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Transition, Flow, and Divergent Times

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2013

Avinoam Shalem
Avinoam Shalem*
Affiliation:
Department of Art History, Ludwig Maximilians University, Munich, Germany, and Kunsthistorisches Institut, Florence, Italy; e-mail: avinoam.shalem@lrz.uni-muenchen.de
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Extract

The Western academy's growing interest in the contemporary arts in the Arab world illustrates the desire to map “Islam”—problematic as this term is—within the global history of cultures and to integrate it into “Western” models of the writing and documenting of the past. As positive and corrective as these academic approaches may seem, the notion of recording time—that is, writing history—is still firmly bound at the beginning of the 21st century to the idea of continuity, and the pattern of “Western”-centric thinking imposes that notion upon contemporary artists and art historians. Yet the political changes and spontaneous eruptions that the Middle East and North Africa are experiencing, especially since the beginning of 2011, defy and resist conventional interpretations of historical processes and therefore demand a rethinking of the configuration of the past.

Type
Roundtable
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 45 , Issue 3 , August 2013 , pp. 581 - 584
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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References

NOTES

1 See, for example, Amin, Samir, Global History: A View from the South (Bangalore: Books for Change, 2011)Google Scholar; Ansary, Tamim, Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World through Islamic Eyes (New York: Public Affairs, 2009)Google Scholar; and Burbank, Jane and Cooper, Frederick, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010)Google Scholar. For “corrections” in the field of art history, see esp. DaCosta Kaufmann, Thomas, “Eurocentrism and Art History? Universal History and the Historiography of the Arts before Winckelmann,” in Memory and Oblivion, ed. Reinink, Wessel and Stumpel, Jeroen (Boston: Springer, 1999), 35–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Araeen, Rasheed, “Eurocentricity, Canonization of the White/European Subject in Art History, and the Marginalisation of the Other,” in Globalisierung / Hierarchisierung. Kulturellen Dominanzen in Kunst und Kunstgeschichte, ed. Below, Irene and von Bismarck, Beatrice (Marburg, Germany: Jonas Verlag, 2005), 54–61Google Scholar.

2 Walid Raad, 1 January 1995, cited in Jayce Salloum, “. . . east of here . . . (upon arrival),” in East of Here: (Re)imagining the “Orient,” ed. Jayce Salloum, exh. cat., YYZ Gallery, Toronto, 20 November–14 December 1996 (Toronto: YYZ Artists’ Outlet, 1996), 4–5.

3 See esp. the debate around the exhibition Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking, held at New York's MOMA in 2006. Daftari, Fereshteh, ed., Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2006)Google Scholar. For an interesting interview on the status of artists working today in the so-called off-main Western centers, see Lilian Engelmann and Vera Lauf, “Rediscovering the Dialogue: An Interview with Rasheed Araeen,” in Below and Von Bismarck, Globalisierung / Hierarchisierung, 62–64.

4 On this issue of the “life span” of Islamic art and the problems concerning its methodology, see esp. the articles of Flood, Barry F., Rabat, Nasser, Shalem, Avinoam, and Shaw, Wendy, in the recent special issue “Islamic Art Historiography,” ed. Graves, Margaret and Carey, Moya, Journal of Art Historiography 6 (June 2012), http://arthistoriography.files.wordpress.com/Google Scholar.

5 See esp. Kara L. Rooney's article in The Brooklyn Rail, http://www.brooklynrail.org/2009/12/artseen/walid-raad-scratching-on-things-i-could-disavow-a-history-of-art-in-the-arab-worldpart-1-volume-1-chapter-1-beirut-1992–2005 (accessed 7 March 2013); and Barbara Casavecchia's article on Walid Raad in Frieze, http://www.frieze.com/shows/review/walid_raad/ (accessed 7 March 2013).

6 Toufic, Jalal, Forthcoming (Berkeley, Calif.: Atelos, 2000)Google Scholar, esp. 64–68. On this question concerning the production of art in Lebanon today, see Feldman, Hannah and Zaatari, Akram, “Mining War: Fragments from a Conversation Already Passed,” Art Journal (2007): 49–67Google Scholar. See also Hanan Toukan, “Art, Aid, Affect: Locating the Political in Post-Civil War Lebanon's Cultural Production” (PhD. diss., School of Oriental and African Studies, 2012).