Creative Reckonings The Politics of Art and Culture in Contemporary Egypt [Paperback]

The Egyptian art world is the oldest and largest in the Arab Middle East. Its artists must reckon with the histories of ancient Egypt, European modernism, anti-colonial nationalism, and state socialism-all in the context of a growing neoliberal economy marked by American global dominance. At this crucial intersection of culture, politics, and economy, Egypt's art and artists provide unique insight into current struggles for cultural identity and sovereignty in the Middle East.This book examines the heated cultural politics in today's Arab world, and tells how art-making has become an unexpectedly central part of that. It offers a lively analysis of the battles between artists, curators, and audiences over cultural authenticity, cultural policy, public art in a changing urban Egypt, and the new global marketing of Egyptian art. The art world it shows powerfully exemplifies how people in the Middle East reckon with global transformations that are changing how culture is made in societies with colonial and socialist pasts.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.Jessica Winegar is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Northwestern University. As the only study of its kind to date, and for its sensitive view of the conditions of artistic culture in modern Egypt,Creative Reckoningsis an invaluable contribution to studies of the modern Middle East, post-Arab socialist cultural history, and anthropologies of modern and contemporary art. The extraordinary strengths of this book lie in its thorough ethnography, its theorizing of artistic impulse and resulting artistic work in terms of class and the political economy of the time, and its fine treatment of modernity through the lens of art. WInegar offers a wonderful critique of Enlightenment thinking in an Egyptian context, taking on individualism and lsµ