brill.nl/mjcc MEJCC Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 5 (2012) 149–189 © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2012 DOI 10.1163/187398612X641879 The Aesthetics of Belonging Transformations in Hizbullah’s Political Posters (1985–2006) Zeina Maasri* American University of Beirut, Lebanon Email: zm05@aub.edu.lb Abstract This article traces the transformations in Hizbullah’s media discourse from its formative years in the mid- 1980s until the 2006 war with Israel. It focuses on a speciijic outlet of self- promotion and public mediation—that of political posters—to unpack their discursive, semiotic and aesthetic changes at decisive moments in the group’s history. The analysis relates the transformations to paradigmatic changes in Hizbullah’s politics; its growth as a Lebanese political party and military organization with transnational impetus; and the ensuing wider publics it attempts to reach, and, conversely, to the hostile imaginaries and exclusionary politics the group struggles with. The article observes how the Party of God increasingly attempts to negotiate its self-image outside a Shii-Islamic subjectivity and how it particularly strives to broaden its reach among the Lebanese public. It argues that the group’s media transformations have entailed, since the early 1990s, not only an accommodation of the party’s discourse of resistance within a nationalist framework, but also the inscription of its media image, rhetoric and aesthetics within a Lebanese social context. Keywords Media discourse, political posters, semiotics, aesthetics, Hizbullah, Lebanon Two soldiers in full military uniform stand deijiantly, their watchful gaze and machine guns directed toward an apparently imminent danger. We gather, from the elaborate security fence that separates them from the land- scape in their direct ijield of vision, that they are guarding some border. * Acknowledgments: An earlier version of this article was presented at the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) Annual Meeting in Boston, 2009. I thank Amahl Bishara for her thoughtful comments as the panel discussant then, as well as Lara Deeb, Khaled Malas, the two anonymous MJCC reviewers, and specially Mona Harb, for their valuable comments on earlier drafts of this article.