Creative Reckonings

Ethnographic study of cultural politics in the contemporary Egyptian art world, examining how art-making is a crucial aspect of the transformation from socialism to neoliberalism in postcolonial countries.

A look at some of the raging debates in the arts in Egypt

The fifteen Native women writers in Reckonings document transgenerational trauma, yet they also celebrate survival. Their stories are vital testaments of our times. Unlike most anthologies that present a single story from many writers, this volume offers a sampling of two to three stories by a select number of both famous and lesser known Native women writers in what is now the United States. Here you will find much-loved stories, many made easily accessible for the first time, and vibrant new stories by well-known contemporary Native American writers as well as fresh emergent voices. These stories share an understanding of Native women's lives in their various modes of loss and struggle, resistance and acceptance, and rage and compassion, ultimately highlighting the individual and collective will to endure against all odds. Reckonings features short stories by: Paula Gunn Allen, Kimberly M. Blaeser, Beth E. Brant, Anita Endrezze, Louise Erdrich, Diane Glancy, Reid Gómez, Janet Campbell Hale, Joy Harjo, Linda Hogan, Misha Nogha, Beth H. Piatote, Patricia Riley, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Anna Lee Walters.

During the tumultuous years of the English Revolution and Restoration, national crises like civil wars and the execution of the king convinced Englishmen that the end of the world was not only inevitable but imminent. National Reckonings shows how this widespread eschatological expectation shaped nationalist thinking in the seventeenth century. Imagining what Christ's return would mean for England's body politic, a wide range of poets, philosophers, and other writers—including Milton, Hobbes, Winstanley, and Thomas and Henry Vaughan,—used anticipation of the Last Judgment to both disrupt existing ideas of the nation and generate new ones. Ryan Hackenbracht contends that nationalism, consequently, was not merely a horizontal relationship between citizens and their sovereign but a vertical one that pitted the nation against the shortly expected kingdom of God. The Last Judgment was the site at which these two imagined communities, England and ecclesia (the universal church), would collide. Harnessing the imaginative space afforded by literature, writers measured the shortcomings of an imperfect and finite nation against the divine standard of a perfect and universal community. In writing the nation into end-times prophecies, such works as Paradise Lost and Leviathan offered contemporary readers an opportunity to participate in the cosmic drama of the world's end and experience reckoning while there was still time to alter its outcome.

Postcolonial theories have transformed literary, historical and cultural studies over the past three decades. Yet the study of medieval art and visualities has, in general, remained Eurocentric in its canon and conservative in its approaches. 'Postcolonising', as the eleven essays in this volume show, entails active intervention into the field of medieval art history and visual studies through a theoretical reframing of research. This approach poses and elicits new research questions, and tests how concepts current in postcolonial studies - such as diaspora and migration, under-represented artistic cultures, accented art making, displacement, intercultural versus transcultural, hybridity, presence/absence - can help medievalists to reinvigorate the study of art and visuality. Postcolonial concepts are deployed in order to redraft the canon of medieval art, thereby seeking to build bridges between medievalist and modernist communities of scholars. Among the varied topics explored in the volume are the appropriation of Roman iconography by early medieval Scandinavian metalworkers, multilingualism and materiality in Anglo-Saxon culture, the circulation and display of Islamic secular ceramics on Pisan churches, cultural negotiation by Jewish minorities in Central Europe and the Iberian peninsula, Holy Land maps and medieval imaginative geography, and the uses of Thomas Becket in the colonial imaginary of the Plantagenet court.

Picturing Islam: Art and Ethics in a Muslim Lifeworld explores issues of religion, nationalism, ethnicity, and globalization through the life and work of the prominent contemporary Indonesian artist Abdul Djalil Pirous. Presents a unique addition to the anthropology of art and religion Demonstrates the impact of Islam, ethnicity, nationalism, and globalization on the work and life of an internationally recognized postcolonial artist Weaves together visual and narrative materials to tell an engrossing story of a cosmopolitan Muslim artist Looks at contemporary Islamic art and the way it has been produced in the world's largest Muslim nation, Indonesia

In this volume 30 of the field's top scholars examine historical and contemporary aspects of American Islam, and explore the meaning of religious identity in the context of race, ethnicity, gender, and politics.

Since 2011, the art of the Arab uprisings has been the subject of much scholarly and popular attention. Yet the role of artists, writers and filmmakers themselves as social actors working under extraordinary conditions has been relatively neglected. Drawing on critical readings of Bourdieu's Field Theory, this book explores the production of culture in Arab social spaces in 'crisis'. In ten case studies, contributors examine a wide range of countries and conflicts, from Algeria to the Arab countries of the Gulf. They discuss among other things the impact of Western public diplomacy organisations on the arts scene in post-revolutionary Cairo and the consequences of dwindling state support for literary production in Yemen. Providing a valuable source of empirical data for researchers, the book breaks new ground in adapting Bourdieu's theory to the particularities of cultural production in the Middle East and North Africa.

In modern Syria, a contested territory at the intersection of differing regimes of political representation, artists ventured to develop strikingly new kinds of painting to link their images to life forces and agitated energies. Examining the works of artists Kahlil Gibran, Adham Ismail, and Fateh al-Moudarres, Beautiful Agitation explores how painters in Syria activated the mutability of form to rethink relationships of figure to ground, outward appearance to inner presence, and self to world. Drawing on archival materials in Syria and beyond, Anneka Lenssen reveals new trajectories of painterly practice in a twentieth century defined by shifting media technologies, moving populations, and the imposition of violently enforced nation-state borders. The result is a study of Arab modernism that foregrounds rather than occludes efforts to agitate against imposed identities and intersubjective relations.

In the last years of the nineteenth century, the Tunisian city of Qayrawān suddenly found itself covered in murals. Concentrated on and around the city’s Great Mosque, these monumental artworks were only visible for about fifty years, from the 1880s through the 1930s. This book investigates the fascinating history of who created these outdoor paintings and why. Using visual archaeological methods, William Gallois reconstructs the visual history of these works and vividly brings them back to life. He locates pictorial records of the murals from the backdrops of photographs, postcards, and other forms of European ephemera. In Qayrawān, he identifies a form of religious painting that transposed traditional aesthetic forms such as house decoration, embroidery, and tattooing—which lay exclusively within the domains of women—onto the body of a conquered city. Gallois argues that these works were created by women as a form of “emergency art,” intended to offer amuletic protection for the community, and demonstrates how they differ markedly from “classical” Islamic antecedents and modern modes of Arab cultural production in the Middle East and North Africa. Based on extensive archival research, this study is both a record of a unique moment in the history of art and a challenge to rethink the spiritual force and agency of a group of anonymous female artists whose paintings aspired to help save the world at a time of great peril. It will be welcomed by scholars of art history, Islamic studies, Middle East studies, and the history of magic.