Jessica Winegar

The Humanity Game: Art, Islam, and the War on Terror

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.”

Africa North, South, and In Between

It is by now a well-known and remarkedupon fact that there exists a problematic divide between north and south in the scholarship on Africa, a divide that ignores centuries-long continental circulations of people, objects, images, and practices. Another scholarly divide, which is well known to Middle East scholars, but less so to Africanists, exists between the eastern and western parts of North Africa. This regional partitioning is reproduced in the structuring of academic departments/centers, professional associations, funding organizations, and publications, as well as in the often parallel structuring of visual culture venues, such as museums and their collections, exhibitions, and film series. Visual culture practitioners—artists, writers, filmmakers, musicians—also frequently experience and reproduce this divide. The historical reasons for this compartmentalization of knowledge production are multiple: an environmental determinism that presumes a lack of activity in or movement across the Sahara; the association of North Africa with Islam (often accompanied by an assumption that Islam defines North African life and renders it distinct from the sub-continent); the association of North Africans with slave-traders (not as also enslaved); essentializing notions of racial and ethnic uniformity in the north, and difference from the south; and the association of the north with higher levels of modernization and modernity. Many of these constructions of difference are traceable to the colonial era, when territories were carved up into administrative units, with little regard for existing human relations and movements, when the people living within these territories were divided and placed into colonial ideological hierarchies of value, and when their material and visual culture was collected and organized according to corresponding thematic distinctions. These colonial spatial and hierarchical divisions were also often reproduced within the anti-colonial nationalist discourse of North African elites. Their reinscripiton continued into the post-independence period of nationand geopolitical-alliance-building, most notably within the pan-Arab movement. Yet there were important early attempts to think across these boundaries, and these deserve further attention.

A hometown artist of the world: Sabah Naim (visual artist in Egypt)

Sabah Naim is now one of the few visual artists from Egypt who has become internationally recognized. You can find her on the Internet: she has exhibited in the famous biennial exhibitions in Venice and Havana, and in many other venues throughout the Middle East and Europe. Her work has sold like hotcakes, and the critics love her. But when I first met her just a few years ago, she was almost completely marginalized in the local Cairo art scene. Her work had been ignored by some of the most important Egyptian curators at the time. They dismissed her as an “ignorant girl” who didn’t know anything about the cosmopolitan world of art that they fancied themselves to be part of. Sabah might not have been “cosmopolitan” in their sense of the word. She lived in a poorer neighborhood of Cairo where few people had completed even secondary education, let alone knew much about the visual arts. She did not speak any Western language and had never traveled outside Egypt. Like many young women her age, she wore a headscarf and talked openly about religious belief and practice. To the Egyptian curators, members of an older generation of elites, this last fact represented all that had gone wrong in Egypt and in many other Muslim-majority countries. But what they did not realize was that Sabah was cosmopolitan in a different way.