Cultural Studies

Calligraphy in Mauritania: Creating a Lost Identity
This paper focuses on the role of calligraphy in contemporary painting in Mauritania. I begin by outlining the history and contemporary status of Arabic calligraphy in this country after which I trace the role of calligraphy in contemporary painting through the work of three artists representing three generations since the inception of a modern art movement in the late 1950s. I argue that the use of calligraphy in contemporary painting reflects an exploration of changing conceptions of Mauritanian identity as situated between North and Sub-Saharan African and between an Arab present and an Amazigh past.

Cybernetics and Postcolonial Utopias
This article argues that in the pre-1965 square-based abstraction by Mohammed Melhi Islamic art as a cultural heritage is mobilized as a space of both creation and re-invention only to be immediately destabilized with a larger project that seeks universalism by transcending national and religious belonging. He locates these abstractions within cybernetics and the language of IBM mobilizing them towards a vision of modernity that is not regional and instead argues that the fundamental question of the era was in his words “the common point between Human and Science.” This work connects Islamic art with a belief in borderless technological modernity as a predecessor to the later strategic nationalism of the Casablanca School. Yet these paintings are also a utopic vision of a modern world of connection and possibility that could exist outside of the ongoing enmeshment of colonialism – not just decolonizing but rejecting the grounds of colonization entirely.

Possessed: The Mystical Post-Surrealism of Wifredo Lam, Abdel Hadi El-Gazzar, and Ibrahim El-Salahi
This essay compares three paintings made by three prominent global modern artists: the Cuban Wifredo Lam (1902–82) the Egyptian Abdel Hadi El-Gazzar (1925–66) and the Sudanese Ibrahim El-Salahi (b.1930). Combining Surrealist techniques with references to mystical practices of their natal communities they express the state of possession of the non-white modern artist. Because of the asymmetrical power relations of colonization they were both ‘possessed’ by a European style of easel painting and ‘possessed’ by local movements that demanded nationalist symbolism. Within this demanding context it is no surprise that they decided to paint their dreams.

Between Art and Architecture, Modernism and Makhzen
This chapter discusses how two architects Abdeslam Faraoui and Patrice de Mazières commissioned artists such as Farid Belkahia Mohamed Chebaa and Mohamed Melehi to create artworks for new building projects across a newly independent Morocco. It considers how artists and architects collaborated to experiment with what a distinctly Moroccan modernism could be and it asks how these artist-architect collaborations intersected with state efforts to promote foreign tourism and repress those it viewed as dissident.

Dispersal, Decolonization, and Dominance: African Muslim Objects from the Swahili Sultanate of Witu (1858–1923)
This article examines four objects associated with the Sultanate of Witu (1858–1923) the last of coastal East Africa's independent Swahili Muslim city-state. The objects were removed from Witu between the late 19th and early 20th centuries and dispersed into British and American collections. They include: 1)an illuminated Qur'an manuscript in the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland in London UK; 2) an ivory-inlaid chair in the British Museum in London UK; 3) a pair of carved wooden sandals in the Brooklyn Museum; and 4) a carved door in the Museum of Science Boston US. The study argues that decolonizing African Muslim material culture requires accounting for how present-day structures and institutions of power as well their everyday practices reproduce coloniality and dominance over these objects.

Kader Attia's Alternative History of the Grands Ensembles, from France to Algeria and Back
The French phrase “grand ensemble” designates a modernist residential housing typology consisting of the repetition of standardized units into vast-scale compositions. The grands ensembles were imported from France to Algeria by way of colonialism. At the onset of the postcolonial era the dense migration of groups of people in the other direction from Algeria to France where more grands ensembles were constructed to house them brought this episode of architectural history full circle. How have French-Algerian residents of postcolonial grands ensembles perceived metabolized and responded to this circulation of people and architectural forms in time and space? To answer this question this chapter turns to the collages of Kader Attia (b. 1970) a French-Algerian artist who spent his formative years as a resident of grands ensembles in postcolonial France. This chapter argues that Attia's collages tell a resident-centric architectural history of the grands ensembles across France and Algeria thus proposing alternative conceptions of modernity and its relation to vernacular traditions.

Tattooing as Subversive Archive: Safaa Mazirh's Reclamation of Tattoos in Postcolonial Morocco
This chapter concentrates on the photographs of Moroccan artist Safaa Mazirh and her 2017 series “Amazigh.” In this series of 13 black and white photographs Mazirh uses a multiple exposure technique in the camera to place North African tattoo designs over her nude or semi-nude body. She creates a multi-layered palimpsest that critiques colonial-era efforts to record tattooed women as ethnographic objects. The practice of tattooing has largely faded from fashion in Morocco as it is understood to be counter to Islam. Mazirh sees tattoo symbols as an expression of Amazigh identity that should not be forgotten. Mazirh's method of superimposing tattoo symbols over her own body contributes to the subversive nature of her photographic project that reclaims the past and also archives its destruction.

Queer Contemporary Art of Southwest Asia North Africa
Presents new perspectives on queer visual culture in the Southwest Asia North Africa region from queer artists as well as scholars who work on queer themes. With contributions from both scholars and artists this volume demonstrates that queer visual culture in the SWANA region is not only extant but is also entering an era of exciting growth in terms of its versatility and consciousness. The volume focuses on artworks produced in the contemporary era while recognizing historical and contextual connections to Islamic art and culture within
localities and regions from the pre-modern and modern eras.
By framing this volume as unambiguously located within queer studies the editors challenge existing literature that merely includes some examples of queer studies or queer representation but does not necessarily use queer studies as a lens through which to engage with visual culture and/or with the SWANA region. Through four interrelated sections - Gender and Normativity Trans* Articulations Intersectional Sexuality and Queer SWANA - this volume probes several previously unexplored academic areas namely the intersections of queer studies with other fields.
Part of the Critical Studies in Architecture of the Middle East series.

Gender and migration: A continuum of gender-based violence echoing across the Sinai Desert and into Israel
Gender-based violence (GBV) is widespread globally and is based on social roles. These social roles represent society’s expectations of men and women carrying out stereotyped functions and behaviours. These gendered social expectations vary across culture space and time. Drawing from an empirical study in Israel and building on the previous literature on these issues this qualitative and interdisciplinary article identifies various forms of GBV along Eritrean women’s journey from their home country into Israel. The empirical work helps to examine the findings of previous theoretical studies. This article establishes that there is a continuum of violence for women especially refugees and asylum seekers rooted in the standard system of oppression – patriarchy. This has triggered the flight and trafficking of refugees from Eritrea through the Sinai Desert and into Israel. The article argues that structural and cultural violence emanating from both the hosted community and the host community play significant roles in allowing the circumstances for GBV to thrive throughout the entire refugee cycle. What can be seen is the creation of multiple layers of vulnerabilities particularly the specific social–legal–economic marginalization of segments of the population including Eritrean asylum-seeking women. Reacting to this continuum of violence many participants in the study argued that it was necessary to adopt strategies to create a continuum of resilience and resistance grounded on women’s sorority support and agency.

Carving spaces of hospitality: Place attachment among migrant and non-migrant residents in a rural town undergoing rapid demographic change
This article explores the complex and evolving nature of place attachment in the rural Lincolnshire town of Boston a new immigration destination. Drawing on 28 semi-structured interviews with residents it examines the ways in which migrant and non-migrant communities make Boston their home how they react to change and disruption navigate (in)hospitable encounters and narrate their belonging in the town post the EU referendum which saw residents overwhelmingly voting against EU membership. The findings show that in the face of place alteration and turbulence both migrant and non-migrant residents demonstrate a nuanced and differentiated form of commitment to place and despite intractable systemic challenges actively work to bring communities together and reframe negative place narratives. Community leadership emerges as integral to the collective effort of creating spaces of hospitality. For migrant and non-migrant communities place attachment is a dynamic and fluid process shaped and constantly reshaped by socio-economic and political factors media discourses and experiences of hospitality/hostility. It is an embodied and emotional process that involves individual and collective discursive efforts to reframe dominant narratives material and social ways of connecting as well as pragmatic ways of distancing.

Infrastructure in Dystopian and Post-apocalyptic Film, 1968-2021
Dystopian and post-apocalyptic movies from 1968 to 2021 usually conclude with optimism with a window into what is possible in the face of social dysfunction - and worse. The infrastructure that peeks through at the edges of the frame surfaces some of the concrete ways in which dystopian and post-apocalyptic survivors have made do with their damaged and destroyed worlds.
If the happy endings so common to mass-audience films do not provide an all-encompassing vision of a better world the presence of infrastructure whether old or retrofitted or new offers a starting point for the continued work of building toward the future.
Film imaginings energy transportation water waste and their combination in the food system reveal what might be essential infrastructure on which to build the new post-dystopian and post-apocalyptic communities. We can look to dystopian and post-apocalyptic movies for a sense of where we might begin.

Heart to Heart: Baseera Khan in Conversation with Yasmine K. Kasem
A excerpt from a long form conversation between artists Baseera Khan and Yasmine K. Kasem about Baseera's inspiration and concept behind their poster “Muslim = America”. In this conversation Khan and Kasem discuss their experiences as American muslims the aftermath of 9/11 the lead up before and contextualizing islamophobia through Edward Said's writings.

Sa'dia Rehman's Queer Cartographies: Convivial Opacities
The work of queer Muslim visual artist Sa'dia Rehman (she/they) animates a queer call for no borders. These queer cartographic logics are clear in projects like Mihrab (2019) and The Land of Promise (2020). Through queer aesthetic strategies such as conviviality and opacity Rehman gathers traces as a brown visual commons that cultivates unforeseen affiliations. Their works of art are portals into queer theory committed to dismantling borders to prompting social re-ordering and to ungovernability. As a result she frustrates regulatory logics undergirding visuality announcing the possibility of another kind of visuality altogether.

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This collaborative poem and drawing series incorporates images and words to create memory maps. Playing with language recognition and embodied attachments the images and poems recall Arab feminist foremothers in speaking to solidarity community and diaspora.

Transing Contemporary Art: Aïcha Snoussi and Khaled Jarrar
Over the past decades trans has been mobilized to emphasize the unsettling borders and boundaries in that which is across or beyond. Akin to the instability and multi-directionality of queer trans in this sense provides a method of reading for non-normative subtleties and a resistance to categorizations fixed within hegemonic matrices of domination. In this chapter we take up the framework of trans for its potential in reading works from Aïcha Snoussi and Khaled Jarrar that we suggest benefit from an approach that unsettles the fixed and the singular. We do not consider these works within the context of the artists' gender identities but investigate transing as a method of critical inquiry into the works' substance. This chapter takes as a starting point the myriad of suffixes including and beyond - gender that could be attached to the prefix trans- to think expansively about how trans- can be queer.

Queer Heavens: Rethinking the Islamic Garden in Contemporary Art
This chapter examines the use of flower and garden imagery as indicators of spaces for homoerotic and same-sex encounters. Creating links between contemporary artistic production in the SWANA region and aesthetic traditions of the Islamic world it allows us to situate contemporary queer subjectivities within the cultural fabric of Muslim society and history.