utilised in the construction of a modern Jamaican national identity, negotiating notions of race, class and gender to come to terms with a colonial history. Through these three papers, the panel aims to contribute to current debates in design history about the circulation of design beyond Euro-American geographies of modernism and frameworks of knowledge.