For a firsthand account of some of these debates as they are expressed in art writing by artists and art critics, see Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents, ed. Anneka Lenssen, Sarah Rogers, and Nada Shabout (Duke University Press, 2018). See also Faisal Darraj, “The Peculiar Destinies of Arab Modernity,” trans. Anna Swank, in Arab Art Histories, ed. Sarah Rogers and Eline van der Vlist (Idea Books, 2013). Darraj’s essay explains the relevance of these debates for modern and contemporary Arab art.
Timothy Mitchell, “The Stages of Modernity,” in Questions of Modernity, ed. T. Mitchell (University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 26.
Youssef Bazzi is a Lebanese poet and journalist who worked with the Saudi-backed Lebanese Future Movement political party–supported print newspaper Al Mustaqbal; as of 2019 the paper is only in online form. Bazzi is part of a generation of Lebanese leftists turned liberals in the aftermath of the civil war. These writers are vocal critics of what they perceive to be Arab culture’s tendency to forgo individual freedom and political democracy for the purpose of armed resistance, anti-imperialism, provincialism, and nationalism.
Youssef Bazzi, “A Short History of the Relationship Between Lebanese Arts Production and Foreign Funding,” Babelmed, July 18, 2007 →.
Nicola Pratt, “Human Rights NGOs and the ‘Foreign Funding Debate’ in Egypt,” in Human Rights in the Arab World, ed. Anthony Tirado-Chase and Amr Hamzawy (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 114–26.
Pratt, “Human Rights NGOs,” 114.
For a summative analysis of the “foreign funding debate” with particular regard to Egyptian women’s rights and the NGOs where these debates are most hotly contested, see Nadje Al-Ali, Secularism, Gender and the State in the Middle East: The Egyptian Women’s Movement (Cambrige University Press, 2000).
Pratt, “Human Rights NGOs,” 114.
Ibrahim Abu-Rabi‘, Contemporary Arab Thought: Studies in Post-1967 Arab Intellectual History (Pluto, 2004), 134.
Ghassan Salamé, The Foundations of the Arab State: Nation, State, and Integration in the Arab World, vol. 1 (Routledge, 1987), 52.
A good example of how this binary is drawn on historically is found in Kamal Boullata, Palestinean Art: From 1850 to the Present (Saqi, 2006), 126, in which he describes two intellectual currents among literary forms and magazines reflected in the visual arts. The first current called for an engaged literature as popularized in the immediate post–World War II era by French existentialists such as Jean Paul Sartre. The second emanates from artists whose figurative language perpetuated a narrative pictorial art that seemed to echo the metaphorical imagery popularized by the poetry introduced in the pan-Arabist Al-Adab, founded and edited by the writer and literary critical Suhail Idriss. The poets associated with Shi’r, on the other hand, valorized the more abstract and experimental artists.
See Al-muthaqaff al-arabi: humumuh wa ata’ouh (The Arab intellectual: Challenges and concerns), ed. Anis Sayegh (Markez Dirasat al-Wihdah al-A‘rabiyah, 2001) for an understanding of the concerns and thinking of this generation. See also Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab, Contemporary Arab Thought: Cultural Critique in Comparative Practice (Columbia University Press, 2009).
Lara Deeb, An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shi’i Lebanon (Princeton University Press, 2006), 13. For a thorough and polemical take on cosmopolitanism as ideological warfare, see Timothy Brennan, At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now (Harvard University Press, 1997). On how conceptions of cosmopolitanism and nationalism shape identity and protest, see Rahul Rao, Third World Portest: Between Home and the World (Oxford University Press, 2010).
Discussion with the author, April 12, 2015.
Daniel Drennan ElAwar, “A Black Panther in Beirut,” Counterpunch, January 13, 2020.
For more on this debate, see Mohammed (1989) and Sabry (2010: 29). For the preoccupation with assala (authenticity) in artistic production today, see especially Winegar (2006: chaps. 1–3). Through a critique of three major pan-Arab conferences that took place in the Arab world after 1967 as part of Arab intellectuals’ introspective turn, Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab’s Contemporary Arab Thought provides a comprehensive take on the place of authenticity and tradition in the post-1967 intellectual scene, arguing that these notions are often de-historicized while simultaneously idealized by cultural elites.
In Trials of Arab Modernity, literary scholar Tarek El-Ariss makes similar suppositions about the experience of encountering modernity as an experience rather than as a representation (of an event). He reframes Arab modernity as a somatic condition shaped through “accidents and events (adth) emerging in between Europe and the Arab World” (El-Ariss 2013: 3).
Samah Idriss, founding editor of Al-Adab, a Lebanese Arabic language arts and culture journal, and son of the late literary giant Suhail Idriss, who was deeply involved in confronting Hiwar’s role in the cultural Cold War, cynically wondered in conversation with me how it was that Tawfik Sayigh’s journal suffered the fate it did, while today an entire industry is built around the politics of Western funding for culture and the arts “with hardly any questions asked by the generation building it.”
A comprehensive report on cultural policies in the Arab world shows how the language of development, civil society, and democratization is interwoven with arguments about the politics of arts production in the region (Al Khatib et al. 2010).
Zeina Maasri, Off the Wall: Political Posters of the Lebanese Civil War (Tauris, 2020,) 94.
Arndt 2005: xviii
Iriye 1991: 215.
Kim 2017. Soft power describes the ability of a political body, such as a state or its civil society, to indirectly influence, through trust and mutual understanding, the behaviors or interests of other political bodies through ideological means of persuasion rather than coercion. For more, see Nye (2004).
An interesting read in this regard is Tim Rivera’s (2015) report on cultural relations or cultural diplomacy in reference to the British Council. See also Bátora (2005); Melissen (2005); and Cull (2009).
Melissen 2017.
Kim 2017: 294
Williams 1961: 57–70. In this reading, Williams tries to break down the analysis of culture into three terms; ideal, documentary, and social. Ideal refers to lives, works, and values; documentary is the body of the intellectual work (i.e., the actual evidence of the culture); and social is the description of a particular way of life. The social element could refer to traditions or language. Williams also ascertains that the dependent relationship between dominant, residual (as in remnants of the traditional), and emergent cultural forces is an ongoing practice of exchange, confrontation, and assimilation on all fronts within the hegemonic sphere. These three elements invariably and selectively co-opt each other (Williams 1977: 110).
Interview with the author, May 2, 2008, Beirut.
Interview with the author.
Daccache 2006: 21
Strategic Communications Division, EU 2016.
(Bloembergen 2006)
The concept of power in public diplomacy has been explored in Rasmussen’s discursive influence model of normative power (2009). These normative frameworks have been criticized in Pamment (2011). See Sylvester (2009) for an alternative view that utilizes feminist and poststructuralist approaches to account for the role of culture in international politics. For an excellent analysis of Mitchell’s piece, see the introduction of his republished chapter in Preziosi (2009).
For more on the world exhibitions, see both Allwood (1977) and Benedict (1991). See also Çelik (1992).
To see how the power relations inherent to cultural diplomacy are elided by framing the practice as an enjoyable dimension of public diplomacy that values free cultural expression, see Schneider (2004).
In the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001, a plethora of articles, reports, and op-ed pieces appeared that gave attention to how the US and its values, culture, and policies are perceived abroad and how it can improve those perceptions. Among the recommendations were calls for increased efforts in the area of cultural diplomacy. Ironically, the renewed interest in cultural diplomacy comes at a time when the country’s resources and infrastructure are at their lowest levels. Since 1993, budgets have fallen by nearly 30 percent, staff has been cut by about 30 percent overseas and 20 percent in the US, and dozens of cultural centers, libraries, and branch posts have been closed. See “Arts and Minds: Cultural Diplomacy amid Global Tensions” (presentation, Columbia University, New York, NY, April 14–15, 2003).
Cynthia Schneider, “Culture Communicates: US Diplomacy that Works,” Diplomacy, no. 94 (September 2004) →.
Schneider, “Culture Communicates” details these changes in funding focus.
This essay is an edited excerpt from The Politics of Art: Dissent and Cultural Diplomacy in Lebanon, Palestine, and Jordan (Stanford University Press, 2021). Copyright the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.