literaturen im kontext arabisch – persisch – türkisch literatures in context arabic – persian – turkish Vol. 41: Commitment and Beyond. Reflections on/of the Political in Arabic Literature since the 1940s Series Editors Verena Klemm (Universität Leipzig, Germany) Sonja Mejcher-Atassi (American University of Beirut, Lebanon) Friederike Pannewick (Philipps-Universität Marburg, Germany) Barbara Winckler (Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Germany) Advisory Board Hülya Adak (Sabanci University, Turkey) Roger Allen (University of Pennsylvania, USA) Sinan Antoon (New York University, USA) Tarek El-Ariss (The University of Texas at Austin, USA) Beatrice Gründler (Freie Universität Berlin, Germany) Angelika Neuwirth (Freie Universität Berlin, Germany) Bilal Orfali (American University of Beirut, Lebanon) Sunil Sharma (Boston University, USA) Reichert Verlag Wiesbaden 2015 Commitment and Beyond Reflections on/of the Political in Arabic Literature since the 1940s Edited by Friederike Pannewick and Georges Khalil together with Yvonne Albers Reichert Verlag Wiesbaden 2015 Die Publikation wurde aus Mitteln der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) unterstützt. Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.dnb.de abrufbar. © 2015 Dr. Ludwig Reichert Verlag Wiesbaden ISBN: 978-3-95490-040-4 www.reichert-verlag.de Das Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urhebergesetzes ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages unzulässig und strafbar. Das gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen, Übersetzungen, Mikroverfilmungen und die Speicherung und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen. Printed in Germany Table of Contents Acknowledgments ................................................................................................................. 7 Yvonne Albers, Georges Khalil, Friederike Pannewick Introduction: Tracks and Traces of Literary Commitment— On IltizƗm as an Ongoing Intellectual Project ....................................................................... 9 Part 1 Of Poetics and Politics: Revolution and Literary Commitment Randa Aboubakr The Egyptian Colloquial Poet as Popular Intellectual: A Differentiated Manifestation of Commitment.................................................... 29 Atef Botros Rewriting Resistance: The Revival of Poetry of Dissent in Egypt after January 2011 (Surnjr, Najm and Dunqul) ..................................................................................... 45 Dina Heshmat Egyptian Narratives of the 2011 Revolution: Diary as a Medium of Reconciliation with the Political........................................ 63 Part 2 Roots of a Discourse: Historical Concepts of Literary Commitment Elias Khoury Beyond Commitment............................................................................................. 79 Yoav Di-Capua The Intellectual Revolt of the 1950s and the “Fall of the UdabƗҴ” ....................... 89 Rachid Ouaissa On the Trail of Frantz Fanon ............................................................................... 105 Part 3 Refiguring IltizƗm: Literary Commitment after 1967 Stephan Guth Between Commitment and Marginalization: The ‘Generation of the Sixties’ in the Sadat Era.................................................. 125 Sonja Mejcher-Atassi The Arabic Novel between Aesthetic Concerns and the Causes of Man: Commitment in Jabra Ibrahim Jabra and ‫ޏ‬Abd al-Rahman Munif ...................... 143 Zeina G. Halabi The Day the Wandering Dreamer Became a Fida’i: Jabra Ibrahim Jabra and the Fashioning of Political Commitment ...................... 157 Refqa Abu-Remaileh The Afterlives of IltizƗm: Emile Habibi through a Kanafaniesque Lens of Resistance Literature ............... 171 6 Table of Contents Michael Allan You, The Sacrificial Reader: Poetics and Pronouns in Mahmoud Darwish’s “al-QurbƗn”................................ 185 Leslie Tramontini Molding the Clay: Mu਌affar al-NawwƗb’s Concept of Colloquial Poetry as Art of Resistance ................................................................................................. 201 Sinan Antoon Sargnjn Bnjluৢ’s Commitment ............................................................................... 213 Friederike Pannewick From the Politicization of Theater to Individual Humanism: Towards a New Concept of Engagement in the Theater of Saadallah Wannous.............................................................................................. 221 Part 4 Commitment or Dissent? Contemporary Perspectives Tarek El-Ariss Fiction of Scandal................................................................................................ 237 Christian Junge On Affect and Emotion as Dissent: The KifƗya Rhetoric in Pre-Revolutionary Egyptian Literature .......................... 253 Charlotte Pardey A Body of Dissenting Images: KamƗl al-RiyƗতƯ’s Novel Al-GhurillƗ Read as an Example of Engaged Literature from Tunisia ......................................................................... 273 Stephan Milich Narrating, Metaphorizing or Performing the Unforgettable? The Politics of Trauma in Contemporary Arabic Literature ................................ 285 Felix Lang Redeemed from Politics: Notions of Literary Legitimacy in the Lebanese Literary Field .......................... 303 Yvonne Albers The Empty Chair: On the Politics of Spectatorial Situatedness in the Performances of Rabih Mroué............................................................................. 317 Hanan Toukan Whatever Happened to IltizƗm? Words in Arab Art after the Cold War.................................................................. 333 Notes on the Contributors.................................................................................................. 351 Whatever Happened to IltizƗm? Words in Arab Art after the Cold War Hanan Toukan In Palestinian artist Yazan Al-Khalili’s (Yazan al-KhalƯlƯ) 2013 photographic installation Scouting for Locations: Film Title: Traces of a Scream (figure 1 and 2 below) a search takes place for a film crew that has disappeared while scouting locations for a film based on an adaptation of Ghassan Kanafani’s (GhassƗn KanafƗnƯ) novel Men in the Sun (RijƗl fi-l-shams, 1963), planned to be shot in Sharjah. What supposedly remains of this crew are photographs taken of possible locations for shooting the film, and a scream that was heard in an empty, dimly-lit alley. The artist’s project sets out to find those who have disappeared by reconstructing their journey and their encounters, investigating the scream that eerily lingers on in the alleyway, roaming the streets, spaces and alleyways of Sharjah. The artwork itself is made up of a series of photographs as well as the text written by the artist recounting the story of the scream, its possible meanings and myriad detonations. In the artist’s words: The scream is examined as proof, but no one is certain who’s scream it was; the crew’s or that of the witness of their disappearance. These photographs were found in an email sent to their producer without any details. We organise them on a wall in a timeline chronicling their movement in the city, looking for clues we find that many witnessed their disappearance but no one remembers them, everyone remembers the scream that night but no one recollects its author. The project is scouting for a public space in the public space through the possibility of a scream. Whose voice is heard? who is there to witness? was that scream the result of fear or was it a demand for visibility? can one be invisible in the public space? or is it even a public space if the public is invisible? perhaps that scream is the demand for visibility? but isn’t demand for visibility in the public space a demand for political existence! Someone said that the crew are still roaming in the city, scouting for public spaces, that is why they will not be found, as soon as they enter the public space, they are devoured by invisibility. The inaudible scream that lingers in those photographs perhaps brings into question their political existence. (al-Khalili) Complementing Khalili’s text is a series of photographs of the “search” that takes place. The images in the photos depict a desolate, dry landscape with vacant lots, deserted restaurants and seemingly empty high rises, sparsely dotted with Asian workers appearing only as props against an otherwise bleak backdrop of a city devoid of a soul. Poignant in form and elaborate in the nuanced complex of narratives, the images tell of the cruel dynamics of capital and transnational migrant labor flows to the Gulf. What Khalili’s art work seems to recall most of all is the predicament of the individual in the Middle East today. Inspired by the characters in Kanafani’s book, Khalili’s hollow spaces devoid of voices, of life in fact, ironically recall with painful urgency protagonist Abu Al-Khaizaran’s repeated cries of “Why didn’t you knock on the sides of the tank?” (Kanafani 74) upon discovering the death of three Palestinian men he attempted to smuggle in his truck from Basra to Kuwait. In the novel Abu Al-Khaizaran is delayed at the border by officials who laugh about his supposed relationship with a dancer in Basra, instead of completing the necessary paperwork in a timely manner. Upon his release, Abu Al-Khaizaran rushes back and opens the water tank to let the men out, already suspecting what he will find: three dead bodies. He decides to bury 334 Hanan Toukan Figure 1. (Courtesy of the artist)  Figure 2. (Courtesy of the artist) Whatever Happened to IltizƗm? 335 each in his own grave when he arrives. However, too tired, he instead leaves the bodies by the garbage dump. In the morning the bodies are discovered by municipal employees, and are buried under official auspices (73). Abu Al-Khaizaran returns once again after abandoning the bodies to take their money and belongings. For al-Khalili, resurrecting Abu Al-Khaizaran’s pained wails is an ode to the Palestinian people in a changing world, specifically, in a globalized world where the principal issues of the age-old Palestinian struggle are now also the central tenets of larger transnational struggles. These struggles are related to migration and labor flows, the movement of refugees and their human rights, the securitization of states and the legalities of illegitimately constructed borders and walls. They include and also reach beyond the scope of an anticolonial nationalism and the narration of a people struggling against the routine Israeli tactics of constructing an undisputed history, territoriality and identity in Palestine that have tended to dominate the representation of the struggle in the twentieth century. Hence in Scouting for Locations, Kanafani’s commitment to the Palestinian struggle is not abandoned, only contextualized and historicized within some of the twenty-first century’s most gripping global challenges. Here the notion of a public space—or lack thereof—and the “invisible” voices and bodies at play within them are therefore both testament to and statement on the dire situation of South Asian workers in the Gulf today as well as a reminder of the Palestinian voice devoured in dominant diplomatic discourse. Thus, the border-crossing Palestinian smuggled across vast Arab territory and through the bureaucracies of border posts in search of a decent life is also the South Asian worker in the Emirates of today. In its fusion of publicness, visibility and voice with time, place and identity, the artwork—like the novel that inspired it and which often reads like a stream of consciousness that shifts from the third person to the second by way of flashbacks that blend senses together—is formally and conceptually experimental. Khalili, whose work was commissioned by the Sharjah Art Foundation for its 2013 biennial, is not alone in his endeavor to reach back into modern Arabic literary history and, specifically, the era of iltizƗm in literature in order to make art in and about today’s Arab World. Arabic literary texts in visual art have historically been used as both the subject or the object of the artwork itself in various ways: as narrative or statement, as recorded speech and even as sculpture or performance.1 In Marwa Arsanios (MarwƗ ArsƗniynjs) and Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s (Lnjrins Abnj ণamdƗn) The Pessoptimist Marathon Reading (2012), a live reading session lasting six hours by six fellow artists, which took place simultaneously in Ramallah, East Jerusalem and Beirut, the subject is The Secret Life of Saeed: The Pessoptimist (AlwaqƗҴiҵ al-gharƯba fƯ ikhtifƗҴ SaҵƯd AbƯ al-Na‫ۊ‬s al-mutashƗҴil, 1974), the political satire by the Palestinian novelist and communist party co-founder Emile Habibi (ImƯl ণabƯbƯ). Inspired by Habibi’s musings on movement, border crossings, smuggling and boundaries in the aftermath of the nakba in 1948 through the satirical narration of the double life of Saeed, the Palestinian citizen of Israel, Abu Hamdan and Arsanios saw in the novel a contemporary relevance. Engaging the text through the reactions it provoked from the participants, the subjects of politically dictated borders and the resultant fractured, decentered and dislocated psyches of postmodern identities in the Arab region were highlighted. More than that, the work—when viewed especially within Arsanios’s larger oeuvre which includes scrutinizing reading, writing and publishing and their relationship to the public in the region’s modern history of nation-building and anti-colonialism—seems to be sardonically commenting on the long-gone promises of regional liberation, unification and independence that came with the heady days of Arabism’s finest moment in the 1950s and 1960s. 336 Hanan Toukan The appropriation of legendary texts as a central vehicle for articulating counterhegemony, either by challenging the notion that an artwork should consist of a physical object or by probing the relevance of historical texts to the trials and tribulations of the contemporary moment, is a trend more specifically associated with young contemporary artists in the region.2 Indeed, with the general global shift towards ideas and systems that invite the viewer to engage with an intellectual concept rather than just experience an affective encounter with the art, text took on an even more important role for many artists. It is, however, this “dematerialization of the art object,” as it has been termed (Lippard viii),3 and its concomitant ephemeral and transient nature as well as its links to external sources of funding and the ironies of Gulf monarchial patronage, that has been at the heart of the skepticism greeting contemporary artists of the post-Cold War generation in the Arab region. To be precise, al-Khalili, like many of his contemporaries, is part of a generation of cultural actors that came to the fore subsequent to the end of the Cold War in 1990 and the manifold regional reconfigurations of the political landscape, such as the dwindling of Soviet influence in the region, the onset of the First Gulf War and the subsequent sanctions on Iraq, the ‘end’ of the Lebanese Civil War, the signing of the Palestinian-Israeli Oslo Peace Accords and the Jordan-Israel Wadi Araba Treaty, all of which unfolded instantaneously.4 This generation has been lauded for its post-ideological character, and at the same time criticized for proposing seemingly normalized, apolitical or anationalist artistic and cultural practices more generally. Moreover, the postmodern visualities associated with this generation of artists, and which parallel the global art world’s tendency toward and interest in conceptual projects embedded in metaphorical approaches that reject “totalizing” theories of history, are deemed to stand in direct contradistinction to the committed art undertaken in the service of a broader social and political cause. The latter is understood to have been the norm practiced by the predecessor generation of anticolonial and postcolonial visual artists and writers—the ‘iltizƗm generation’ as they are commonly referred to. Yet, what I would like to argue here, is the fact that iltizƗm or any historically related notions of commitment to a cause or dissent in the arts are revisited, re-appropriated or commemorated at all; and the way they are rearticulated, visualized, narrated, revised and adapted in contemporary art practice and the processes that bring them into being is dependent first and foremost on the prevalent notion and understanding of ‘the Political.’ In other words: What commitment is and how it manifests as a counter-hegemonic act depends on how politics is practiced, conceived, understood and resisted in any respective historical era. Accordingly, the political is the medium through which the changing conceptions of commitment and dissent are expressed in cultural production. By taking various examples of artworks and their discursive and material (re-)presentation as critical, subversive or resistant in the local and global spheres and within the channels of production, display and dissemination that the contemporary art world affords them, this chapter focuses on the legacy of iltizƗm. Specifically, it questions if any form of iltizƗm continues to exist at all and if so, probes its impact on today’s meaning of the political in art, as is evident amongst the generation of artists and arts production in the post-Cold War era in Lebanon and Palestine. Thus, taking as its point of departure the structural and global dynamics at play in Arab contemporary arts production since the period of the 1990s, especially after the events of September 11, 2001 and the Second Gulf War, as well as the revolutionary process that began to unfold in December 2010, the essay grapples with how we are to make sense of the ongoing commitment of cultural producers in the Arab region and specifically visual artists to speak truth to power—in the new visual form it is taking and the structural dynamics it is imbricated in. Whatever Happened to IltizƗm? 337 Following this, and in line with Lila Abu-Lughod’s warnings against romanticizing resistance (42), the chapter interrogates prevalent interpretations of these new visualities as embodiments of a new political composed of alternative civic practices and new spaces of dissent, emancipatory experiences and subjective micro-resistance by asking whether every visual expression of dissent is in fact an act of dissent. Seeing—again to borrow from AbuLughod—resistant cultural production as a diagnostic of power (ibid.), the chapter asks if it is possible to read iltizƗm in literature as only one form of enactment of the political amongst myriad other aesthetical forms that evolve with the passing of time. Through this querying, the chapter uncovers how the dichotomy of the politics of art, i.e. the structures and processes that create art, versus the political in art, in reference to its affectively emancipatory potential and politically sensorial nature, has been constructed to account for the various ways art’s counter-hegemonic role may manifest itself. The Challenge to the World as Text Historically, Western representations of Arab culture have tended to privilege the spoken and the written word as the highest form of intellectual practice. By extension, visual representations of thought, concepts and sentiments have traditionally suffered from a legitimacy deficit in the academic milieu, often considered ‘non-Islamic.’5 Hence, scholarship in Middle Eastern Studies generally has by and large neglected artistic and aesthetic practices as socially, politically, and culturally formative sites worthy of examination. By the same token however, the modern and contemporary visual arts spheres in the region have been incapable of penetrating the popular imagination or competing with the dominant position that literature has in Arab high culture or that music occupies in Arab popular culture (Laïdi-Hanieh). And this, despite the visual arts or at the very least individual artists’ centrality in informing many of the debates around modernity and tradition, such as the Baghdad Group, the Bread and Freedom surrealist group in Egypt in the earlier part of the twentieth century or—as in Beirut—artists’ historical participation in the tensions emerging between modernist journals like MawƗqif, Shiҵr and al-ƖdƗb. In the case of the many young visual artists in the region today, their relationship to the larger cultural sphere is most discernible in the ways in which they speak back to and rework the interpretations of literary legends in their multimedia-based works. Yet, since the turn of the millennium, the Middle Eastern visual arts terrain has witnessed major transformations that have allowed for its increased visibility, arguably posing a challenge to literature as the dominant cultural voice representing the region, at least at the global level. This tension between the two mediums is part and parcel of the global development of visual culture both as subject matter and lived experience, which has contested the hegemony of the word over the image. As visual theorist Nicholas Mirzoeff compellingly argues: “the visual disrupts and challenges any attempt to define culture in purely linguistic terms” (5). He further posits that the visual is to postmodernism what literature was to modernism (ibid.). Beginning in the late nineteenth century and extending throughout most of the twentieth century, colonial power, modern technology, discursive modernist praxis and a modern re-organization of society in the Middle East fostered the formation of the postcolonial national state primarily through the channels of urbanization and print cultures (most notably magazines, newspapers, journals and novels). Today, fragile states, corrupt regimes and structural violence imbricated in imperial wars and ongoing colonialism have resulted in mass exile, disrupted lives in the diaspora, and frequent migrations across national and transnational borders. These distortions have arguably nurtured a generation of dislocated selves who no longer claim to speak 338 Hanan Toukan for a nation or community in the face of an empire but rather—through the production of culture—as political subjectivities with a transnational frame of reference. As an amalgamation of vision, thought, text, image and phenomenological experience, the field as a whole, especially when viewed within the context of the new media revolution, creates politicized subject positions. This production of political subjectivity, in turn, occurs through a framework “in which the viewer exists in and contributes to a society marked by practices of looking” and interacting with the many “visual industries that cater to an ever-expanding public” both participating in and receiving these signifiers (Gruber and Haugbolle xxiii). For the new media revolution is understood to have affected all forms of communication whether image- or textbased, from the acquisition of information, to its communication, manipulation, storage and dissemination, allowing for a novel eclecticism in the employment of texts in connection to images (Manovich 5). Consequently, visual literacy and the impact of visual forms of thinking and working today arguably play a more crucial role in how society shifts and progresses than they ever have historically. At this historical juncture, the disjointed, de-territorialized, fluid and accessible nature of visual culture as both lived experience and cultural as well as political practice, often involving a synthesis of text and image, has become the dominant medium for dissenting voices in the region. Nowhere is this growth in the visual production field as a channel of protest, dissent and political voice more evident than in the myriad forms of production emerging as part of the Arab revolutionary process that began in Tunis in December 2010. From political cartoons, to hip-hop and rap, street graffiti, public art performances and installations as well as video and internet art, and experimental poetry and literature, the cultural production of the Arab revolutionary process has been largely transmitted through a global visual scopic field, even when it is written or oral.6 In turn, the growing academic concern with the visual cultural production of the region is both testament to the expanding modes of representing its histories, subjectivities and different forms of resistance to power as well as an acknowledgment of a gap in studies on the visual field as a crucial site of study into the societies, politics and cultures of the region in their own right. As the section below shows, the tension between the visual and the textual—whereby the former, when considered, has arguably often been incorporated into literally traditions rather than being appreciated in its own right—is further complicated today, specifically in the case of the contemporary visual arts field, by its proximity both to ‘suspect’ sources of funding as well as patronage. These come in the form of either international development organizations (such as the Ford, Soros Foundations and USAID [United States Agency for International Development]), bilateral organizations (like the Goethe and Heinrich Böll Institutes or the British Council), or the monarchial regimes of the Gulf. The tension is equally compounded by the “persistence of a constructed oppositional binary between ‘traditional Islamic’ arts and ‘new’ arts. This binary is based on a perceived historical discontinuity between the two” (Amirsadeghi, Mikdadi, and Shabout 8). Moreover, the fact that the contemporary art form itself and the “boundaries between what is and what is not visual art are increasingly blurred as to become barely discernible” (Makhoul 24), intensifies this already complicated relationship. Video art for instance, arguably the most critical, widely used and circulated of the new art forms sits resolutely between film, painting, literature and theater, borrowing from and yet also critiquing each by refusing to be limited to any discipline. Concurrent with these trends, when the giants of commitment such as Samih Al Qassem (SamƯত al-QƗsim), Emile Habibi, Mahmoud Darwish (Maতmnjd DarwƯsh), Ghassan Kanafani and Hannah Minah (ণannƗ MƯna), amongst others known for having formed the cultural backbone of a century of resistance to colonial subjugation and its aftereffects appear in contemporary visual art, Whatever Happened to IltizƗm? 339 Figure 3. ‘Jacques Derrida’ taken by Joel Robine on Derrida’s emblematic white chair. From Oraib Toukan, Google-gazing, ongoing, on representations of the intellectual. (Courtesy of the artist) they are not so much disavowed as lamented in conceptual, formal and aesthetical terms. These figures are, although admired, often also bemoaned and interrogated through different art forms for embodying a failed aesthetics of resistance. Artists today return to them to understand their critical role in the life, death and afterlife of a botched modernist project of liberation where the centrality of writing was an unquestionable tool in the collective experience of subjugation and hence resistance and commitment to change. Proposing the text as an artistic strategy, visual artist Oraib Toukan’s (‫ޏ‬Urayb ৫njqƗn) powerful experimental essay, written in English, “We, the Intellectuals” intervenes in the world of intellectual ideas through an online arts and culture platform (figure 3). In her piece Toukan questions the notion of commitment to a cause and its historically paradoxical relationship to ideology, institutionalism, intellectualism and its dominant role in the region’s processes of liberation and nation-building. In the artist’s words: […] painter Ismail Shammout was a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) before he became Palestinian Director of Arts and National Culture in 1965; the novelist and poster artist Ghassan Kanafani was a spokesperson and a writer for the Marxist Leninist movement of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in 1967 until he was assassinated by the Mossad; cartoonist Naji Al-Ali joined the Arab Nationalist Movement (and was barred a few times too many for lack of party discipline) before he too got assassinated, and so on. Kanafani once summed it up by saying: “My political position springs from my being a novelist. In so far as I am concerned, politics and the novel are an indivisible case and I can categorically state that I became politically committed because I am a novelist, not the opposite.” (“We, the Intellectuals”)7 Through her written piece Toukan underscores the phenomenon of commitment to a cause that manifests itself within the framework of the organized, top-down institutionalized politics of state formation. Through her writing, the artist playfully interrogates the historic relevance of dissenting intellectual voices—both in the anticolonial struggle and the subsequent nation-building project—in regard to the meaning of resistance in the cultural production taking place in the contemporary context of the Arab World. Likewise, in Ramzi Hazboun (RamzƯ Hazbnjn) and Dia‫ ގ‬al-Azzeh’s (ঋiyƗ‫ ގ‬al-‫ޏ‬Azza) “Motionless Weight” (2009), a blue free-flowing bag discarded at the start of the four-minute video, takes the viewer on a journey through and past the crowded streets, alleyways and walls of post-Oslo Ramallah (Hazboun and Al-Azzeh). Beginning with the bag flowing across a book kiosk, allowing a glimpse into the type of “high” and “low” translated and local popular literature on sale, the journey finishes at the memorial site and tomb of Palestine’s “Poet of Resistance” Mahmoud Darwish. Along the way the bag lingers in front of a mural of Darwish gazing at the scores of people going about their daily business without so much as a glimpse at the mural before them, before arriving at the Ramallah municipality garbage dump. The short film, a video essay, interrogates post-Oslo Ramallah’s neoliberal 340 Hanan Toukan urban symbols. Through the specter of Darwish presiding over crumbling walls, alleyways and disinterested people, the poet’s musings on the tension lying between presence and absence in his prose poem “Absent Presence” (“FƯ তaঌrat al-ghiyƗb,” 2006) is pointedly alluded to in a nod towards the failures of Oslo, the delusions of supposed statehood and the PA’s (Palestinian National Authority) rhetoric of resistance. Twinning Darwish’s grand memorial and the specter of his image in the street with the city’s garbage dump, al-Azzeh and Hazboun, like Toukan, are also concerned with what critical voices from the past represent in our contemporary world. Al-Azzeh, however, cogently juxtaposes these questions against the PA’s imperatives of profit, free exchange, open markets and consumer subjectivity in neoliberal times, issues that place Palestine in a global context and transnational frame. On Resistance, Critical Practice and the Institution Works like those described are in line with what is known in the global art world as critical art practice insists it is doing: making interdisciplinary art that intervenes in the political as opposed to making political art. Critical art practices and artists who see themselves as critical, seek, amongst other objectives, to transform the world through activist, socially engaged and intellectual approaches, the creation of radical social collectives and alternative art spaces, as well as the construction of utopian imaginings and representations of the dystopias of our age. The latter endeavors to give a voice to the marginal and oppressed, authoring radical manifestos to adress social inequalities and, last but not least, intervenes in social, political, intellectual and economic norms and flows. Sometimes object or display oriented, other times interactive or performative or indeed encompassing curatorial and institutionally organized work, what is understood as a critical practice may, according to Dan S. Wang writing in Art Journal, draw from multiple formal and technical traditions, even within the confines of a single work. In his words: “What critical practices share is a fundamental aspiration: to present questions and challenges about the way the world is […]. Thus, critical practices are always in a basic sense politicized” (69). Related to one of the central issues for artists who identify themselves as critical today, is the question of their relationship to the processes and structures shaping their work. Contextualizing artists’ own formal and conceptual questioning of the boundaries of art’s reception by institutions, audiences, communities and constituencies, in addition to interrogating the latter’s interactions with the political, public and artistic fields are central to understanding what has been termed the “artist as public intellectual.” This term is employed in relation to the role artists play in society as organic intellectuals in the Gramscian sense (Becker 13–14). No longer relegated to the gallery space, museum or artist studio, art has now taken on a social, political, technological and cultural life well outside those nodes of production and exhibition. The artist, or more specifically the representation of the artist, is therefore no longer of “the artist on the fringe,” the “bohemian,” the “socially irresponsible,” the “fraudulent” and the “esoteric” (11). Rather the artist, or at least some artists, are increasingly taking on the role of critiquing and thereby effectively engaging the public and private spheres through accessible visual experimentations that tenaciously insist on representing society to itself. Yet, on the notion of critical art as counter-hegemonic practice some—such as artist and theorist Hito Steyerl—have maintained that “[e]ven though political art manages to represent so-called local situations from all over the globe, and routinely packages injustice and destitution, the conditions of its own production and display remain pretty much unexplored” (Steyerl). It has also been argued that in the era of neoliberal globalization, corporate and state Whatever Happened to IltizƗm? 341 powers have transformed the institutions and conventions of contemporary art to adapt art’s social functions to the needs of the new world system (Stallabrass 34–36). This includes, above all, a process of producing and exhibiting that valorizes culture within the larger remit of “cultural policy”—a professionalized form of art where, as some have suggested, politics becomes the art of display (Leslie). In the context of the Arab World, the past decade has witnessed a flourishing of what are often—and arguably—referred to as “independent” or “alternative” art spaces, artist-run and artist-led projects, biennials, festivals, exhibitions and other events understood to be self-organized structures operating adjacent to the official apparatuses of the state. This phenomenon occurred coupled with a return to “cultural diplomacy” as well as “civil society and democratization” programming on behalf of international donor organizations working in the field of development in the region, first in the 1990s and then with full force after the events of 9/11 and again with the onset of the revolutionary process in 2011. Concurrent with the transformations in the structure and type of aid directed at civil society, including the NGO-ization of the culture sector, an exponentially growing Gulf-based market comprised of a momentous infrastructure of commercial galleries, collectors, and world-class museums has also flourished. These include the existent Sharjah Biennial (accompanied by an extensive program of events for “alternative” arts) and Art Dubai (a first-class art fair), the Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha and the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, venues in which most critical contemporary artists of the region have either exhibited in or aspire to do so. Consequently, these internationally-funded pockets of what is broadly categorized as visual artistic production and increasingly gained a foothold at the turn of the millennium, are often located at the heart of tense debates which tend to conflate foreign-supported democracy with neoliberalism and imperialism. These debates emerged in most domains of foreignsupported civil society NGOs throughout most of the region from roughly 1990 onwards. Here the heated deliberations on the relationship between cultural production and international support often get wrangled in defensive takes on what especially post-1990 visual artists operating in these fields understand as attacks on their perceived “in-authenticity due to what are sometimes regarded as aesthetical re-adjustments being made with the production of internationally funded (read western) ‘post-modern visualities’” (Toukan, Art).8 Emblematizing how international cultural assistance has been historically perceived by cultural producers and resonating with relevance to their counterparts today is an incident which occurred around the financing and aesthetical trends of one particular literary journal: Al-Hiwar (al-‫ۉ‬iwƗr) in 1960s Beirut. In 1957, the poets Yousef el-Khal (Ynjsuf al-KhƗl) and Adonis (AdnjnƯs) (regarded as the leader of the modernist movement in Arabic poetry) founded and edited Shiҵr, a magazine for contemporary Arabic poetry. This was to inaugurate modern Arabic poetry. For eleven years, between 1957 and 1970, the magazine struggled against what it perceived as outdated and archaic poetical theory and practice. This precipitated a reflection on the role of Arab nationalism in the loss of the rest of Palestine in 1967. Adonis himself, who was never fully trusted by Arab nationalists, later launched the daring literary journal MawƗqif where he and his colleagues delved into a reassessment of the political style of the two decades that had passed and of the very language and vocabulary of politics of the time. At the same time, a bifurcation was taking place in the literary field that art historian Kamal Boullata claims was also very relevant and reflected in the visual arts (“Artists” 25). The first current, according to Boullata, called for a littérature engagée as popularized in the immediate post-World War II era, when the French existentialists such as Jean-Paul Sartre applied a basic existentialist tenet to art: That a person defines her/himself by consciously engaging in willed action. The position was a reaction against the second wave re- 342 Hanan Toukan flected in the creed of “art for art’s sake.” Among Beirut’s most influential literary journals, al-ƖdƗb represented the former trend while Shiҵr espoused the latter view. Beirut’s small size and close-knit community of artists and intellectuals then, like today, facilitated easy collaboration between the two, helping to “elevate the visual arts to share the space traditionally dominated by the oral arts,” as Boullata explains (ibid.). On the one hand, the artists whose figurative language perpetuated a narrative pictorial art seemed to echo the metaphorical imagery popularized by the poetry introduced in the pan-Arabist al-ƖdƗb founded and edited by the writer and literary critic Suheil Idriss (Suhayl IdrƯs). The poets associated with Shiҵr, on the other hand, valorized the more abstract and experimental artists. Out of Shiҵr evolved another magazine founded by Tawfik Sayigh (TawfƯq ৡƗyigh), named al-‫ۉ‬iwƗr, dedicated to modernism in Arabic poetry. The magazine, which first appeared in Beirut in 1962 thanks to the efforts of the CIA’s shadow organization, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, founded in 1950 as part of the United States’ commitment to extending the ideals of liberal democracy well beyond European parameters in a Cold War world, faced relentless attack from Communists and Nationalists (Saunders 334). It ceased publication in 1967 in a dramatic chain of events, which began with Sayigh’s discovery of the source of his journal’s funding, a court case brought by al-ƖdƗb, Sayigh’s depression, and his subsequent untimely death in an elevator (Boullata, “The Beleaguered Unicorn” 69). The drama revolving around al-‫ۉ‬iwƗr continues to resonate in the contemporary consciousness of Arab cultural producers crudely divided along binaries of progressive/conservative, modern/anti-modern, and authentic/inauthentic, measured in accordance to where they stand in regards to the question of commitment to change and the role of the artist in social and political progress. It is precisely here, nestled in between these tense discussions, that the fraught relations between the postmodernist artist expressing critique visually and the committed modernist intellectual armed with the legendary power of the word become most animated, for the latter generation of writers, poets, and visual artists indirectly continue to haunt debates on what it means to be committed and resistant in cultural production. This haunting occurs mostly because their revolutionary conscience is what they consider to be the yardstick by which today’s younger counterparts’ achievements on the global level are to be measured. As the director of a contemporary art house cinema in Beirut of the post-1990 generation put it: This generation in my opinion got stuck in the 1960s. They can’t come out of it. They did something great then, but they are stuck in it and they have not been able to progress. They are kind of living off of the legend they created, and they still think that the revolution must start from the same place. (Toukan, Art 73) “Starting the Revolution from a Different Place” Speaking of the art world generally, the artist Hans Haacke acknowledges that there is a widespread assumption in the public, and often among art professionals as well, that art has nothing to do with politics and that politics can only contaminate artworks. For Haacke, this is an interesting sociological phenomenon (Bourdieu and Haacke 88–89). Like Haacke, I find the meaning of the “political” in art to be grounded in sociologically discursive formations. Consequently, I work my way up from the premise that it is the “politics” of these formations which account for the nuances in the shifting understandings of the “political” as it pertains to cultural production. As such, my reading of art and its relationship to culture, society and politics is based on Chantal Mouffe’s articulation of the relationship between the “political” and “politics” (101). By “politics” Mouffe refers to the ensemble of Whatever Happened to IltizƗm? 343 practices, discourses and institutions that seek to establish a certain order and organize human coexistence in conditions that are always potentially conflictual and “constitutive of human societies” (ibid.). The “political” for Mouffe is the dimension of antagonism that is inherent in human relations and works to resist or reinforce hegemonic “politics” (ibid.). In either case, the field of the political is reformulated as a hegemonic one, because she articulates it as a set of antagonisms that are essentially always bidding to consolidate social power. Envisioning the “political” in Mouffeian terms means that we see power, conflict and antagonism as innate to debates about cultural production and its meaning and relationship to society. Hence, to borrow from Abu-Lughod once again, by reading resistance (in cultural production) as a ‘diagnostic of power,’ it is suggested that the hegemonic conception of the “political” in art and its materialization as resistance, dissent or subversion is itself a reflection of the politics of art that is at play in any period. In conversation with Stephen Wright, a Paris-based art theorist for the Out of Beirut (2006) Modern Art Oxford exhibition catalogue, Bilal Khbeiz (BilƗl Khubayz)—poet, essayist, journalist and prominent commentator and actor in what is known today as Lebanon’s post-civil war contemporary art scene—draws a line between the pre- and post-civil war generations of Lebanese artists, the start of a new era after the war and the delineation of new identities as part of that process. Khbeiz states that there existed a total subservience of the arts to the politics of the Arab liberation movements prior to the war: Where a poem may resemble a tear, a painting may amount to a scream and a novel may exceed expectations, the arts were always successful in communing with their audience. In that context, the artist was like Rilke, the person most capable of expressing general and common emotions. (Wright 68) Khbeiz here posits the Lebanese pre-civil war generation of artists and writers upon whom he is reflecting as concerned with outright political art (as opposed to politically critical art) by emphasizing its link to prevailing ideology. Comparatively for him, the arts today have managed to “escape the edicts of politics” (ibid.). Khbeiz is part of a generation of contemporary post-war multidisciplinary artists, writers and architects, and their supporting networks and organizations, based in Beirut who emerged from the rubbles of the Civil War and the ambiguities of the ܑƗҴif Accords that supposedly ended hostilities in 1990, responding in their work to a very particular post-violence scenario. These particularities propelled them to: firstly, subvert understandings of how the history of the Civil War might be read and narrated; secondly, to interrogate and challenge the traditional role of cultural institutions and the commercial gallery system in the creation of art often by incursions into public space, whether physically or conceptually; and thirdly, to probe prevalent and accepted understandings of hegemony and ideology in identity formation. They did so through what they often describe as an ‘introspective’ turn which entailed a move away from what they saw as their predecessors’ tendency to ‘write back to the empire’ within the confines of the metanarratives of history. Whether iltizƗm proper or the legacy it left in the wake of its collapse in 1967 with—in the words of Lebanese journalist and poet Youssef Bazzi (Ynjsuf BazzƯ)—“its leftist revolutionary tone” and “immense amount of anger, despair and the call for revolution […] a call made in a singing and somewhat naïve tone” (4); it was the conception of a committed dissident speaking on behalf of society by holding a mirror up to itself that was in the process of being visually deconstructed and then reconstructed though a self-understood, non-ideological form and introspective process of making art. 344 Hanan Toukan Lina Saneh (LƯnƗ ৡƗni‫ )ޏ‬and Rabih Mroué’s (RabƯ‫ ޏ‬Mrnjwah) performance Biokraphia (Beirut, 2002) questions the conventional interview format common to documentary practices that often pose versions of history as conclusive. Oscillating between the role of victor, victim and subject under interrogation, the protagonist—Saneh herself—stands before a glass tank full of water which hazily relays images of her face to her audience. Alluding to television monitors and constructed narratives, the content and form of the piece grapples with the indeterminacy of a fragmented identity at play within the confines of what was in 1990s Beirut an existent and formal hegemonic narrative propagating an amnesia of the war in order to go on living. In this example, the ‘introspection’ or the ‘auto-critique,’ often articulated in the various interviews carried out with members of the post-war generation, in order to locate itself vis-à-vis the pre-war one, is aptly demonstrated in the following excerpt from the performance: You’re still thinking with the logic of the enemy. The enemy thinks that our work is provocative. They accuse us of being influenced by the West. Of being cerebral. Formalist. There’s no story here...no actors…We have suffered and are still suffering from the homogenization of the Arab and Islamic identity. But in reality people are not all proud of this identity. This is our reality; and what I did was attempt to tell the truth. We don’t remember that we’re Arabs until the Americans and the Israelis bomb Beirut, the West Bank, or Iraq… in times of crises. ... It’s only when things like this happen that this instinct in us is stirred. Our loyalty is instinctive; therefore it’s not positive. In this context, the Arab identity can be considered an issue or matter, which in itself imposes upon us the inevitability of fate and destiny. (Saneh and Mroué) The work as a whole touches upon crucial issues regarding an artist’s position in the era of globalization by tackling—head on—local political, sexual, and religious taboos. Most relevantly for our concerns here, it attacks norms and conventions and teases out the seemingly hypocritical in Lebanese and Arab society at large. Ibrahim Abu-Rabi‫ގ‬, scholar of Islamic and intellectual thought, argued that contemporary Arab thinkers of all hues and inclinations are grappling with questions of modernity, postmodernity, and globalism with a twofold purpose (186). Firstly, to reflect on the challenges the phenomenon of globalization has posed to the Arab World; and secondly, to assess the overall trajectory of the Arab World over the past century or so (ibid.). Yet, despite the added challenge of grappling with the wave of globalization and the ‘New World Order’ that pulled Lebanon in after the end of its Civil War, the introspection transmitted in Biokraphia is in fact part of the larger dynamics that Abu-Rabi‫ ގ‬discusses. Interestingly, this generation of artists is often framed, especially by international onlookers of the scene, as one of the products of an exceptionally brutal war that forced a break with the past. This stands in stark contrast to the interpretation of them as a perpetuation of a new form of introspection in cultural production that is in fact a continuation of a larger history of war, revolution, oppression and resistance in the region.9 Yet, the post-war generation’s introspective tendency is also one that is an integral part, in fact a continuation, of a larger movement of intellectual thought that seeks to address the internal workings of Arab society, mentalities and relationship to modernity. This move was set in motion after what the pre-Civil War generation, ironically echoing contemporary Lebanese artists’ choice of terminology about the Civil War, refers to as the cataclysmic experience of the naksa (the day of the setback)—the loss of the rest of historical Palestine to Israel in the Six Day War of 1967. Following this, and in the words of novelist Elias Khoury (IlyƗs KhnjrƯ) writing about artist’s migration between places, languages, and tools. “The artists and writers of our times do not return to a place of stable values and forms. Their very being is afflicted by a crisis, Whatever Happened to IltizƗm? 345 searching for a significance in the only reference available to them, namely in the very artistic forms they create” (82). The pre-1990 generation of cultural actors in Palestine and Lebanon, and particularly those most active in the period of the 1960s, articulated the political in terms of “modernity,” understood as a comprehensive cultural project that aims at social and political change, understood not as a historical process, but rather as a value in itself, an instigator of social transformation and not its result, as the Lebanese poet and novelist Abbas Beydoun (‫ޏ‬AbbƗs Bayঌnjn) once described it (27–30). In contrast, for some members of the contemporary generation, particularly those with transnational ties, the point of artistic creation is selfreferential and primarily about a critical and often conceptual engagement with an aesthetics localized within the domain of a global conception of art, even if it does extend itself outwards to society through public festivals, artistic interventions in public space and interventions into the political and social spheres. Thus, while the previous generation of artists and intellectuals shaped its purpose in direct relation to society by conceptualizing modernity as an endpoint and modernism as an aesthetic tool in the process of postcolonial identity negotiation and nation-building, the post-Cold War generation of Arab artists aims more at interaction with and inclusion in a “global” art discourse, and thus as part of a process of deconstructing and rethinking modernism and its related cultural practices as a project. Hence, for one generation, art was meant to be for a purpose, more than for its own sake, an educational or developmentalist tool, directed towards state and society and used in ‘speaking back to the empire’ and its after-effects. For the subsequent generation, this very idea was to be refuted, deconstructed, and reworked, allowing, as I argue here, for a “re-visualization” of the postcolonial entity primarily vis-à-vis itself rather than a “writing-back” to the former empire. Consequently, whether or not the generational introversion that Khoury describes as a crisis in the quote above is in fact symptomatic of the loss of meaning and purpose generally associated with postmodern literary and visual production, as he hints is in fact true, what is more relevant, at least for our purposes here, is what this perception represents. In other words, Khoury’s framing of the post-Cold War generation’s cultural production as crisis ridden, is in and of itself indicative of the existent generational tensions over the meanings and contexts of the political. Viewed through the lens of a contentious generational divide, one may argue that cultural production—a process constituted of artefacts that may or may not emanate a transcendent “political”—is also a state of being that is translated and explicated in terms that are always a manifestation of the larger critical condition of society itself. Conclusion In Jumana Manna’s (JumƗna MannƗ) short video “Blessed Blessed Oblivion” (2010) Palestinian male thug culture is the focus. Inspired by American underground experimental filmmaker Kenneth Agner’s short film Scorpio Rising (1963) and Kustom Kar Kommandos (1965), Manna’s twenty-minute piece is a voyeuristic gaze into East Jerusalem’s underworld of marginalized male Palestinian youths (figure 4 below), showing their hungry sexual appetites, raunchy jokes and the crude working of their imagination. By juxtaposing their seemingly hedonistic and depoliticized lives against the main protagonist’s recitation of martyred poet Abdel Rahim Mahmoud’s (‫ޏ‬Abd al-RaতƯm Maতmnjd) well-known poem “Al-shahƯd” (“The Martyr,” 1936), running intermittently through the length of the video, Manna insinuates that humor, recklessness and lack of discipline may in fact be forms of subversion and thereby everyday resistance in and of themselves. Moreover, by referencing the notion of commitment existent in the 1930s, a period before the historical era of iltizƗm officially ‘be- 346 Hanan Toukan Figure 4. (Courtesy of the artist) gan,’ Manna, like other artists of her generation bluntly reminds us that counter-hegemony in the colony and post-colony are not only linked but also lived, renewed, recreated and modified unremittingly. Within this frame of reference, what distinguishes the post- and pre-Cold War generation of artists and writers in Palestine and Lebanon is not whether or not they employ strategies of subversion against the grand narratives of Western progress and its violent repercussions, as they both do that. Rather, it is the variance in the tools appropriated to carry out this feat of countering hegemonic discourses and practices that marks each generation. As Meier, writing of the generation of Arab contemporary artists of the post-1990s era, explains: “their work certainly interrogates this relationship, but colonialism and the independence struggle is a past these artists did not personally experience,” and because of that “their multimedia or post-media work consciously overturns modernist visual vocabularies and concepts” (15). Following this, I would suggest by way of conclusion, that the divergent conceptions of resistance and the political and the chosen mediums of their expression, be read as temporal and spatial variations in articulations of ‘speaking back’ to the colonial encounter and its various manifestations, whether imperial, colonial, postcolonial or neocolonial. One related question that remains however is why post-Cold War multimedia artists today insist on revisiting the concepts and practices of cultural resistance from a bygone era of which they are deeply critical, instead of abandoning it all together and engaging their own fellow writers on contemporary aesthetical concerns? IltizƗm was once a concept and aesthetical practice anchored in an uncompromising leftist ideology of commitment to a cause and responsibility toward the people. Yet, as demonstrated here and as has been relatedly argued elsewhere about the changing conceptions of iltizƗm in relation to especially Arab Leftists, Nationalists and later Islamists (Klemm 58), the term in its different guises has always encompassed an understanding of the need to resist empire, a commitment to revolutionary change and the relationship between cultural production and society necessary for each to flourish. In the final analysis, the persistence of the term iltizƗm and the different meanings and practices that emanate from it is, if anything, testament to its enduring legacy, the continued appeal of the iconic figures Whatever Happened to IltizƗm? 347 associated with it, and the imaginings of commitment and resistance that they practiced and inspired. These conceptions of the political in art continue to sit deeply, albeit often uneasily, in the consciousness of various post-iltizƗm generations of cultural producers. Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 The appropriation of writing, in the form of quotations, words and single letters has historically appeared in the works of many Arab artists. Iraqi Ghani Alani (GhanƯ al-‫ޏ‬ƖnƯ), Egyptian Ahmed Mustafa (Aতmad Muৢ৬afƗ), Lebanese Samir Al-Sayegh (SamƯr al-ৡƗyigh), Etel Adnan (Itil ‫ޏ‬AdnƗn), Aref El Rayyes (‫ޏ‬Ɩrif alRayyis) and Salwa Raouda Choucair (SalwƗ Rawঌa Shuqayr), Palestinian Kamal Boulatta (KamƗl BullƗ৬a), Syrian Mahmoud Hamad (Maতmnjd ণammƗd) and Algerian Rachid Koraichi (RashƯd al-QurayshƯ) are amongst the many others who have explored the rich literary tradition of the region and transformed it into sculpture, painting, drawing, etching, book art and more recently performance and video art. For more on the use and power of the written word in the works of Middle Eastern Artists today see the online archive of the British museum’s 2006 exhibition “Word into Art: Artists of the Modern Middle East” (http://www.british museum.org/wordintoart/). In contrast to the employment by previous generation artists of the word, letter or scripture to explore the relevance, multi-dimensional meanings and cultural meanings imbued in their respective forms, contemporary artists such as Walid Sadek (WalƯd ৡƗdiq) have more recently proposed bringing words into the domain of the visual and effectively making the text, essays, musings and prose the artwork in itself. On another level, some artists like Samah Hijjawi (SamƗত ণijjƗwƯ) in her 2009 project Where are the Arabs, a public performance in Amman that reenacts former Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser’s (JamƗl ‫ޏ‬Abd al-NƗৢir) powerful oratory skills and inspirational speeches, questions the power of language and its relationship to the public in the contemporary Arab World. Palestinian artist Sharif Waked’s (SharƯf WƗkid) 2009 video To be Continued... employs the tradition of storytelling, so intrinsic to Arab (and Persian and Indian) oral culture, through a suicide bomber’s reading of excerpts from One Thousand and One Nights in order to ultimately defer his selfimmolation. In her seminal publication Lippard focuses on the web of ideas and practices that have been termed conceptual art. She argues that in their critique of the art object, conceptual artists set out to reshape the art world into a network of ideas and critique rather than a marketplace of artifacts for sale. In Egypt, these shifts in aesthetical styles after 1990 were reflected most strongly in the generation of poets that came to be known as the ‘90s generation’ for their use of the personal voice and concerns of the street or spoken Arabic poetic forms. This phenomenon has had the effect of marginalizing the visual heritage of both the Ottoman Empire as well as the vast Indo-Persian artistic tradition from mainstream representations of the region’s culture. See for instance the myriad forms of experimental writing and prose emerging in the internet or even the rise of spoken word poetry, which is part performative and circulated on the web. See also the different forms of experimental music circulated on the web placing as much emphasis on the image as the music. The issue of the intellectual is similarly taken up by Egyptian artist, writer and musician Hassan Khan (ণasan KhƗn) in his online journal article “In Defense of the Corrupt Intellectual.” E-Flux 18 (2010). Web. 2 June 2015. In an interview with T. J. Demos for Art Journal, Lebanese curator Rasha Salti suggests that multimedia conceptual practices have today become “legible” and therefore should no longer be regarded as inauthentic. This challenge of being regarded as “inauthentic” or “illegible” was, according to her, overcome by addressing the shortage in venues for contemporary art and building up relevant audiences (109–112). See Dagher, Sandra, Catherine David, Rasha Salti, and Christine Tohme. “Curating Beirut: A Conversation on the Politics of Representation.” Interview with T. J. Demos. Art Journal 66.2 (2007): 98–119. Print. According to art historian Sarah Rogers, “the dominant critical paradigm for Beirut is a locale in which the violent history of the civil war produced a tabula rasa for visual practices” (191). See Rogers, Sarah. Post-War Art and the Historical Roots of Beirut’s Cosmopolitanism. Diss. MIT Boston, 2008. Print. Portraying Beirut’s art scene as “proto-institutional,” western critics have promulgated an understanding of an art scene operating in a void. 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Meier, Prita. “Authenticity and Its Modernist Discontents: The Colonial Encounter and African and Middle Eastern Art History.” Arab Studies Journal 18.1 (2010): 12–45. Print. Whatever Happened to IltizƗm? 349 Mirzoeff, Nicholas. “What is Visual Culture.” The Visual Culture Reader. Ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff. London: Routledge, 1998. 3–13. Print. Mouffe, Chantal. The Democratic Paradox. London: Verso, 2000. Print. Saneh, Lina and Rabih Mroué. Biokraphia. Home Works: A Forum on Cultural Practices in the Region. Beirut, 2002. Performance. Saunders, Frances Stonor. The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters. New York: New P, 2000. Print. Stallabras, Julian. Art Incorporated: The Story of Contemporary Art. Oxford: Oxford U P, 2004. Print. Steyerl, Hito. “Politics of Art: Contemporary Art and the Transition to Post-Democracy.” E-Flux 21 (2010). Web. 2 June 2015. Toukan, Hanan. Art, Aid, Affect: Locating the Political in Post-Civil War Lebanon’s Contemporary Cultural Practices. Diss. U of London, 2012. MS. Toukan, Oraib. “‘We, the Intellectuals’: Re-routing Institutional Critique.” Ibraaz 29 July 2014. Web. 2 June 2015. Wang, Dan S. “Practice in Critical Times: A Conversation with Gregory Sholette, Stephanie Smith, Temporary Service, and Jacqueline Terrassa.” Art Journal 62.2 (2003): 68–81. Print. Wright, Stephen. “Territories of Difference: Excerpts from an E-mail Exchange between Tony Chakar, Bilal Khbeiz and Walid Sadek.” Out of Beirut. Ed. Suzanne Cotter. Oxford: Modern Art Oxford, 2006. 56–64. Print.