In this commentary, I challenge assumptions about political transformation by contrasting women's experiences at home during the Egyptian revolution with the image of the iconic male revolutionary in Tahrir Square. I call attention to the way that revolution is experienced and undertaken in domestic spaces, through different forms of affect, in ways deeply inflected by gender and class. [Egypt, revolution, gender, class, space, affect, generation]
A B S T R A C TActs of aesthetic ordering dominated Egyptian protest and civic activity in 2011, around the time of former president Hosni Mubarak's downfall. They played a central role in motivating collective political action, giving form to a nationalist utopian vision and legitimizing ordinary Egyptians as active agents and upright citizens. Yet they also reproduced exclusionary middle-class aspirations tied up with state projects and related forms of citizenship that center on surveillance, individualism, and consumption. Examining such acts of aesthetic ordering
This article reviews recent anthropological scholarship of Arabmajority societies in relation to geopolitical and theoretical shifts since the end of the Cold War, as well as conjunctures of research location, topic, and theory. Key contributions of the subfield to the larger discipline include interventions into feminist theorizing about agency; theories of modernity; analyses of cultural production/consumption that destabilize the culture concept; approaches to religion that integrate textual traditions with practice, experience, and institutions; and research on violence that emphasizes routinization and affect. Emerging work in the areas of race and ethnicity, secularism, law, human rights, science and technology, and queer studies has the potential to strengthen anthropology of the region as well as to contribute to the discipline more broadly.
This essay examines the connections between art and politics in Middle East arts events in the U.S. since 9/11/2001. It critiques the universalist assumptions about humanity and the agentive capacity of art to build bridges of understanding in contexts of so-called civilizational conflict—assumptions that have strong roots in anthropology. By juxtaposing evidence of how the notion of “humanity” is deployed in exhibitions of Palestinian art with an analysis of the three more predominant types of arts events (historical Islamic art, Sufi arts, and contemporary art by Muslim women), the essay demonstrates how American secular elite discourse on Middle Eastern art corresponds to that of the “War on Terror.”
The post‐1989 transformation of the Egyptian art world reveals the particular tenacity of colonial logics and national attachments in culture industries built through anticolonial nationalism and socialism. Tensions emerged between and among Western and Egyptian curators, critics, and artists with the development of a foreign‐dominated private‐sector art market and as Egyptian art begins to circulate internationally. This international circulation of art objects has produced rearranged strategies of governance in the cultural realm, collusions and conflicts between the public and private sector, and, most importantly, a new articulation of cultural sovereignty.
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