Dear colleagues,
Please find below the CFP for the AAA 2018 session titled: *Beyond
Resistance and Complicity: New Approaches to Middle Eastern Art Production
and Circulation*
Proposed AAA panel, AAA 2018, San Jose, CA, Nov 14-18 2018
Organized by Kyle Craig (NorthwesternU) and Melanie Sindelar (IFK Vienna &
UVienna)
Panel Abstract:
Resistance themes have become popular with international art collectors and
exhibitors when it comes to selecting or buying art produced in the Middle
East. The potential of art to resist hegemonic contexts has thereby been
overly romanticized, and there exists an implicit assumption that art that
does not explicitly critique or is not accompanied by outright calls for
justice is not as valuable as artworks that do boldly resist authoritarian
governments, patriarchal structures, and other forms of domination.
Criticality has thereby become a vital currency in the global art market,
for better or worse. Ideas on the universality of art's capacity for
resistance and critique, however, emanate from a canon of Western produced
art theory that ignores different socio-political contexts.
In recent history, there are two key conjunctures in which these
assumptions have had important repercussions for arts practitioners in the
Middle East region. First, following the September 11th, 2001 attacks, art
curators in Europe and North America attempted to exhibit Middle Eastern
art as a way to represent the "humanity" of Arabs and Muslims (Winegar
2008). Many of these attempts celebrated Middle Eastern artists as
deploying art to break free from the constraints of "Arab/Muslim culture,"
thus reifying reductionist ideas of a liberated and progressive West in
opposition to an oppressive and backward East. Second, since the Arab
uprisings of 2011 there has been increased attention to the role of arts
and cultural production in political activism wherein artistic mediums with
deep ties to Americana, such as graffiti and street art, are viewed as key
sources of inspiration for a so-called Arab "awakening."
This panel, therefore, welcomes submissions that try to decolonize and
dismantle these approaches, thereby building on the newer work of those
art-anthropologists who already critically examine universalizing ideas on
art or art-markets. New contributions in this vein seem especially relevant
given anthropology has borrowed from such theories, and stands (or should
stand more regularly) in a dialogue with art historians. Furthermore, the
panel would aim to cover contributions that examine visual or performative
art practices that cannot be easily labeled as either "resistance" or
"complicity," thereby aiming for a more nuanced analysis of the potential
of art that works, to speak with Homi Bhabha, as both "subjection" and
"subterfuge" vis-à-vis a more clearly designated "resistance art".
We invite proposed paper abstracts of no more than 250 words, to be
submitted by April 1st, 2018 via email to [log in to unmask] and
[log in to unmask]
-------
Melanie Sindelar, B.A., MSc.
IFK_Junior Fellow
IFK Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften |
Kunstuniversität Linz in Wien
Reichsratsstraße 17
1010 Wien
Österreich
Tel.: +4369919088135 <+43%20699%2019088135>
E-Mail: [log in to unmask], [log in to unmask]
http://www.ifk.ac.at
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