Culture and Crisis in the Arab World: Art, Practice and Production in Spaces of Conflict 1788314247, 9781788314244

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Culture and Crisis in the Arab World

Culture and Crisis in the Arab World Art, Practice and Production in Spaces of Conflict Edited by Richard Jacquemond and Felix Lang

I.B. TAURIS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, I.B. TAURIS and the I.B. Tauris logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2019 Copyright © Richard Jacquemond, Felix Lang and contributors 2019 Richard Jacquemond and Felix Lang have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work. Cover design: Tjaša Krivec Cover image: Old blue paper background (© Alfio Scisetti / Alamy Stock Photo) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-7883-1424-4 ePDF: 978-1-7867-3638-3 eBook: 978-1-7867-2632-2 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents List of Figures Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors Introduction  Richard Jacquemond and Felix Lang 1 Beauty, Goodness and Bombs: The Role of Political Crisis in Structuring the Arab Field(s) of Cultural Production  Felix Lang 2 Rumour in Two Tunisian Artistic Fields: A Form of Legitimate Speech  Annabelle Boissier and Mariem Guellouz 3 The Symbolic Power of Syrian Collective Memory since 2011  Alexa Firat 4 Committed Knowledge: Autonomy and Politicization of Research Institutions and Practices in Wartime Lebanon (1975–90)  Candice Raymond 5 The Crisis as an Institutional Tool: Challenging Anti-Institutional Challenges in the Egyptian Cultural Field  Elena Chiti 6 The Algerian Literary Field in the ‘Black Decade’: A Reinforced Polarization  Tristan Leperlier 7 Successive Shifts in the Yemeni Cultural Field 2011–16  Laurent Damesin 8 A Field in Exile: The Syrian Theatre Scene in Movement  Simon Dubois 9 Class and Creative Economies: The Cultural Field in Cairo  Ilka Eickhof 10 Contemporary Art in Extremis: Gaza between Imprisonment and Globalization  Marion Slitine Index

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Figures 5.1 Cairo Book Fair, January–February 2016, Source: Elena Chiti 5.2 Cartoon by Samah Farouq, al-Kitāb 5.3 Newspaper al-Qāhira, front page, Source: Elena Chiti 6.1 Publications by country 6.2 Publications by language 6.3 Languages by country 10.1 Poster ‘Visit Gaza’ by Tarzan Nasser and Arab Nasser 10.2 Poster ‘Continuity’ by Kamal Al-Mughanni, Source: Palestine Poster Project Archives 10.3 ‘A Metro in Gaza’ by Mohamed Abusal, 2011 10.4 Installation ‘Magic Box’ by Mohamed Abusal, 2004

107 108 111 132 133 135 214 219 223 226

Acknowledgements This volume is the result of the workshop ‘Arab Cultural Fields in Crisis’, organized by the Institut de Recherches et d’Etudes sur les Mondes Arabes et Musulmans (IREMAM, UMR 7310, CNRS, Aix-Marseille Université, Aix-en-Provence) and the Research group ‘Figures of Thought|Turning Points. Cultural Practices and Social Change in the Arab World’ (Leibniz, DFG), Center for Near and Middle Eastern Studies (CNMS), Philipps-Universität Marburg, held at Maison Méditerranéenne des Sciences de l’Homme, AixMarseille Université, 7–8 November 2016. First and foremost, the editors would like to thank Prof. Friederike Pannewick, head of the ‘Figures of Thought | Turning Points’ research group, for her continuing support for this project and the German Research Foundation (DFG) for granting the generous financial support that has enabled the publication of this volume. We thank Simon Dubois for his conceptual and organizational work for the workshop as well as all participants for two days of engaging discussions. Thanks also go to David Tresilian for translating into English the articles by Annabelle Boissier and Mariem Guellouz, Simon Dubois, Tristan Leperlier, Candice Raymond and Marion Slitine, and to Linda Moussaoui for her help in formatting the manuscript at various stages. Finally, we would like to thank Rory Gormley from I.B. Tauris for his support in making this book.

Notes on Contributors Annabelle Boissier is a socio-anthropologist. She holds a PhD from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, EHESS-Paris. Her research focuses on contemporary art worlds, writing processes in social sciences and alternative ways of producing knowledge. Annabelle has extensively published on art, organization, politics and conflict with a focus on North Africa and South East Asia. She is co-founder of the research group ARVIMM (Visual Art of Muslim Worlds, Middle-East and Maghreb, nineteenth to twentieth century – http://arvimm.hypotheses.org) whose aim is to produce and promote knowledge on the art in MENA region. Elena Chiti is Associate Professor at the Stockholm University. A literary expert and a cultural historian of modern Egypt, she holds a PhD from AixMarseille Université. She is interested in cultural productions as sources to explore identity-making in times of social and political turmoil. From this perspective, she studied Alexandrian literary circles between the late nineteenth and the first third of the twentieth centuries. She aimed to go beyond the cliché of ‘cosmopolitan Alexandria’ to examine a period of conflicting horizons (the end of the Ottoman Empire, the British occupation, the rise of Egyptian nationalism). Since 2011, she has applied the same perspective to the present and to popular culture, to explore the epoch that follows the Arab revolutions. Laurent Damesin is a doctoral student in Social Anthropology and Ethnology at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris, affiliated with the Interdisciplinary Research Institute for Social Issues (IRIS), and is an associate researcher with the French Institute for the Near East (IFPO) in Beirut. His dissertation, under the supervision of Franck Mermier, deals primarily with the Yemeni literary scene. However, his extensive fieldwork (Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Qatar, Oman, Kuwait and the UAE) on transnationalism in the Arab literary field, and as part of a comparativist

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approach, has led him to focus on notions of centre and periphery within the Arab literary scene. He has recently published an article on ‘Literary Censorship in Yemen’ (‘La censure littéraire au Yémen’, Pount, IX) and written two articles in the collective work Perspectives on Publishing in the Arab World (Regards sur l’édition dans le monde arabe, Charif Majdalani and Franck Mermier [dirs.], Paris, Karthala). Simon Dubois is a PhD candidate at the Aix-Marseille Université, affiliated with the Institut de Recherche et d’Études sur les Mondes Arabes et Musulmans (IREMAM, UMR 7310, CNRS, Aix-Marseille Université). His thesis, under the supervision of Richard Jacquemond, deals with Syrian artists in exile. Focusing mainly on the theatre scene, this research is built on fieldwork conducted in Beirut, Berlin and Paris. After a Master’s dissertation about street songs in the Syrian protests, he published ‘Les chants se révoltent’ [‘The songs rebel’] in Pas de printemps pour la Syrie. Les clés pour comprendre les acteurs et les défis de la crise (2011–2013) [No Spring for Syria. The Keys to Understanding the Actors and Challenges of the Crisis (2011–2013)] edited by François Burgat and Bruno Paoli in 2013. Ilka Eickhof (MA Islamic Studies, Sociology and Modern History) joined the Sociology unit of the American University in Cairo in 2017 and completed a PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. She focuses her research and teaching on postcolonial critique, power dynamics and structural perpetuations of social inequality. Selected publications include Anti‐Muslim Racism in Germany. A Theoretical Approach (2010); ‘All That Is Banned Is Desired: “Rebel Documentaries” and the Representation of Egyptian Revolutionaries’ (2016); ‘Fear and Floating in Alexandria: The Economy, the Pound, and Women’s Sexual Health. A Small Size Case Study and an Online Application’ (2018). Currently, she works on creative economies, neoliberalism and urban contestations in Cairo. Alexa Firat is Assistant Professor of Arabic Studies at the Temple University. She is the co-editor of the forthcoming volume Generations of Dissent: Cultural Production and the State in the Middle East and North Africa and is currently working on a manuscript entitled The Historical Imaginary in Contemporary Syrian Fiction (forthcoming). Firat is also a literary translator.

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Mariem Guellouz is Assistant Professor at the Université Paris Descartes and a researcher at CERLIS. She is also a dance performer and the director of Carthage Dance festival-Tunisia. She works on the political issues of discourses in Tunisia after the revolution and also on the discursive construction of the body of the belly dancer in Arab countries. Richard Jacquemond is Professor of Modern Arabic language and literature at the Aix-Marseille Université, affiliated as a researcher with IREMAM. A graduate in Law and Arabic studies, he lived in Cairo for some fifteen years, working as a programme officer at the French cultural mission in Egypt before writing his PhD thesis on the Egyptian literary field from the 1960s to the 1990s, which he later published as a book (English translation: Conscience of the Nation. Writers, State and Society in Modern Egypt, 2008). A member of the editorial board of Alif, Journal of Comparative Poetics, The Translator and Arabica, he has published extensively in French, English and Arabic, on modern Arabic literature and on translational exchanges between Arabic and the main European languages. As a literary translator, he has also published to date twenty French translations of works by modern Arab authors, among them eight novels by leading Egyptian writer Sonallah Ibrahim. Felix Lang is a postdoctoral research fellow in the department of Arabic Literature and Culture at the University of Marburg and coordinator of the ‘Figures of Thought | Turning Points’ research group (DFG-Leibniz). He studied Arabic and Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews and completed a PhD in Arabic Literature and Culture at the University of Marburg with a thesis which has recently been published as The Lebanese Post-Civil War Novel: Memory, Trauma, and Capital (2016). Currently, he is working on a postdoctoral project on the MENA cultural field as a networked space and the role of public diplomacy organizations in cultural production in the Arab world. Tristan Leperlier obtained his PhD in sociology and literature at the EHESS (Paris). His thesis on the Algerian literary field during the civil war was recently published at CNRS Editions under the title Algérie, Les écrivains dans la décennie noire [Algeria, The Writers During the Black Decade]. His main

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interests are postcolonial literature, multilingualism, political commitments and transnational circulations of literature and intellectuals. Candice Raymond is a postdoctoral research fellow at Pantheon-Sorbonne University as core researcher in the ERC Program Social Dynamics of Civil Wars. She holds a PhD in history from the Ecole des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS, Paris). In her dissertation she studied scholarly practices of history and historiographical debates in Lebanon from the late 1960s onwards. Her current research is concerned with knowledge institutions, actors and practices in civil war contexts, with a focus on the Lebanese Civil War (1975– 90). Prior joining the ERC Program, she was a doctoral fellow at the Institut Français du Proche-Orient (IFPO, Beirut), a postdoctoral research fellow at the Orient-Institut Beirut (OIB, Max Weber Stiftung) and at the IREMAM. She is currently a member of the editorial board of the Revue des Mondes Musulmans et de la Méditerranée (REMMM). Marion Slitine holds a PhD in anthropology and is a lecturer and researcher at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales-EHESS (Paris), where she holds a seminar on Middle Eastern contemporary art since the ‘Arab revolutions’. A graduate from Sciences Po Paris, with a Bachelor’s in Arabic from the INALCO and a Master’s in Contemporary History from the University Paris I-Panthéon, Marion Slitine wrote a PhD thesis called ‘Palestine through creations. The fabrication of contemporary Palestinian art, from the occupied territories to the globalized scenes’. Her research focuses on contemporary art in Palestine and its political and transnational dynamics, through an ethnographic study of the new generation of artists in the OPT and in the diaspora. She has been awarded scholarships from the Musée du Quai Branly (Paris), the Institut Français du Proche-Orient (Palestinian Territories), and she benefitted from a research residency at the Mucem (Marseille) and the Camargo Foundation. Besides her research, Marion Slitine is a cultural programmer specialized in the Middle East. She has worked in Syria, Palestine and Morocco and is currently based in France, where she works for various contemporary art events.

Introduction Richard Jacquemond and Felix Lang

From the moment they started unfolding, the events that have been taking place in a number of countries across the Arab world following the uprisings of the ‘Arab Spring’ in 2011 have occupied and continue to occupy a central space in research on contemporary Arab societies. And whatever their outcome, the magnitude of these events has been such that they have had an impact on every aspect of social life in the countries concerned, and even, to some extent at least, in neighbouring countries. However, not all of these aspects have received the attention they deserve. Following the demand for expertise from the political sphere and the media, and also reflecting the power relations within the academic field, such research has tended to focus on political and social transformations, while the cultural dimensions of the changes taking place have received much less attention.1 Yet, the specialists in this field have identified the crucial importance of cultural production and cultural practices for understanding not only these political mobilizations but also the deep transformations Arab societies are currently undergoing (see, for example, Cooke 2016; Gandolfi 2013). Actually, while it would be preposterous to pretend that various evolutions in these productions and practices prior to 2011 foreshadowed the coming upheavals, it cannot be denied that the transformations that the cultural scene in Tunisia, Egypt or Syria witnessed in the decade before 2011 were, in a way similar to the social unrest and other social transformations that took place at that time (Bayat 2010), pointing towards the forthcoming changes that the stagnation prevailing in the political sphere concealed.

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On the other hand, the revolutionary moment of 2011–12 deeply affected the Arab cultural scene in many ways. It led to an outburst of artistic production at the hands of newcomers as well as more established ones, taking advantage both of the new media available to them and of the unprecedented level of freedom available on the old ones. This wave of ‘revolutionary art’, which reached unprecedentedly large audiences within Arab countries and in some cases even in the outside world, has probably been till now the best documented and the most extensively studied part of this cultural transformation (see, for instance, Hamdy and Karl 2014; Halasa et al. 2014). But, just as this cultural production was very much involved in the ongoing events and in bearing testimony to them, researchers have dealt with it in a similar way. That is to say that, writing about Tunisian rap, Cairene street art or Syrian protest songs was (is) also very much, for the researchers who engaged with it, a way of expressing support with, of paying tribute to the artists they talk about and helping disseminate their production. Within cultural studies, there is no absolute border between scholarship and criticism – a fact rarely acknowledged, let alone taken into account and analysed by academics (for a counterexample, see Frishkopf 2010) – and this is even truer in contexts such as the ones we are dealing with here, where the course of events becomes suddenly so overwhelming that it affects everyone, local actors and foreign observers alike.2 This is one of the reasons why we have chosen, in this book, to put the post2011 moment in a larger perspective and engage in a wider reflection on the relation between political crises and cultural production in the Arab region. Of the ten contributions that make its chapters, five deal with the post-2011 moment in Egypt, Syria, Tunisia and Yemen, while four others deal with other contexts and one encompasses the whole region. The common feature of these contexts is that they are characterized by a high level of conflictuality, in which actors in the cultural fields are, in a way similar to other social actors, forced to redefine their relations with the field of power. This covers situations of a revolutionary type (Tunisia, Egypt) as well as civil war situations (Lebanon), others where these two types are connected (as in the transition from a revolution to civil war in Algeria at the turn of the 1990s, or Syria and Yemen after 2011), but also contexts where the conflicts are produced by invasion and foreign occupation (Palestine). The word ‘crisis’ chosen for the title of this

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book is meant to cover this broad spectrum and to convey two meanings: by cultural fields in crises, we mean both how culture is affected by external crises and how it becomes itself a subject of crisis, either because of these external factors or because of internal ones. We are well aware that in the way we use the term crisis in this book, we are treading a fine line between a pragmatic use of language and the time-honoured (orientalist) trope of the Arab world in a state of (moral) decline. And while it remains that ‘crisis is not a condition to be observed […] [but] an observation that produces meaning’ (Roitman 2014: 39), as Roitman has pointed out, we believe that it can still function as a blanket term for the types of conflicts referred to above. The contributions in this volume focus on different aspects of political crises in various segments of the cultural field. In some instances, crisis appears as catalyst that intensifies tendencies and developments that were already present in the field before the onset of the crisis – such as the bipolarization of the Algerian literary field (Leperlier) or the growing importance of funding from NGOs and foreign cultural organizations in the case of Syria (Dubois). Other contributors focus on the moment of crisis as a site of creativity (Slitine on visual arts in Gaza; Firat on the art of the Syrian revolution) or as a moment of wide-ranging structural changes such as the growing importance of research centres with a clear political affiliation for careers in the academic field during the Lebanese Civil War (Raymond) or the breakdown of Yemen’s local publishing system in the wake of the Arab Spring protests in the country (Damesin). On a wider, regional level, recurring crises are considered as a central element in constituting the Arab cultural field as a transnational, multipolar and decentralized social space (Lang). Methodologically and theoretically the present book is clearly situated within a sociology of culture informed by the work of Pierre Bourdieu. The world’s most quoted sociologist (Santoro 2008) has inspired and continues to inspire thousands of researchers, and this is also true for those who study modern Arab societies, especially in cultural studies. Quite naturally, French or France-based Arab world specialists have been the first and the most active in making extensive use of Bourdieu’s rich conceptual toolbox (see, for example, Gonzalez-Quijano 1998, Jacquemond 2008 [2003], Leperlier 2018). Many others have now joined them, whether in Europe, North America (see, for example, Frishkopf 2008, Geer 2011, Lang 2016) or in the Arab world,

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where Bourdieu’s works have been extensively translated (see Jacquemond 2015). However, these contributions, while often referring to each other, remain dispersed in separate monographs and articles and have yet to be put in perspective. Indeed, considering the empirical material which forms the base for Bourdieu’s theoretical work, and the contexts in which it has been applied in the past, it is far from self-evident that this conceptual framework should be suited to investigate the questions set out above. Bourdieu’s concept of the field of cultural production, developed in its most detailed form in The Rules of Art (1996 [1992]), is famously based on nineteenth-century France, a wellintegrated and strongly institutionalized space of cultural production, lodged in a nation-state which – at least by comparison to the contemporary Arab world – enjoyed a considerable political stability. The case studies in this book, however, relate to postcolonial nation-states, frequently under authoritarian rule, characterized by cultural production subject to a large measure of state control, a literary language shared across the whole region and strong transnational ties. While the authors in this volume share the view that a Bourdieusian perspective, foregrounding the processes of production and circulation, power dynamics and the distribution of resources for artistic creation addresses important issues in the world of art and culture, they might be more properly designated as post-Bourdieusian, in the sense that they seek to adapt the theoretical framework to the contexts at hand rather than following through a rigorously Bourdieusian research programme. Coming from a large variety of academic disciplines, including literary studies, anthropology and sociology, the contributors address theoretical and methodological questions raised by applying Bourdieu’s sociology of culture to modern Arab societies. Thus, Felix Lang’s opening chapter emphasizes the transnational dimension of cultural production and cultural practices, an issue very much side lined in Bourdieu’s own research.3 The relations between national cultural fields and the regional cultural space or field have been a recurrent issue in the work on Arab cultural production which becomes particularly acute in these contexts of crisis. The quasi-simultaneous uprisings of 2011, the circulation not only of political slogans but also artistic forms of expression despite the fact that mobilization remained strictly national and activists circulated very little

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from one country to the next (contrasting with the decidedly transnational character of jihadist mobilization) underlines the fundamental importance of the cultural field in creating a (pan)Arab public sphere, and the effect of local and regional crises in structuring the wider Arab cultural space. Setting the scene for the case studies that follow, Lang takes into view the transnational Arab cultural field as a networked, relational space from a macro perspective and puts forward the argument that, rather than being extraordinary moments of rupture, political crises play an eminent role in structuring the Arab cultural space on the level of institutions and individual actors as well as on the level of symbolic production. The remainder of the volume is built around two central paradoxes which appear across all contributions and case studies and equally require the contributors to go beyond an orthodox Bourdieusian reading. For one, the contexts analysed in this book are marked by an overpolitization of the players and stakes in the cultural field due to the ‘desectorisation’ (Dobry 2009) that is characteristic of political crises. In such contexts, social sectors (Bourdieu would say ‘fields’) that are normally relatively partitioned and autonomous tend to reduce their autonomy, to meet with each other and to mobilize together. The context of crisis re-legitimized politically committed art and the figure of the politically committed artist, after they had lost their legitimacy at the autonomous pole of the field as they were instrumentalized by the field of power. The paradox lies in the fact that these moments of crisis are also times where the field of power loosens its control over the cultural field, resulting in a greater autonomy of the latter. This paradoxical double movement of overpolitization and autonomization of the cultural field can be found in different forms in Algeria in 1988–91 (see in this book Leperlier) as well as in Tunisia (Boissier and Guellouz), Egypt (Chiti, Eickhof), Syria (Dubois, Firat) and Yemen (Damesin) in 2011–12. In their contribution which deals with contemporary visual arts and choreographic art in Tunisia Annabelle Boissier and Mariem Guellouz capture such a moment of transition when the practitioners of the two art forms, freed from the disregard and censorship of the Ben Ali era tap into the struggles taking place in the political field in the process of positioning themselves in the field of cultural production. Rumours, for instance, about a dancer’s or artist’s close relations to figures of the regime, become a weapon in the struggle

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for recognition in the cultural field. In their piece, the two authors reflect in particular on the position of the researcher who becomes part of the struggle within the field as the interlocutor to whom rumours are related in order to establish the ‘truth’ about other players in the field. Alexa Firat, in her contribution, shows how the Syrian uprising brought with it an explosion of creativity: In the wake of 2011, film-makers, intellectuals, artists and writers did not only make use of a wider space of possibles opening up as a result of a political situation in which the Assad regime struggled to retain its control over the Syrian population, but they also quickly found themselves invested in a struggle for symbolic capital to support the eminently political task of building a cultural memory and narrative of the Syrian Revolution. Another case of the paradoxical movement of politicization and autonomization, this time in the field of academia is examined in Candice Raymond’s study of the Institute for Arab Development (IDA) in Lebanon. Funded by the Libyan government and active from 1975 until 2000, the research institute was among the most dynamic of the numerous research institutions associated with different parties to the conflict that existed in Lebanon in the 1970s and 1980s. Focusing on the IDA research during its most productive phase in the 1970s, Raymond shows how the interplay between the political crisis in Lebanon, the crisis of established institutions of higher education and the growing importance of research institutions outside university funded by political players produced a paradoxical effect: while, on the one hand, the institutions’ funders were driven by a political agenda, the situation also allowed for a considerable margin of autonomy, as researchers were seldom dependent on a single employer. Elena Chiti’s contribution on the uses of crisis as an institutional tool in the contemporary Egyptian cultural field elucidates another aspect of the paradox of overpolitization/autonomization, where artistic work is politicized as the result of a struggle of forces outside the field of cultural production: drawing on two recent controversies surrounding the publication of a chapter of a novel by Ahmed Naji in Akhbār al-adab and the release of Mohamed Diab’s film Eshtebak (Clash); the chapter shows how the state, on the one side, enlists art and culture in its struggle with the forces of the religious field, while, on the other hand, cultural production is subject to severe censorship

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in a process of setting up the state as legitimate guardian of morality. Thus, while the autonomy of art is represented as a bulwark against religious fundamentalism, works of art become highly politicized as instruments in a political struggle. A second distinguishing feature of fields of cultural production at times of political crisis is a de-territorialization of the national cultural fields as a result of a number of factors: exile of actors of the cultural field, be it in neighbouring countries (from Syria to Lebanon and Turkey, for instance), major European cities and beyond; redistribution of resources (dwindling of local resources, compensated by the appearance of other resources, regional or international). The internationalization of national fields has paradoxical effects, being simultaneously a factor of autonomization (in particular where, as holds for most of the cases examined here, autonomy was significantly limited prior to the moment of crisis) and heteronomy (the constraints emerging from the local field of power are replaced by new constraints: the expectations of outside markets, the agendas of patrons and other regional and international funding bodies) as is well apparent in the contributions collected in this volume. Thus, Tristan Leperlier in his contribution to this volume traces the changes in the Algerian publishing sector during the ‘black decade’ of Algerian Civil War (c. 1991–2002). On the basis of a database of 2000 titles published by Algerian writers between 1988 and 2004, he is able to show that for the duration of the conflict, the Algerian literary field was increasingly polarized between francophone and arabophone production. A higher demand for publication in France and difficulties to publish in the highly fraught political climate in Algeria itself led to a considerable increase of the proportion of works by Algerian writers being published in France and in French. This trend was only reversed after the end of the conflict by a political effort of the French and Algerian state to rebuild francophone publishing in Algeria. While, as Leperlier claims, the civil war in Algeria only reinforced certain developments that were grounded in the structure of the field and the depolarization following the end of the conflict establishes a continuity with the pre-war field of literary production, the changes occurring in the set-up of the Yemeni literary field since 2011 are likely to have more lasting consequences, as Laurent Damesin argues in this book. While the highly dynamic and original

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work of artists, musicians and writers which accompanied the protests in the cultural space of Change Square in the capital Sanaa has left its mark on the cultural field and opened up avenues for new forms of cultural production and marginalized cultural producers, it has also led to the disbanding of the Yemeni Writers’ Union and of Yemen’s organic literary publishing system for those authors who could not afford to publish with Lebanese or Egyptian publishing houses. The greater autonomy from the state that characterized the cultural production on Change Square translates, for the writers at least, into a greater dependence of the regional book market. A similar move from a politically dominated position in the national field to a politically and economically dominated position in a transnational field of cultural production is found in Simon Dubois’s case study of three Syrian playwrights. All three began their careers at the Damascus Higher Institute for Dramatic Arts in the early 2000s and left for Lebanon as the Syrian uprising turned into a war in the course of 2011. Dubois shows how the playwrights’ contact and collaboration with foreign cultural institutions, such as the British Council, and other NGOs while still in Syria stood them in good stead to hold their own in the post-2011 Syrian cultural field, where funding and support of Syrian artists in exile comes almost exclusively from European and American states and NGOs, bringing with it a certain autonomy, but also a new set of rules to abide to successfully secure funding. Ilka Eickhof touches on related issues in her exploration of the role of Northern European funding institutions in the cultural scene of postrevolutionary Cairo. Throwing into question the political development narrative attached to the work of cultural and public diplomacy organizations in Egypt, she considers the relations between the donors and the recipients of funding and their divergent attitudes to this form of patronage. As many of the other authors in this volume, she draws the picture of a cultural field which, while it enjoys a certain degree of autonomy in relation to the state on the national level, finds itself subject to the political and ideological agendas of the Northern European donor countries and organizations. These institutions, Eickhof argues, end up restricting access to funding and support for artistic work to a small circle of socio-economically privileged individuals who can afford the investments of time and labour which are demanded by the organizational processes set in place by the institutions.

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Marion Slitine, writing on the situation of the contemporary art scene in Gaza, explores a field of cultural production where the dominant political field makes itself felt not only through censorship laws, but by physically restricting the freedom of movement of artists and artworks alike. At the same time contemporary art from Palestine is in high demand in the commercial art market and enjoys much attention from foreign cultural and public diplomacy organizations whose presence in Gaza has dramatically increased between 2005 and 2011. While this increases the autonomy of artistic work with respect to the local, Israeli–Palestinian political field, many artists find themselves closer to the heteronomous pole by submitting to the interest of dominant players in the global economic field as well as the international field of politics. We hope it has become clear from this brief overview that the aim of this book is twofold: it is not only a collection of new empirical studies on the relations between culture and politics in the contemporary Arab world, but it also aims to use these field studies as a starting point for a methodological and theoretical reflection on the conceptual tools with which we analyse these social spaces, and the political and scientific stakes involved in our positioning in relation to them.

Notes 1 Bibliographies of the Arab uprisings are saturated with references to political science. Outside the political, most references belong to urban studies, gender studies and anthropology (especially of youth). Very few deal with matters of cultural production. See, for example, https://pomeps.org/2012/09/04/arabuprisings-bibliography/. For the Egyptian case, see https://connectedincairo.com/ resources/bibliography-of-the-egyptian-uprisings/. 2 Of course, this fluidity between inside and outside talk, scholarly analysis and political comment is not confined to cultural studies. Rather, it permeates every field of scholarly research in social sciences and every sector of area studies, but as a general rule, it is seldom made explicit in the academic discourse, leaving the lay audience, when this discourse makes its way to the main media outlets, with the idea that this discourse is pure ‘expert’ talk, disconnected from its author’s affects, interests or allegiances. 3 However, the question has been addressed by scholars such as Gisèle Sapiro (2013).

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Bibliography Bayat, Asef. 2010. Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1996. The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. [French original: Les règles de l’art. Genèse et structure du champ littéraire. Paris: Seuil, 1992]. Cooke, Miriam. 2016. Dancing in Damascus: Creativity, Resilience, and the Syrian Revolution. London and New York: Routledge. Dobry, Michel. 2009. Sociologie des crises politiques: la dynamique des mobilisations multisectorielles. Paris: Presses de Sciences Po. Frishkopf, Michael. 2008. ‘Nationalism, Nationalization, and the Egyptian Music Industry: Muhammad Fawzy, Misrphon, and Sawt al-Qahira (SonoCairo)’. Asian Music 39(2): 28–58. Frishkopf, Michael. 2010. ‘Music and Media in the Arab World and Music and Media in the Arab World as Music and Media in the Arab World: A Metadiscourse’. In Music and Media in the Arab world. Michael Frishkopf, ed., pp. 1–64. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press. Gandolfi, Paola. 2013. Rivolte in atto: dai movimenti artistici arabi a una pedagogia rivoluzionaria. Milano: Mimesis. Geer, Benjamin. 2011. The Priesthood of Nationalism in Egypt: Duty, Authority, Autonomy. Unpublished PhD Thesis, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. [https://www.academia.edu/1399961/Benjamin_Geer_-_ The_Priesthood_of_Nationalism_in_Egypt_-_PhD_Thesis]. Gonzalez-Quijano. Yves. 1998. Les gens du livre. Édition et champ intellectuel dans l’Égypte républicaine. Paris: Éditions du CNRS. Halasa, Malu, Nawara Mahfoud and Zaher Omareen. 2014. Syria Speaks: Art and Culture from the Frontline. London: Saqi Books. Hamdy, Basma and Don Stone Karl. 2014. Walls of Freedom: Street Art of the Egyptian Revolution. Berlin: From Here to Fame. Jacquemond, Richard. 2008. Conscience of the Nation: Writers, State and Society in Modern Egypt, translated by David Tresilian. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press. [French original: Entre scribes et écrivains. Le champ littéraire dans l’Égypte contemporaine. Arles: Actes Sud/Sindbad, 2003]. Jacquemond, Richard. 2015. ‘Translating Social Sciences in Arabic Today: The Case of Pierre Bourdieu’. The Translator 21(2): 189–209. Lang, Felix. 2016. The Lebanese Post-Civil War Novel. Memory, Trauma, and Capital. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Introduction

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Leperlier, Tristan. 2018. Algérie, les écrivains dans la décennie noire. Paris: Éditions du CNRS. Roitman, Janet. 2014. Anti-Crisis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Santoro, Marco. 2008. ‘Putting Bourdieu in the Global Field’. Sociologica 2. doi:10.2383/27719. Sapiro, Gisèle. 2013. ‘Le champ est-il national?’ Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 200(5): 70–85.

1

Beauty, Goodness and Bombs: The Role of Political Crisis in Structuring the Arab Field(s) of Cultural Production Felix Lang

At the time of writing (November 2018) Wikipedia lists over fifty conflicts which have taken place in the Middle East since 1948. Add to this the conflicts which have taken place in North Africa since the beginning of the twentieth century, and the list of coups, revolutions, anti-colonial rebellions, foreign invasions and prolonged civil wars extends to almost a hundred, leaving not one single year where peace would have reigned across the whole of the territory now covered by the nineteen states that form what is referred to as MENA region. Some of the most recent additions made to those lists – notably the events that have been unfolding in Egypt, Tunisia and Syria since 2011 – have drawn the attention of a wider public not only on account of the human suffering, (shattered) hopes or terrorist threat they entail, but also for the forms of cultural production developed in their wake. From film to theatre, literature and visual arts, scholars have pointed out formal and thematic innovations. Such developments inevitably raise questions as to the role of moments of political crisis for cultural production1 in the Arab world. This chapter advances one possible answer to these questions by moving away from an analysis largely anchored in the concept of the nation-state to a wider diachronic and transnational perspective. Given the manifest transnational dimensions of an Arab space of cultural production and the continuity of crisis in the region, I will argue that political crisis, rather than being the extraordinary moment of rupture as which it is often construed, is a structural feature of the regional field of cultural production. As such, it plays out on at least two levels:

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(1)  The level of social networks and institutions: political crises, and violent conflict in particular, affect the material infrastructure as well as mechanisms of control and regulation and frequently occasion a relocation of cultural producers and institutions. Taken together, these effects lead to a reconfiguration of social networks, including the subversions of established hierarchies. (2) The level of symbolic production2: political crises structure the historical narratives of the field of cultural production and its various segments; crises structure artwork in content and form; and finally crises play an important role for reception in other spaces of cultural production. Conceiving of crisis as a structural factor of the Arab field of cultural production addresses two problematic issues in academic research on the region’s cultural production which have once more become conspicuous in recent publications on the Arab uprisings. For one, it questions a notion of political crisis as exceptional rupture which is derived from a very particular European and American historical experience and somewhat removed from lived reality in many other parts of the world. For many millions of people, from Palestine to Syria to Algeria, political crisis is not an ‘“event” that suspends “normal” social processes, but instead has become the normal […] context for the unfolding of social life’ (Lubkeman 2008: 1) as the anthropologist Lubkeman put it with respect to the African continent (see also Slitine’s contribution to this volume). In fact, and this is the second point, political crisis is not something extraneous to the field of cultural production which disrupts the normal flow of things, but is built deeply into the network of producers, institutions and works of art and becomes a generative rather than a disruptive principle. Thus, political crises often present windows of opportunity for the transformation of symbolic relations of force, or what Bourdieu has called ‘symbolic revolutions’ (Bourdieu 2006: 81). In the following I will proceed by first defining the Arab field of cultural production as a social space in its national and transnational dimensions. In a second step I will sketch the concept of crisis as it is used in the context of this chapter. The second half of this chapter will be devoted to the different ways political crises come to bear on the field of cultural production, its institutions, actors and products.

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The field ‘Cairo writes, Beirut publishes, Baghdad reads’ – we don’t have to look any further than what feels like the most quoted adage in talks on Arab literary production to realize that the idea of a self-contained, national Egyptian, Lebanese or Iraqi field of cultural production is of limited use for analysis. Lebanese publishers print the work of Syrian, Tunisian and Egyptian authors; their readers can be found from Morocco in the west to the Gulf states in the east – a state of affairs that is hardly different for other forms of art: Arab Pop by a Lebanese singer, financed by Saudi production firms, is diffused all over the region over satellite TV; films are screened at festivals all over the world. Major institutions of consecration often lie outside the artists’ countries of origin: be it the much talked-about International Prize of Arabic Fiction (Abu Dhabi), major film festivals, galleries as well as much Arabic language criticism of art and literature which appears in pan-Arab newspapers and magazines. All these cross-border entanglements are well known to the scholars of Arab cultural production and while most of them acknowledge the transnational dimension of their subject of study they often have difficulties to go ‘beyond methodological nationalism’ as the programmatic title of a recent publication (Amelina et al. 2012) has it.3 In recent years, an increasing number of publications have explored transnational phenomena, such as the circulation of artworks (Chèvre 2017; Dickinson 2016; Marchetti 2017), or transnational markets and institutions (Erskine-Loftus and Wakefield 2016; Mermier 2017), without, however, advancing a conceptualization of a transnational space of cultural production as a whole. At the same time, the emphasis on a national context is not completely unwarranted either. As Sapiro has shown for the case of the French field, states can and do play an important role in structuring cultural production (Sapiro 2013). Censorship on political and religious grounds which, in different forms, exists across region is clearly the most immediate way the state exerts control over cultural producers. Professional unions of artists and writers, as in Egypt and Syria, as well as state-owned production facilities such as publishing houses and state-sponsored awards are other instruments which allow the state a certain influence in the cultural field. Finally, education of writers but especially of artists such as film-makers and musicians which needs more of a technical

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formation presents possibilities for the state to intervene. Last but not least, the lived reality of cultural producers is inevitably anchored in space.4 While many of them, especially from the younger generation, may share the international mobility characteristic of the well-educated upper-middle class,5 they are temporarily based in one geographic locale. To claim, as does this chapter, that the Arab field of cultural production is a quintessentially transnational space does not deny the importance of institutions and developments on a national level. Quite on the contrary, I will try to show how recurring political crises in the fragmented and nationally framed field of politics can be seen as constitutive for the transnational space of cultural production. Rejecting the ‘nation/state/society’ (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002) as natural unit of analysis leaves us with the question how the space of cultural production should be usefully defined. Simply widening the scope to the ‘Arab world’ does not go a long way in addressing the underlying problem. The definition of the region follows the logic of the nation-state and merely transfers the problem to a larger scale – considering the role Europe, through its communal programmes as well as through the cultural diplomacy policies of individual member states and its publishing enterprises, has on the Arab field of cultural production, it is not immediately clear, why France should not be part of this social space.6 A definition on linguistic grounds might seem an alternative which to some extent undermines the nation-state as analytical paradigm. But it quickly becomes clear that defining this space through its shared Arabic language – of the works or the artists – even if, for the sake of argument, we gloss over differences between dialects and fuṣḥa, excludes a vast body of cultural products which rely on French, English, Tamazight or Kurdish in their relations to the public. The problem in all three cases is eventually the same: they rest on a notion of social space that has been termed ‘substantial’ (Pries and Seeliger 2012), where social space is limited by geographical space. This is immediately clear in the first two cases; enclosing the field of cultural production in a linguistic space is just another attempt to limit it by use of a concept of space extraneous to the field. Eventually, it is not strictly necessary, and most likely unhelpful, to construct the unit of analysis by defining a kind of geographical container. As I will try to

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show, the field of cultural production as laid out by Bourdieu (2006) lends itself to the conceptualization of transnational spaces of production, even though it was modelled on a national field. Bourdieu’s field is a relational social space, constituted by the relations between actors, their positions and positiontakings; in a more general way we could say that the field of cultural production can be understood as a network of relations between actors, symbols and artefacts (Pries and Seeliger 2012). Such relations do not necessarily stop at national borders – although some of them do – yet this does not mean that the field of cultural production in which artists such as Walid Raad, Daoud Abd El-Sayed, Elias Khoury or Aida Nadeem move can be completely dissociated from geographical space. The Arab field of cultural production would then denote a network of relations between actors, symbols and artefacts which is densest7 in the countries – or more realistically, the major cities – of the region, while it also comprises ties to places in South America or Australia. As a consequence, researchers in Aix-en-Provence or Marburg, US publishing houses and readers in La Réunion are understood as constitutive elements of the social space. For the present purposes, I would suggest to conceptualize the Arab space of cultural production as a set of partly overlapping ego-centred networks, in which ‘ego’ is identified as the individual cultural producer. In order to be able to gauge the role of political crises for the field of cultural production, it will be necessary to first define more clearly what relations we are looking at. As a starting point it will help to distinguish seven types of actors and institutions whose relations with the cultural producers, such as novelists, film-makers and musicians, form the network of the field of cultural production. These are (1) institutions in charge of the publication or display of the cultural product: publishers, galleries, concert venues, cinemas; (2) criticism: newspapers, magazines, websites; (3) prizes and awards; (4) funding bodies; (5) schools and universities as institutions of formation and consecration; (6) censorship; (7) the audience. The relations or ties between these actors serve the circulation of, and access to, material and immaterial resources. Such resources would include different kinds of capital, information, labour and facilities needed for cultural production. Thus, ties between artists and critics may serve to supply an artist with symbolic capital or a friendship between two film-makers may lead to a

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fruitful exchange of ideas – or an exchange on how to best secure funding from one institution or other, to give just a few examples. All these types of actors and relations exist, in some guise or other, across the states of the Arab world and beyond. The relations between them can be intra-national – as in the case of a Lebanese novelist who publishes with Dār al-Ādāb and whose novel is reviewed in the al-Nahār newspaper; or they can be transnational as in the case of a Syrian author living in France published by the same publisher. While the relations between actors and institutions can be transnational, the institutions and actors themselves are bound to a national legal framework: a gallerist has to buy or rent their premises in accordance with the law, a broadcaster, publisher or newspaper will be subject to the laws of the state from which they operate. Equally they are grounded in geographical space: the gallery, the printing press, the warehouse and the studio are inevitably anchored in space, and the same holds for the servers of social media which otherwise might seem ideal-typical transnational institutions. In order to locate the field of cultural production in geographical space – the space where the network of social relations is densest, as I suggested above – it could be helpful to come back to the classical distinction between ‘strong ties’ and ‘weak ties’ as advocated by Granovetter (1973). Where a strong tie exists between individuals – we might add: institutions – these individuals are likely to share ties to other parties. Phrased in the sometimes cumbersome terms of social network analysis, if A has a strong tie to B, and B has strong ties to C and D, then A is more likely to have ties to C and D than if A had no tie or a weak tie to B. It seems reasonable to assume that such strong ties are more numerous on the level of a city, within a nation-state, than they are on the transnational level. For one, this is due to the fact that the bulk of cultural producers holds small amounts of symbolic capital. Newcomers to the field will usually make their entry at the local level, they will have few ties reaching across national borders or the borders of the city they live in. Publications, exhibitions or recordings often present the first step across national boundaries – either by quite literally taking a work of art from Cairo to Beirut or by attaining a certain visibility within an internationally connected scene of cultural producers.8 Coverage in major Arabic newspapers, on radio or on TV is a further step across the border. With growing symbolic capital cultural producers and their work are

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‘transnationalised’ – the ‘strong’ ties of their respective networks increasingly include transnational ties – to foreign publishers, London galleries, European NGOs and cultural producers from other countries.9 As a result, we find that many of the most important institutions of the cultural field in terms of consecratory power are located outside the national framework in which cultural producers move. Consider the example of literary production: With its 4.5 million inhabitants Lebanon holds just about 1.1 per cent of the region’s population but accounts for 17 per cent of books published, with only 10 per cent of the whole production sold on the Lebanese market.10 On the other hand, much of the francophone literary production from the states of the Maghreb as well as Lebanon is published by mainstream French publishers; newspapers and literary magazines (al-Ādāb; al-Ḥayāt’s literary supplement, both based in Lebanon) review works from arabophone writers from around the region; the IPAF, a literary award for Arabic fiction which has become one of the most important regional institutions of consecration is based in the UAE. In addition to that, the translation into one of the major European languages remains the most important form of recognition for many authors: by consequence scholars of European and American universities, Italian, German and American publishers become important institutions for Arab cultural production. Finally, the authors’ readership is of course not limited to their country of origin – in many cases it is indeed not unlikely that most of their readers live abroad. What emerges is a very decentralized field whose major institutions are distributed over a number of nation-states and even continents. This is a structural feature which is not limited to the literary segment of the field: think of the importance of international film festivals or funding for film projects,11 concert tours,12 funding and training programmes for artists.13 To some extent this is of course true for all fields of cultural production, especially when it comes to institutions of consecration: the Nobel Prize for literature or the Palme d’Or of the Cannes Film Festival are but two obvious points in case. The difference to highly integrated national spaces of cultural production, such as the French or German fields, is that even at a level of high consecration a higher proportion of strong ties remains within the national borders. The most prestigious publishing houses for German writers are German publishing houses, such as Suhrkamp, the majority of their readers live in Germany, the most important literary critics are those from German

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quality media. Literature might be considered an extreme case, bound up as it is with the nationalist project in a very particular way. But it remains that the number and variety of institutions in place for the training, funding and consecration of artists on a national level is considerably higher than in the countries of the Arab world.14 So far, this description has been dealing with institutions and producers, the players in the field of cultural production in Bourdieu’s terminology. If we follow Bourdieu in understanding the field of cultural production not merely as the network of relations between those players, but also the relations between position-takings, there is a whole other level of the field that has to be explored. Talking about works of art rather than people or institutions, it might seem a bit forceful to use the vocabulary of social network analysis. Yet I think that it offers a good framework for description and enables us to grasp more clearly what Bourdieu has called the homology of structure (Bourdieu 2006: 193–201), if we allow for certain adaptations. In the idiom of network analysis, the position-takings, that is works of art and other symbolic products, such as statements in interviews or articles, that producers use in their struggle for symbolic capital form the nodes of such a network. The ties between the position-takings take the form of flows of formal and thematic elements. Such ties differ from the ties between actors in that they are exclusively unidirectional: new position-takings will always situate themselves with respect to those that predate them, but older positiontakings cannot acknowledge what comes after them (certain types of ongoing visual arts projects form an exception). The notion of strong and weak ties, however, can be easily transferred to the world of position-takings. The status of a text, film or work of art as canonical could be said to derive from its presence as an aesthetic or thematic reference analogous to the way that a scholarly article acquires symbolic value as a function of citations. In the same vein, shared narratives, concepts and arguments that characterize a specific set of position-takings could be said to indicate strong ties between symbolic products. In contradistinction to the relations between producers and institutions, strong transnational ties between position-takings can be found in the work of non-consecrated producers who don’t command much symbolic or economic capital. Works of art, from Latin American magic realism to the latest films

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of the Cohen brothers or Ai Wei Wei’s art installations are readily available and are the type of work with or against which producers position themselves implicitly or explicitly.15 On the other end of the spectrum, the producers’ local peers’ work provides the backdrop against which their own position is defined. In between the position-takings of highly consecrated producers based outside the Arab field of cultural production and those of non-consecrated local producers found on the level of a city or at best national level, we find the position-takings of consecrated producers based in the Arab cultural field – the latest novel by Elias Khoury or a film by Mohammad Malas, for instance. Thus, the network of relations emerging among the position-takings emphasizes the transnational dimension of Arab cultural space as players don’t need much symbolic capital to engage with the works of consecrated producers. In fact, access to the works of highly acclaimed writers, film-makers and musicians which are sold, shown or played at every corner is much easier than access to the work of non-consecrated local artists.16 Having established the subject of analysis, the Arab field of cultural production as a relational social space and a network of ties that link the various players and institutions engaged in cultural production, as well as the cultural products or position-takings, and is densest in the countries of the Arab world, I will proceed to consider the role of political crises in shaping this social space. But before going there, a word is in order about the concept of crisis used in this analysis.

Crisis In his critical summary of the then contemporary usage of the concept of Crisis (Krise), Reinhart Koselleck wrote in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, ‘“Crisis” is often used interchangeably with “unrest”, “conflict”, “revolution”, and to describe vaguely disturbing moods or situations’ (Koselleck 2006: 399). An analysis that is no less valid now than it was a quarter of a century ago – the refugee crisis, the banking crisis: examples abound. And now as much as then, it appears sensible to heed the historian’s advice and ‘weigh the concept carefully before adopting it in [one’s] own terminology’ (Koselleck 2006: 399). In the following, I will attempt to define the concept of crisis as it is used

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in the present chapter hoping that, at the very least, it will serve to denote something more tangible than a ‘vaguely disturbing mood’ (Koselleck 2006). For the purposes of this chapter, it will not be necessary to delve deeply into the history of the concept. As the title suggests, it will be limited to political crises and follow a rather conservative path in this respect.17 As a starting point I would suggest a basic definition of crises as ‘processes through which the structure of a system is called into question’ (Offe 1976), advanced by Offe. Offe in fact discards this definition to opt for a more processual definition of crisis which, locating itself in a Marxist tradition, sees it as an immanent feature of the system. While I agree that a definition such as the one I adopt here might convey the impression of crises as extraneous to the systems in question, I think it is legitimate to explore the effects of such processes on the social space that is the field of cultural production independently from the reasons that these processes occurred in the first place. The question whether Aleppo is being reduced to rubble because of processes inherent to a capitalist mode of production or divine providence is important to discuss, but the immediate effect of bombs and shells on the field of cultural production – the destruction of publishers’ warehouses or the emigration of film-makers for instance – remains the same. The system, then, will be limited to denote the state, its institutions and the practices associated with them. Any processes that are liable or likely to produce a pronounced change in any of these within a short time frame will be understood as a crisis. Typical ways in which this system has been ‘called into question’ – or ‘threatened’, as other definitions of crisis have it (Auer 2016), are violent conflict and non-violent protest movements. In addition, I would argue that moments of succession in authoritarian regimes where much authority and legitimacy is concentrated in the figure of the leader present moments of crisis in which the political field is re-structured. In order to arrive at a clear understanding of what crisis is taken to mean in this context, it will be helpful to come back to the list of conflicts referred to in the opening paragraph and order them according to different types: (1) anti-colonial wars, for example the Algerian war of independence; (2) post-colonial foreign intervention, for example the US invasion of Iraq; (3) regional wars, for example Six Day’s War 1967; (4) civil wars, including intervention of outside parties, for example Lebanon, Syria, Libya, Algeria, Yemen, Sudan; (5) regime change, for example Tunisia 2011, Egypt 2011 and 2013; (6) succession, for example Mohammed VI

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in Morocco, Bashar al-Assad in Syria; finally, there is the Arab–Israeli conflict stretching across a number of different types. As any classification stretching across a hundred years of history and what are now nineteen nation-states, this may look wildly simplificatory. However, rather than claiming a comparability of these crises as such, as regards their underlying causes for instance, this classification merely asserts that they are comparable in respect of the effects they had and have on the field of cultural production.

The effects of political crises on cultural production – Networks and resources Any attempt to assess the effects of political crisis on cultural production that is based on a Bourdieusian theoretical framework will have to consider two levels: the positions on the one hand, and the position-takings on the other. To show that political crisis is a structural feature of the current Arab field of cultural production, it will be necessary to show in what ways crises and their effects shape the relations between producers and institutions, as well as the relations between individual works of art. In general, crises tend to have effects on the relations between cultural producers and the institutions (1) through the ways they affect the material infrastructure on which cultural producers rely, (2) through the displacement of producers and other actors in the field of production, (3) through changes in the practices of control by actors from the field of power. Threats to the material infrastructure of the field of cultural production are of course most pronounced where crises take the form of violent conflict. Musicians need concert venues and studios for recording, visual artists need galleries, film-makers need cinemas, where their work can be screened, not to talk about the technical equipment and material. Writers need publishers, printing presses and a network of distribution. In a city – or a country – at war, none of these can be taken for granted. This does of course not mean that musicians stop playing and writers stop writing, but that they are compelled to find ways around these problems which leave their marks on the form and content of their products.18 At the same time the network of relations is being reconfigured: the publisher who used to hold significant consecratory powers

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may become marginalized if the political conditions don’t allow for a smooth production process any more.19 The flourishing of online magazines such as aljumhuriya.net in the case of Syria or madamasr.com20 in Egypt is also clearly related to moments of political crisis where existing outlets for publication become dysfunctional. As these few examples already indicate, many of the ways around the problems which materialize in a national context lead the producers abroad. The breakdown of material infrastructure is certainly one of the reasons which lead to the emigration of cultural producers, as well as many other people, in situations of crisis.21 The emigration of large numbers of cultural producers of course has a deep and lasting impact on the structure of the field, as Dubois’s and Firat’s contributions on the Syrian field in this book show. In the long run, it works to break up the national framework by obliging producers to form strong ties in a different national context, while many types of formerly strong ties will be transformed into weaker relations. In some circumstances, this process may even lead to new nodal points in the network of relations that makes up the field. The case of anglophone Lebanese literature is a good example: Rabih Alameddine and Rawi Hage, the two authors who have been credited with putting anglophone Lebanese literature on the map22 both fled Lebanon during the civil war. But it is not only the producers’ emigration to countries in the region or further away that changes the structure of the field. The emigration of broadcasters, magazines or newspapers, as well as producers or gallerists – individuals and organizations that we could conceptionalize as intermediaries between cultural producers and their works – likewise leads to reconfiguration of the social space that is the field of cultural production. In addition to the reconfiguration of existing ties, the producers’ relocation also leads to the development of new ties. The way exiled Syrian cultural producers are integrated into the national networks of cultural production of their host countries is an interesting point in case. European governmental and non-governmental organizations, by acting as funding bodies for artistic projects or writers’ residencies and giving Syrian cultural producers a platform have acquired an important role for Syrian cultural production over the last six years which is bound to have long-term effects on the structure of the field. It is not only through funding and showcasing cultural producers from the Arab cultural fields that new ties between the actors and institutions of these spaces

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are established, but also the growth of an audience which is equally related to political crises in the region. The Arab Spring with its romantic revolutionary narrative and the ensuing refugee crisis has led to an unprecedented (albeit still marginal) presence of players from the Arab cultural fields in many European quality media.23 The third major way the cultural field is affected by political crises regards the mechanisms of control deployed by the dominant actors in the field of politics. On the one hand, political crises often lead to a tightening of control over cultural production as a way of asserting authority. On the other hand, the breakdown of state authority can also produce short-lived loss of control during which censorship laws are no longer enforced. Arguably, these windows of opportunity are more relevant for types of cultural production which operate with short time frames. Street art in general and graffiti in particular,24 as well as protest music,25 are more likely to profit from these crisis situations than literary production, and novels especially.26 A third aspect is one that mostly appears in relation to policy changes which are the result of peaceful succession within the nation-state. The Damascus Spring which followed Bashar al-Assad’s succession of his father as president of the Syrian republic in 2000 made possible the publication of a host of prison memoirs and testimonies by former political prisoners that now form a distinct part of Syrian literary production.27 A similar point could be made regarding Morocco and the way that the repressive rule of King Mohammed VI’s father has become a legitimate subject of cultural production. Another element of control, which is also subject to policy changes occurring in times of crisis, is the formation of artists in state-run universities and art schools or the setting of curricula for such institutions. While political crises may arise from a variety of internal and external reasons, their direct effects on the field of cultural production remain limited to the national arena. Censorship and other types of government control over artistic production, as well as the destruction of infrastructure, will have a considerable impact on local cultural production, as they interfere and restructure the dense network of relations that exists in a specific geographic locale. The Arab field of cultural production, and those producers in particular which are part of a dense web of transnational ties – incidentally those who have higher stocks of symbolic and economic capital which allow for their mobility

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Culture and Crisis in the Arab World

in the first place – however, are not reliant on the stability and functioning of any one particular nation-state and its institutions for their creative work and the processes of production. Thus, the Lebanese film-maker Jocelyne Saab does not have to rely on Lebanese programmes in order to fund her projects but can look towards funding schemes by different European Union member states, for instance.28 The fact that the field’s institutions are spread over more than nineteen nation-states vouches for the field’s resilience. A political crisis in individual countries may have a more considerable impact on the work and formation of young, non-consecrated producers. But in the wider Arab field of cultural production, such crises simply produce a shift of certain activities, institutions and sets of cultural producers to a different geographic space. The indirect consequences of political crises, arising from these shifts, however are a structural element of the social space that is the cultural field. Arguably, the recurring crises which hardly spared any of the region’s states in the last seventy years led to an emphasis of the transnational networks of social relations at the expense of more strongly integrated national cultural fields.29

The effects of political crisis on cultural production – ‘Crisis art’ So far, we have been concerned with crisis and its impact on the relations between cultural producers, institutions and the audience that form the space of cultural production. What is left to show is the effects of political crises on the level of symbolic production. It will be helpful to distinguish three levels at which the impact of political crises can be shown: (1) on the level of themes, (2) on the level of field-specific historical narratives and (3) on the level of marketability. Unsurprisingly, crises and their effects have been the subject of a vast body of cultural products over the past century. We need to only think about countless films, songs, novels and plays that have come out of the Arab–Israeli conflict since 1948. The Algerian War of Independence, the Lebanese Civil War and, more recently, the Arab uprisings have all been the subject of art and literature. Death of civilians and combatants, (war time) disappeared, the destruction of urban space and emigration are elements that can be traced across different

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forms of art, genres and times. While some crises, such as Six Day’s War 1967, the Arab-Israeli conflict,30 the invasion of Iraq by an US-led coalition and, most recently, the Arab Spring have been central to cultural products across the whole Arab field of cultural production, others, such as the Lebanese Civil War or the Years of Lead in Hassan II’s Morocco, have a pronounced effect in a rather more limited part of the field. Besides these elements, much recent ‘crisis art’ shares a specific conceptual framework. Currently, as for the past twenty years or so, notions of memory, trauma, the archive, testimony, docu-fiction and documentary provide an idiom to tell crisis which appears in Moroccan prison literature just as it does in recent films about Tahrir Square,31 the music of Aida Nadeem (Iraq) or Mazen Kerbaj (Lebanon) (Dickinson 2013), and visual arts from across the Middle East (Downey 2015: 14).32 Certainly, not all ‘crisis art’ shares this dominant conceptual framework. One obvious exception are cultural products which bear an immediate relation with the moment of crisis, such as protest songs and street art which is produced as the crisis unfolds, rather than in its aftermath. While it is difficult to determine the precise share of ‘crisis art’ in the overall volume of cultural production, the fact that many of the field’s most highly consecrated producers participate in its production and that it has frequently been seen as a dominant theme in discourses on cultural production – the list of academic works studying film, literature or visual arts from the region in relation to a specific political crisis is too long to be referenced here in detail – seems to point towards its importance. Considering the importance of ‘crisis art’ in relation to other genres takes us straight to the second point to be dealt with here: crises have played an eminent role in cultural production not only by imposing certain themes and conceptual frameworks through which they are understood, but also because they have become points of reference in the historical narratives of specific art forms and their local and regional traditions. The year of 1967 is one such example which provides a reference point for a large proportion of cultural producers across different genres. It is taken to spell the end of iltizām literature and politically engaged art in the framework of Arab nationalism. Another example more limited to a local Lebanese level is the way the civil war novels published in the early war years have been constructed as the beginning of a Lebanese novelistic tradition.33 Currently, the Arab uprisings are in the course of being constructed

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as such a watershed moment in the history of cultural production. The historical narratives of genres or art forms are never purely academic concerns, but stakes in the struggles of the players in the cultural field, to borrow Bourdieu’s terminology. In order to legitimize an author or film-maker and their work, the history of the field has to be constructed in a way that they end up ‘on the right side of history’ as it were. By distancing oneself from the didactic political art of the 1960s, cultural producers fashion themselves as a ‘new’ generation which is set against the ‘old’ and ‘outmoded’ cultural producers of the past. Similarly, the claim that the Lebanese novel was born in the civil war disqualifies previous published novels and elevates those authors who began their careers in the late 1970s to mothers and fathers of the Lebanese novel. Political crises, not least because of the reconfiguration of networks of cultural production discussed above, lend themselves as turning points around which legitimizing narratives can be constructed.34 Boissier’s and Guellouz’s piece in this book, for instance, shows how rumour is used in Tunisia in a first attempt to redefine the limits of the field and artists’ legitimacy after the fall of Ben Ali. Likewise, academic work on the region’s cultural production makes ubiquitous use of political crises for the temporal framing and delimitation of its subject matter as well as a structuring device for field-specific historical narratives. Thus far we have seen the effect political crises in the themes of cultural production and in the construction of the field’s history. Finally, crisis-art certainly affords a privileged access to the market on a transnational level, especially in Europe and the United States. In the wake of the Arab uprisings, we have seen Samar Yazbek, a writer formerly known only to specialists outside the Arab world enjoy a presence in European quality media that very few Arab writers have shared; we have seen bands which are not signed to any major (or even minor) record label, such as the group of the aforementioned Youssra el-Hawary, invited to play concerts all over continent; Syrian playwrights, such as Mohammad Attar, have their plays staged at some of Europe’s most prestigious theatres; a number of feature films35 connected to these political crises have been produced with the support of European organizations; in Egypt, as Eickhof points out in her contribution to this volume, ‘revolutionary art’ appears as the favourite genre of European funding organizations – the list could be extended. However, the general interest for work connected to the Arab Spring maybe the starkest, but not the only example. It might be no

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coincidence that the only two films by Arab directors which have won major European/American awards are Mohammad Lakhdar-Hamina’s Chronicle of the Year of Embers (Palme d’Or in Cannes, 1975) and Hany Abu-Assad’s Paradise Now (Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film, 2005) (Gugler 2015a) which deal with Algerian revolution of 1954 and the Arab–Israeli conflict, respectively. In the field of visual arts, the work of many of its most successful proponents internationally – for instance Joanna Hadjithomas’s and Khalil Joreige’s – is related to moments of political crisis through the archive and memory thematic. Rarely are artists so open about the role of political crisis on their position in the global arts market as the Palestinian artist Mohammed Hawajri quoted by Slitine in her article in this book, who puts down much of his international success to the fact that he is from Gaza. But even if we assume that artists are not consciously pursuing strategies which aim to increase their symbolic capital through the production of ‘crisis art’, it seems reasonable to hold that the market for cultural products in Europe and the United States privileges those producers who – for whatever reason – relate their work to political crises, a process which inevitably structures the Arab field of cultural production.

Conclusion – Crises and symbolic revolutions The argument pursued in this chapter, namely that political crises are an important structural element of the Arab field of cultural production, puts into focus a type of constraints on cultural production that are arguably more marginal in the European context on which Bourdieu’s work on the literary field is based, and which still constitutes the focus of much current scholarship which operates with his conceptual framework. Essentially, this is a context in which the market and (political) ideology are identified as the main constraints to the artists’ autonomy.36 While this does take into account the effects of the field of politics in as far as they are intended – as in the case of censorship – the unintended consequences of actions by players in the field of politics don’t receive much attention. The destruction of relevant infrastructure, the scarcity of certain materials, the emigration of cultural producers, the role of crises in field-specific historical narratives, to mention just some of the points

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discussed above, present constraints originating in the field of politics which are mediated through the cultural field and take an effect on its products. With this in mind, and given the history of recurring crises in the Arab world, it seems plausible to assume that political crises play a considerable role in the development of what Bourdieu has called ‘symbolic revolutions’, that is, moments when established hierarchies in the field of cultural production are being overturned. This is not to say that the field of politics imposes its logic by structuring the history of the cultural field in dependence of events – wars, coups, mass-demonstrations – that lie outside it. Cultural producers will not remain unaffected by a civil war or the toppling of an authoritarian ruler. But nor does cultural production necessarily reflect every transformation in the political sphere. Rather, we should follow Bourdieu in regarding such changes which are external to the field of cultural production as necessary rather than sufficient preconditions for transformations in the structure of the cultural field. As Bourdieu writes with respect to literature: If the permanent struggles between possessors of specific capital and those who are still deprived of it constitute the motor of an incessant transformation of the supply of symbolic products, it remains true that they can only lead to deep transformations of the symbolic relations of force that result in the overthrowing of the hierarchy of genres, schools and authors when these struggles can draw support from external changes moving in the same direction. (Bourdieu 2006: 127)

Political crises can present themselves as an opportunity to break with the highly consecrated avant-garde of cultural producers – a break including a rejection of their formal choices which might lead to a change in the hierarchy of genres. The effects of political crises discussed above can and do lead to a transformation of the field, positions and position-takings. In other words, political crises can be understood as one form of the ‘external changes’ that make possible ‘transformations of the symbolic relations of force’. In the past, these dynamics could be seen at play in relation to 1967 for instance, or on a more local level, with the role the Lebanese Civil War has played in transforming the country’s local literary field. Contemporary Syrian cultural production could also be a case in point. While things are still very much in flux, the growing interest of European media and NGOs in Syrian cultural production is in the process of producing new forms of consecration.

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German theatres, French publishers and Canadian film festivals chose, and thereby consecrate, cultural products not necessarily for the same qualities that would have been relevant for the established institutions in the field.37 In this volume, Dubois shows how the success of three young Syrian playwrights is based on qualifications (such as a professional experience with NGOs and good English language skills) which were not relevant for a career in field of Syrian theatre a decade earlier. Through developments such as these, which are of course not limited to the Syrian case, established hierarchies are bound to be overturned, new and different genres and forms of cultural production are bound to emerge. While it may be too early to say where these transformations are leading, it seems likely that political crises will remain a structural feature of this social space.

Notes 1 Cultural production here refers to specific forms – literature, film, visual arts and music – which have attracted the attention of scholars working on the region. As a consequence, this selection clearly prioritizes the professionalized cultural producers of the affluent upper-middle class. Traditional and lay forms of cultural production are not considered in this chapter. 2 I would take the term ‘symbolic products’ to refer not only to the artworks themselves, but also to specific narratives about cultural production which producers use for their positioning in the field. 3 This becomes clear in the titles of publications on ‘Lebanese’ literature, ‘Egyptian’ cinema, etc. – my own work on the Lebanese literary field being no exception. 4 Cf. Smith (2011). 5 Armes makes this claim regarding the younger generation of Arab film-makers (Armes 2015: 8); Burkhalter about avant-garde musicians in Lebanon (Burkhalter 2013: 93). 6 The Fonds Sud Cinéma (a programme continued as Aide aux cinémas du monde after 2011) financed by the French Centre National du Cinéma has been credited with an eminent role in funding Arab film production. See Armes (2015), Gugler (2015a). Most of the Arab world’s francophone authors publish with French publishing houses. And concerning music, Frishkopf claims that ‘musically, the Arab Maghrib is in many ways more closely linked to urban France [than to the Mashrik]’ (Frishkopf 2010: 38).

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7 Following Mitchell, the density of network is characterized by the ‘extent to which everyone in a set of ego’s contacts knows everyone else’ (Mitchell 1969: 15). Here, I would like to supplement this notion with what Faist defines as the ‘intensity’ of a network, namely the frequency of transactions within a given period and the speed of transactions (Faist 2004: 4). 8 The increasing importance of web-based services, such as YouTube, blogs or social media as a way to reach an audience might present a lower threshold for contemporary cultural producers. However, the mere fact of works being available online is certainly not enough to forge those ties. 9 Here I am putting an emphasis on the perspective of cultural producers. While institutions, such as the IPAF, the Dubai International Film Festival or the Rotana Group as far as it is involved in cultural production operate on a transnational level from the outset, the networks of ties in which they are enmeshed is arguably still densest in the Arab countries. 10 Numbers based on Abu Zeid (2013a, 2013b). 11 The Salt of This Sea (2008) by Palestinian director Annemarie Jacir has received funding from eight different European countries, which, as Roy Armes notes, is the rule rather than the exception (Armes 2015: 19–20). Outside commercial Egyptian cinema, most film-makers rely on this type of funding. See Gugler (2015a). 12 As Burkhalter states in a chapter on Lebanese avant-garde musicians: ‘To earn money with their music, these musicians need to focus on performing and selling mainly on Euro-American platforms. They thus remain largely dependent on festivals, arts funding, NGOs, and media in Europe and the United States’ (Burkhalter 2013: 99). The case is of course different with the stars of commercial Arab pop, such as Nancy Ajram. 13 See, for instance, Hanan Toukan on the crucial role European NGOs and cultural diplomacy have played in shaping the production of visual arts in the Arab world (Toukan 2010). 14 The number of awards for literature granted each year in Germany is estimated to lie between 500 and 1300 (Dücker and Neumann 2005). 15 Whether they be musicians, film-makers, visual artists or writers, contemporary cultural producers are commonly characterized in literature as part of a cosmopolitan upper-middle class with a profound knowledge of cultural production from outside the region. See, for instance, for film Gugler (2015b); for music Burkhalter, Dickinson, and Harbert (2013); for literature Lang (2016) and for visual arts Toukan (2010).

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16 This may be different for visual arts, where they are not distributed commercially in comparable ways. Yet, coverage in the media and photo/video-documentation, which has become an integral part of artistic practices in this field can have a similar effect. 17 The effects of other types of crises, like environmental or economic crises only appear in this analysis as mediated through the field of politics. 18 The Syrian Mobile Film Festival, which was first held in 2014 in a number of Syrian cities is only one example for such strategies which develop in a country at war. See http://syriamobilefilms.com. 19 The fact that two publishers founded in London towards the end of the civil war period, Saqi and Riyad al-Rayess, now count among the most highly regarded publishers (cf. Mermier 2005) could in part be attributed to their ability of offering a high professional standard by profiting from the stability of their host country. 20 Founded by staff from the English language Egypt Independent after it was shut down by the Al-Masry Media Corporation in 2013, the English language website explicitly refers to the publication as ‘born out of crisis’ (http://www. madamasr.com/about-us). In the Arabic version, crisis only figures implicitly in the narrative about the magazines inception. 21 Another reason might be found in the practices of control which will be reviewed hereafter. 22 Cf. Hout (2012). 23 To give but two examples from the fields of music and literature: The Egyptian singer/songwriter Youssra El-Hawary, maybe best-known for her song al-Sūr (the Wall) about the walls erected in Cairo in an attempt to control protests by the SCAF, has had concerts in Sweden, Germany and the UK in the past two years. The Syrian novelist Samar Yazbek has repeatedly appeared in the pages of major French, German and English newspapers since 2011. 24 While the overwhelming (academic) interest in Egyptian graffiti in particular and the way it has been stylized as the prototypical revolutionary art make us liable to overemphasize its role in relation to other modes of artistic production, it remains that it is among the forms of art most immediately related to the moment of crisis surrounding the ousting of Mubarak in 2011. 25 El Général’s Rais Lebled (2011) is a typical example. For more examples see Mattes (2012). 26 A problem the Tunisian author Kamāl al-Riyāḥī seemingly sought to overcome by adding a postface to his novel al-Ghūrīllā (2011) which clearly places it in the

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context of the Tunisian revolution even though it appeared only a few months after the event. I am grateful to Charlotte Pardey for introducing me to his work. 27 Cf. Cooke (2011); Haugbolle (2008). 28 In general, film production seems to be much more decentralized, and even less dependent on a specific national framework. Ciecka’s article on Keif al Hal (2006), the first ‘Saudi’ feature film, concludes that the most Saudi thing about it was the money that paid for it and its adherence to censorship rules: the whole female cast but one came from Lebanon, the director is a Canadian-Palestinian, it was shot in the UAE and post-production work was done in India (Ciecka 2011). 29 The imposition of a nationhood along colonial lines certainly did its share, as did notions of art as universal. 30 A study of blogs by Etling and colleagues also reveals Palestine as one of few topics that were pursued by bloggers from across the region, while their work is usually dominated by domestic politics (Etling et al. 2010). 31 Cf. Eickhof (2016). 32 Attempts to ‘archive’ the revolutions are also present in Lara Baladi’s Vox Populi project (cf. Baladi 2016) on the Egyptian revolution or the Creative Memory of the Syrian Revolution (www.creativememory.org). 33 Cf. Lang (2016). 34 Other such turning points could be of a more technical or economic nature: cf. Frishkopf (2010) on the spread of cassettes in the 1970s and of satellite TV in the 1990s and its effects on Arab popular music. 35 For instance, Leyla Bouzid’s As I Open My Eyes (2015). 36 Cf. Sapiro (2012). 37 For instance, the German e-publisher Mikrotext publishes translated works of a number of young Syrian authors that had not been published in Arabic (Rasha Abbas, Aboud Saeed, Assaf Alassaf). Cf. http://www.mikrotext.de/.

Bibliography Abu Zeid, S. 2013a. The Arab Book Market. http://www.buchmesse.de/images/fbm/ dokumente-ua-pdfs/2014/buchmarkt_arabische_welt_engl_2014_43687.pdf (accessed 20 December 2016). Abu Zeid, S. 2013b. Lebanon‘s Book Market. http://www.buchmesse.de/images/fbm/ dokumente-ua-pdfs/2014/buchmarkt_lebanon_engl_2014_43688.pdf (accessed 20 December 2016).

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Amelina, A., D. D. D. Nergiz, T. Faist, and N. G. Glick Schiller, eds. 2012. Beyond Methodological Nationalism: Research Methodologies for Cross-Border Studies. Routledge Research in Transnationalism. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis. Armes, R. 2015. New Voices in Arab Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Auer, C. 2016. The Handbook of International Crisis Communication Research. Andreas Schwarz, Claudia Auer, and Matthew W. Seeger, eds. Handbooks in Communication and Media. Chichester and Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell. Baladi, L. 2016. Archiving a Revolution in the Digital Age, Archiving as an Act of Resistance. Ibraaz, 28 July. http://www.ibraaz.org/usr/library/documents/main/ archiving-a-revolution-in-the-digital-age.pdf. Bourdieu, P. 2006. The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Meridian crossing aesthetics. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Burkhalter, T. 2013. ‘Multisited Avant-Gardes or World Music 2.0? Musicians from Beirut and Beyond between Local Production and Euro-American Reception’. In The Arab Avant-Garde: Music, Politics, Modernity. Thomas Burkhalter, Kay Dickinson, and Benjamin J. Harbert, eds., pp. 89–118. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Burkhalter, T., K. Dickinson, and B. J. Harbert, eds. 2013. The Arab Avant-Garde: Music, Politics, Modernity. Music & culture. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Chèvre, M. 2017. ‘Youth Literature in the Arab Middle East: Creation without Borders?” In The Transnational Middle East. People, Places, Borders. Leïla Vignal, ed., pp. 221–37. London: Routledge. Ciecka, A. 2011. ‘Cinema “of ” Yemen and Saudi Arabia: Narrative Strategies, Cultural Challenges, Contemporary Features’. Wide Screen 3(1): 1–16. http:// widescreenjournal.org. Cooke, M. 2011. ‘The Cell Story: Syrian Prison Stories after Hafiz Asad’. Middle East Critique 20(2): 169–87. Dickinson, K. 2013. ‘Introduction: “Arab” + “Avant-Garde”’. In The Arab Avant-Garde: Music, Politics, Modernity. Thomas Burkhalter, Kay Dickinson, and Benjamin J. Harbert, eds., pp. 1–31. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Dickinson, K. 2016. Arab Cinema Travels: Transnational Syria, Palestine, Dubai and Beyond. London: BFI. Downey, A. 2015. ‘Contingency, Dissonance and Performativity: Critical Archives and Knowledge Production in Contemporary Art’. In Dissonant Archives: Contemporary Visual Culture and Contested Narratives in the Middle East. Anthony Downey, ed., pp. 13–42. London: I.B.Tauris. Dücker, B., and V. Neumann. 2005. ‘Literaturpreise. Register mit einer Einführung: Literaturpreise als literaturgeschichtlicher Forschungsgegenstand’. In

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Diskussionsbeiträge des SFB 619 »Ritualdynamik« der Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg. Nr. 12. Dietrich Harth, and Axel Michaels, eds. http://archiv.ub.uniheidelberg.de/volltextserver/5811/1/LiteraturpreiseInternet.pdf. Eickhof, I. 2016. ‘All That Is Banned Is Desired: “Rebel Documentaries” and the Representation of Egyptian Revolutionaries’. META – Middle East Topics and Arguments (6): 13–22. Erskine-Loftus, P., and Wakefield, S., eds. 2016. Museums in Arabia: Transnational Practices and Regional Processes. London: Routledge. Etling, B., J. Kelly, R. Faris, and J. Palfrey. 2010. ‘Mapping the Arabic Blogosphere: Politics and Dissent Online’. New Media & Society 12(8): 1225–43. Faist, T. 2004. ‘The Border-Crossing Expansion of Social Space: Concepts, Questions and Topics’. In Transnational Social Spaces: Agents, Networks, and Institutions. Thomas Faist, and Eyüp Özveren, eds., pp. 1–34. Aldershot: Ashgate. Frishkopf, M. 2010. ‘Music and Media in the Arab World and Music and Media in the Arab World as Music and Media in the Arab World: A Metadiscourse’. In Music and Media in the Arab world. 1. Michael Frishkopf, ed., pp. 1–64. Cairo: American University Press. Granovetter, M. S. 1973. ‘The Strength of Weak Ties’. American Journal of Sociology 78(6): 1360–80. Gugler, J. 2015a. ‘Introduction’. In Ten Arab Filmmakers: Political Dissent and Social Critique. Josef Gugler, ed., pp. 1–14. Film & media. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Gugler, J., ed. 2015b. Ten Arab Filmmakers: Political Dissent and Social Critique. Film & media. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Haugbolle, S. 2008. Imprisonment, Truth Telling and Historical Memory in Syria. Mediterranean Politics 13(2): 261–76. Hout, S. 2012. Post-War Anglophone Lebanese Fiction: Home Matters in the Diaspora. Edinburgh studies in modern Arabic literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Koselleck, R. 2006. ‘Crisis’. Journal of the History of Ideas 67(2): 357–400. Lang, F. 2016. The Lebanese Post-Civil War Novel: Memory, Trauma, and Capital. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Lubkeman, S. C. 2008. Culture in Chaos: An Anthropology of the Social Condition in War. Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press. Marchetti, D., ed. 2017. La circulation des productions culturelles: Cinémas, informations et séries télévisées dans les mondes arabes et musulmans. Rabat: Centre Jacques-Berque.

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Mattes, H. 2012. ‘“Herr Präsident, ihr Volk stirbt!” Protestmusik und politischer Wandelin Nordafrika/Nahost’. In GIGA Focus Nahost 9. GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies, ed. Hamburg. http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0168-. Mermier, F. 2005. Le livre et la ville: Beyrouth et l‘édition arabe; essai. Paris: Sindbad. Mermier, F. 2017. ‘Arab Cultural Foundations and the Metamorphoses of PanArabism’. In The Transnational Middle East. People, Places, Borders. Vignal, Leïla, ed. London: Routledge. Mitchell, J. C. 1969. ‘The Concept and Use of Social Networks’. In Social Networks in Urban Situations: Analyses of Personal Relationships in Central African Towns. J. C. Mitchell, ed., pp. 1–50. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Offe, Claus. 1976. ‘Crisis of Crisis Management: Elements of a Political Crisis Theory’. International Journal of Politics 6(3): 29–67. Pries, L., and M. Seeliger. 2012. ‘Transnational Social Spaces: Between Methodological Nationalism and Cosmo-Globalism’. In Beyond Methodological Nationalism: Research Methodologies for Cross-Border Studies. Anna Amelina, Devrimsel D. D. Nergiz, Thomas Faist, and Nina G. Glick Schiller, eds., pp. 219–38. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis. Sapiro, G. 2012. ‘Autonomy Revisited: The Question of Mediations and Its Methodological Implications’. Paragraph 35(1): 30–48. Sapiro, G. 2013. ‘Le champ est-il national?’ Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 200(5): 70–85. Smith, M. P. 2011. ‘Translocality: A Critical Reflection’. In Translocal Geographies. Spaces, Places, Connections. Ayona Datta und Katherine Brickell, eds., pp. 181–98. Farnham: Ashgate. Toukan, H. 2010. ‘On Being “the Other” in Post-Civil War Lebanon: Aid and the Politics of Art in Processes of Contemporary Cultural Production’. The Arab Studies Journal 18(1): 118–61. Wimmer, A., and N. Glick Schiller. 2002. ‘Methodological Nationalism and Beyond: Nation-State Building, Migration and the Social Sciences’. Global Networks 2(4): 301–34.

2

Rumour in Two Tunisian Artistic Fields: A Form of Legitimate Speech Annabelle Boissier and Mariem Guellouz

Social and democratic changes since the revolutionary events of January 2011 have weakened the structure of the power relations operating within the Tunisian artistic field. This has been particularly visible in changes in the relationships between artists and other actors within the field, as well as outside the field and within other institutions. The way in which these relationships have been described is characteristic of these changes, and because artists are important actors in the process of democratic transition and have helped to rethink power relationships, it has seemed essential to analyse the performative aspect of their discourse. The revolutionary events led to an overthrow or at least a displacement of legitimate speech. In a field in crisis, positions of power tend to be overturned, and conflict takes place between a form of speech that is becoming legitimate, that of the revolutionary, and one that has been confiscated from the forces of repression that have lost their former legitimacy. As will be seen, it is rumour, a discourse of accusation that becomes the symbol of this reversal of legitimate speech, with its own status between legitimacy and illegitimacy also being renegotiated. This chapter will study the role and status of rumour as a form of controversial speech in the organization of the Tunisian artistic field by examining it from the two disciplinary points of view of social anthropology and sociolinguistics. While there are also relevant sub-disciplines such as the anthropology of linguistic practices (Canut 2008; Leguy 2001), these have a minority position, at least in the French academic context. The interdisciplinary method employed here is particularly valuable, if not necessary, in studying interlocutory situations that are as full of dangers as those relating to rumour.

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Working in two different fields, choreography and the visual arts, we have each been faced by the question of rumour as something that asks us to rethink our own positioning as researchers and our own subjectivities. For this reason, we have looked at rumour within the framework of ethnographic practice, each of us carrying out long-term research projects with periods spent living in Tunis that lasted several years. The long-term character of this research enabled us to place rumour within the artistic field and to study it over a longer period. The variable of before/after the Revolution could thus also be taken into account and the role this played in the definition of rumour and its status observed. The first question we were confronted to was how and whether rumour could be integrated into a more comprehensive analysis. Both artistic fields studied were affected by rumour, the latter playing a role in group cohesion and in the inclusion or exclusion of members of the fields. By listening to, recording and transcribing words circulating in the form of rumour, our own subjectivities were put in question and we were required to position ourselves in relation to and to reject or to validate different rumours. The interviewees would often pressure us to take part in the rumour, thus necessarily confronting us to a political dilemma and bestowing on the social anthropologist and on the sociolinguist an ethical responsibility. How is this responsibility affected by the context in which the rumours are stated, for example before or after the Revolution? How does rumour, by its very nature a discourse of indirection or circumvention, contribute to defining particular artistic fields in Tunisia? Comparing perspectives coming from our two studies, we were led to think of rumour in terms of different forms of statement confronting each other – the speech of younger and older people, statements made before or after the Revolution, and statements recorded in interviews or made in conversation.

Rumour as illegitimate speech? While agreeing with the observation made by Froissart (2002) that there ‘are as many definitions of rumour as there are researchers’, it is important to remember that rumour has been under-investigated by the human sciences. Many other competing terms are used, including gossip, chit-chat, idle conversation and

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chatter, each one of which has its own particular semantic inflection. In this chapter we have adopted the definition of rumour given by Kapferer (1995), which sees it as consisting of non-official information that circulates in the ‘social body’ and that in the author’s view can often be taken as a form of ‘direct witnessing’. Considered as a speech act (Semujanga 2004), a rumour is a polyphonic and performative social act that, while it evokes a collective voice, is in fact constructed through a dialectical relationship between the individual and the collective. In this sense, it is a collective form of narrative that retains its relationship to individual speech and contributes to the definition of a particular cultural field. A rumour is an instance of oral, polyphonic speech whose original source is often difficult to identify (Harel 2004). An individual recounting a rumour distances himself from his own words by not taking responsibility for them. Rumour is thus characterized by a tension between a desire to undermine or evade dominant speech and being subjugated by anonymity. In a situation of crisis, such as at the end of a dictatorial regime, the place of rumour is central. It becomes a space in which accusation and denunciation are routinely played out and where everything is permitted in so far as the speaker takes responsibility for nothing. Before the Revolution, rumour was used as a weapon against repression and censorship, or, in an opposing way, as a means of increasing pressure on an individual artist. After the Revolution, its role became to denounce those who had collaborated with or profited from the former regime. It tended to replace legitimate speech, yet without acknowledging for itself the right to take on the statutory function of such speech. Bourdieu emphasizes the double competence defining legitimate speech, in that it is both linguistic and statutory by nature. Clearly, rumour is a way of circumventing dominant speech, but this does not mean it takes on the status of official speech that is invested with authority. As a result, Bourdieu emphasizes the symbolic effectiveness of speech that ‘is exercised only in so far as the person subjected to it recognizes the person who exercises it as authorized to do so, or, what amounts to the same thing, only in so far as he fails to recognize that, in submitting to it, he himself has contributed, through his recognition, to its establishment’ (Bourdieu 1991: 116). Legitimate speech thus depends on belief and recognition. Rumour, as a kind of linguistic marketplace, is a space in which conflicts within the field to whose definition it contributes are fought out.

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It is important here to return to the anonymous character of rumour. From a discursive point of view, rumour is characterized by the elision of the individual speaker. It is a kind of ‘vox populi’, or popular speech, that depends on the generic ‘they’, the notion that ‘it seems that’ and that ‘people say that’. In Tunisia, it appears that rumour is the result of a long period of censorship, and the discourse of repression, itself using accusation and intimidation, also depends on rumour. For example, when an individual cultural actor did not stand in good stead with senior figures in the former regime, he could expect to be the object of rumour campaigns aiming to discredit him. Rumour was thus a strategy of repression, and it was well understood as such within the Tunisian artistic field. The question that should be asked is why Tunisian artists who today benefit from much greater freedom of expression should still resort to rumour or gossip. Are they not simply reproducing the repressive methods of the former regime? How do the contexts of crisis, revolution or post-revolution contribute to change artistic practices and artistic fields? In this volume, Felix Lang reflects on the role of political crises in the (de)construction of those fields, moving away from the linear historical point of view in an attempt to think those crises from a transnational perspective. It seems that the question of rumour should also be apprehended from such a nonlinear perspective, where the pre- and post-revolution times are considered as parallel, echoing moments of crisis. Before responding to these questions, our research work will be presented, together with an account of the ways in which rumour operates in the field.

Rumour between visual arts and performing arts In what follows, we propose to draw a comparison between our two sets of fieldwork. This comparison will take place first in terms of methodology. While we both work on the same country, not only do we not study the same field of activity, but we also do not work in the same discipline and have different profiles. Annabelle Boissier is a social anthropologist who has French nationality, was born French and has French parents. She carried out her fieldwork between 2001 and 2015. She lived in Tunis between 2006 and 2010, where

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she was an assistant at the Institut Supérieur des Beaux-Arts, the Tunis Fine Arts Institute. The vast majority of her work thus took place under the Ben Ali regime, and the two sets of surveys she administered after the Revolution mainly concerned new entrants to the field. Her work deals with the construction of the contemporary art world in Tunisia at the beginning of the new millennium, the effects of the Revolution on the work of researchers and the continuities and discontinuities before and after the Revolution. Mariem Guellouz is a sociolinguist and dance researcher. She is Tunisian, has recently become French and was born of Tunisian parents. She carried out the vast majority of her fieldwork after the Revolution between 2011 and 2015. The politics of the performer’s body and the relationship of that body to the dominant discourse are central to her research. By analysing the relationship between political discourse and artistic performance, she looks at the place of the body in politics and of the performer’s body in social movements. The fact that both of us lived in Tunisia, one of us thinking of making a career there, and the other being herself Tunisian and taking part as a dancer in the field under study, determined not only the material that was collected, but also something of our own disquiet when confronted with the discourse reported. It therefore seemed important to us to describe the situations in which speech was observed and fieldwork undertaken. Most of the occurrences of rumour reported took place during observed interactions. In the case of the plastic arts, they took place relatively early on in the investigation and mainly emerged as a result of the relationship of trust that existed among those surveyed. The latter shared their disappointments at not being informed about preparations for an exhibition, for example, and criticized what they saw as the operations of a clique and the absence of collaboration, presenting this in the form of rumours. They speculated that a particular artist, male or female, had been able to take part in an exhibition or be awarded a grant etc., not because of his or her merit but because of a friendship with the person in charge. In the case of dance, such expressions of disappointment and sentiments of injustice were also often repeated. Some people were said to have used their friendships and social networks close to the authorities in order to launch their careers. Rumour is a form of accusation in the sense that Boltanski, Darré and Shiltz give to the term, saying that ‘denouncing injustice presupposes referring

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to someone or something guilty of or responsible for it, and this […] could be represented by an abstraction (such as “capitalism” in a union statement designed to protest against lay-offs, for example) or by a named individual designated as the focus of public anger’ (Boltanski et al. 1984). In ‘denunciation’ we hear ‘enunciation’. Every denunciation is thus paradoxically first and foremost the enunciation of the thing being denounced. In the case of the Tunisian artists surveyed, the denunciation points to practices of censorship and the repression of freedom of expression. However, the rumours expressed in the artists’ discourse also play an argumentative role, since they enable the artist concerned to justify his or her own unsuccessful career or lack of visibility on the scene. The figure of the scapegoat produced in and through rumour enables an artist’s suffering, frustration or disillusionment to be expressed in words. During our interviews, both of us were confronted with this discourse. Interviews carried out after 2011 with individuals active under the Ben Ali regime included stories that dealt with events that had taken place under the former regime with the aim of denouncing corrupt and humiliating practices that may or may not have involved moral questions. We were particularly struck by the fact that while those interviewed asked us to switch off the tape-recorder when moral questions were being discussed, particularly those having to do with the homosexuality of one of the narrative’s protagonists, they were nevertheless ready to give details and overtly denounce the actions of former ministers or other individuals who still had an important position within the field. Boissier did not encounter such accusations during interviews carried out after the Revolution, perhaps because she focused on new entrants to the field not generally familiar with the work of their elders. These new entrants saw the latter as belonging to the corrupt bourgeoisie of the Ben Ali regime, when in fact most artists active before 2011 were rather linked to social categories which while privileged, were not in the good graces of the regime (intellectuals, artists, academics and members of the liberal professions). Rumour operates in this case by omission. On the other hand, while moral questions, particularly those related to homosexuality, were less often heard in the field of the plastic arts, questions relating to gender produced frequent tensions. Thus, during a colloquium in 2010 when one female artist was

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talking about the relationship between Tunisian artists and the international arts scene, one speaker interrupted and distorted what she had to say in order to attack her, accusing her in scarcely veiled terms of ‘having slept with’ the cultural attaché of the French Institute in Tunis in order to obtain the funds for an exhibition. Such statements go back to a criticism, often heard, of the ‘monopoly’ exercised over the contemporary artistic scene in Tunisia by women artists.1 In the situation described above, two groups were involved whose members knew each other. On the one side, there was a group made up mostly of men whose members had acquired legitimacy through higher education. On the other, there was a group made up for the most part of women whose members had acquired legitimacy by staging exhibitions organized by a curator as a new way of exhibiting their work. The opposition between the two groups was reinforced by the deployment of moral questions, which, in the form of rumour, were used in order to undercut the actions of the other group. This form of rumour thus led to a result similar to the simple ignorance of the younger generations.

Studying rumour before and after the Revolution All the dancers and choreographers surveyed talked of the dictatorship and the difficulty of dancing professionally under a repressive regime, though they also often mentioned the lack of interest shown by Ben Ali in dance and even his total ignorance of it. One choreographer said: I don’t believe dance was a threat to Ben Ali […] you don’t destabilize the regime by rolling about on the ground for three hours and then crying out at the end. (interview with Guellouz in August 2012)

The regime’s lack of interest in dance and ignorance of it were often mentioned by the choreographers in interviews, but what they had to say also revealed a form of contradiction. All institutions, as well as the attempts at reforming them as far as dance is concerned in Tunisia, have been the result of presidential decisions and announced as such during speeches by Bourguiba or Ben Ali. The state in general has had a major role in determining artistic policies in Tunisia. It is still an important commissioner of choreographic work, and

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it thus has had an important role to play in supervision and censorship (Guellouz 2018). The ways in which dancers engage in mutual recrimination could also be observed. The issue of collaboration with the former regime is still a very live one, and those working in the field often accuse each other of having taken advantage of friendships with the former president or members of his family. The researcher thus finds herself faced with a situation in which statements are made that could be characterized as rumour or gossip. She may also be faced with questions about her own ethical responsibility when being asked to seek the truth and to see that justice is done for those who have been unfairly treated. Such demands can sometimes be made in aggressive terms: I won’t read your work unless you say that she [the name of a choreographer] collaborated with and was a close friend of Mrs X. Your work will have no meaning and no importance if you do not speak the truth. (informal conversation in December 2014)

The researcher might answer to such pressing demands that her mission as an academic is different to that of Tunisia’s ‘Truth and Justice Commission’ set up in the interests of transitional justice. In the context of a democratic transition, rumour becomes a central component of interviews and informal discussions with artists. Researchers are told secrets in the expectation that they will pass them on. Because of the academic character of their speech, researchers can turn rumours, consisting of unverified information, into facts that are both true and verifiable. Beyond being a form of confession or defamation, rumour also bears witness to the tremendous suffering prevailing among artists who feel they have been unfairly treated by a dictatorial system: I have been running after the minister of culture for years, asking to be allowed to head a choreography centre, without receiving the slightest recognition […] whereas when she was given the national ballet she was only a dancer and not a choreographer. (interview with Guellouz in March 2013)

The pain behind these statements cannot affect the researcher. How should one deal with rumour? What is its value in a work of research? Would repeating rumours in the researcher’s own work not backfire on her, leading her to being accused of defamation? How can a researcher carry out her own research in

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the field if she repeats rumours? On the other hand, if she ignores demands to seek the truth, could this be considered as an obstacle to her research? The issue of rumour leads directly to the question of the place of the investigator in the field (Naepels 1998) and how it is possible to navigate among various groups that know and may often oppose each other. The role and mechanisms of gossip in the Tunisian artistic field are related to the structure of the group concerned, together with who is accepted in it and who is rejected from it. Rumour casts light on relationships of power, rivalry and competition among artists. Repeating rumours in the context of an interview after a period of injustice is also a way of managing the trauma of a dictatorial period experienced by many as a hindrance to their careers. Why do artists resort to rumour? It is noteworthy that artists have published very few texts or documents that aim at establishing the truth. One possible explanation is that the artists have not completely freed themselves from fears of the dictatorship. Their preference for rumour over public speech might be interpreted as a way of incorporating the dominant discourse and its methods. Rumour, made up of statements that subvert legitimate speech, does not entirely overthrow the power relations in the artistic field, and it may in fact operate in continuity with them. It thus indicates that the contestation of the dominant discourse is not yet officially recognized in the field in a sign that there is still a powerful counter-revolutionary discourse at work and a situation in which the dominated still do not bestow upon themselves the right to speak. In his contribution on the Algerian literary field during the ‘Black Decade’, Tristan Leperlier shows how the writers’ choice of language influenced their positions as well as their literary productions during the civil war. It seems to us that rumour emerges when legitimate speech disappears and only remains the discourse of authority. We ourselves as researchers have perhaps also been affected by fears of this counter-revolutionary discourse; resorting to anonymity is perhaps simply a sign of how such fears have become part of our lives, as a Tunisian researcher who has been used to them since childhood and as a French researcher who lived in Tunis during the dictatorship. Rumour thus echoes recent debates in Tunisia about transitional justice. The following section will analyse how the two artistic fields studied are affected by the intertextual effects of these two discourses.

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Intertextuality of rumour and the discourse on transitional justice The demands that those interviewed made at us and their requests that rumour be recognized as a genuine and legitimate form of speech need to be analysed. A researcher who listens to rumour necessarily takes on the role of someone looking to find out the truth. We must, as a result of our position as researchers, take part in the processes of transitional justice that have been taking place in Tunisia since the Revolution. Rumours repeated in the work of researchers have a particular force in that they become legitimate, truthful and academically respectable. Another question arises regarding the effectiveness of anonymity. Tunisia is a country that has a fairly limited number of artists and particularly of dancers and plastic artists. These form communities that are usually based in Greater Tunis and that use the same spaces for their work. It is therefore fairly straightforward to know, even when anonymity is opted for, who is talking even when a rumour is stated anonymously and who is being talked of. The same thing arises when former ministers of culture under the Ben Ali regime are being discussed, as these individuals are known and have been criticized by all. Should one therefore see rumour as a form of personal witnessing in the way that former political prisoners have not hesitated to give the names of their torturers? In the quotation below the former ballet mistress of the Tunisian National Popular Arts Company (Troupe nationale des arts populaires) tells of how she was the victim of symbolic and physical violence at the hands of two senior civil servants of the Ben Ali regime: The minister of culture in 2003 was Mr X. After a trip to Switzerland people told him the Company wasn’t what it had been and that its costumes were also in a bad way. He said, ‘you made me attend for a few crumbs,’ to which I replied that ‘the Company is the face of Tunisia abroad and belongs to the country.’ ‘I was fired on the spot, I had to take early retirement, and no one asked me to dance any more’ (interview with Guellouz, 2013)

In order to make sense of this personal story known to the majority of the artistic community in Tunisia, the names of the two senior civil servants would need to be given. In the absence of any concrete proof aside from this

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testimony, in repeating it are we passing on a libel or did the event really take place? After a long period of state censorship and ruthless dictatorship, rumour is an indication that speech has finally been freed. There is a collective joy that comes from being able to speak into a tape recorder without fear of possible denunciation. Thus, some months after the Revolution a young female artist who was well known in the field of the plastic arts but did not have any institutional position published a long post on social media attacking one of the main actors on the Tunisian contemporary arts scene who before the Revolution had been accused by many of monopolizing its resources. The post made public a rumour, in this case a judgement about the monopolistic practices of an actor in the field, which had been many times heard by the researcher during the period of the former regime. In this case changing the rumour into a direct accusation did not lead to a redistribution of power, and the actor targeted still takes part in the Tunisian arts scene. Rumour is thus the staging of a trauma in the form of the return of the repressed (Kapferer 1995). Statements made by artists overlap, and the same stories are heard in different interviews about different ministers. The latter had very significant power over the arts policies of Tunisia under the dictatorship. The choreographers interviewed emphasized the fact that when a group of artists explicitly demonstrated against the regime, Ben Ali responded by appointing conservative ministers. Rumours circulating about these figures said that ‘[Mr X] liked to say loud and clear that dance was not consistent with our Arab-Muslim identity’, whereas Mr Y ‘considered contemporary dance to be like a pornographic performance’ and Mr Z ‘used to say that he was disgusted by the idea of seeing a man dance’. Faced with these rumours we finally found ourselves confronted by our own self-censorship as researchers. Our interlocutors thought they were giving us important information. But from an academic point of view what they were telling us was simply gossip. For Boissier, rumour and the establishment of truth were kept relatively distinct. While the rumours she heard concerned close relationships between colleagues and the Ben Ali regime (in the shape of senior civil servants), the truth only emerged when she announced that she was leaving Tunis in June 2010 after living in the city for four years. Conversations with subjects

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outside interviews then changed. As she was getting ready to leave the tightknit circle of those who all knew each other, many artists stepped forward to tell her about their distress, exhaustion, and hope that her (written) account would eventually expose the truth about what was taking place in Tunisia, even if the artists concerned did not really draw a line between the role of the anthropologist, the historian, or the curator. The Ben Ali regime was not a ‘soft dictatorship’, they said, and the artists living under it suffered from a lack of intellectual and financial recognition, a lack of interest on the part of the international arts scene and a lack of recognition of their difficulties. Rumour in the framework of the investigation thus implied a form of participation by the observer in the professional network of those observed. It meant hearing criticisms of injustices that the researcher was in some cases asked to pass on, these receiving an historical dimension by being seen as a way of establishing the truth. However, in other cases being exposed to rumour simply meant participating in a network where inclusion and exclusion were determined by it.

Conclusion Rumour is a form of collective speech without a precise origin, but the absence of a primary speaker should not lead us to believe that it circulates in a spontaneous fashion. Instead, it obeys its own logic and its own processes, and it is at the same time a form of strategic speech and a way of bringing about social cohesion. Beyond its interest as a way of giving information about a particular situation or area of study, rumour also has major contributions to make to the construction of a narrative or historiography. Comparing the two Tunisian artistic fields of the visual arts and choreography allows the role played by rumour in a situation of political crisis to be studied. Whether collected before or after the Tunisian Revolution, rumours played the role of a countervailing power. Confronted by silence, disinformation, or the absence of transitional justice, the artists established the truth by using their own methods, a major one being rumour. Rumours were not limited to attacking or injuring a third person but instead helped to construct a collective memory of events – an essential aspect of any democratic transition. Rumour bound

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the community of artists together, while at the same time dividing it between opponents and collaborators with the former regime. It was part and parcel of the cultural fields being studied, but it also helped to shape them by, on the one hand, bringing in ideological and political constructions that affected the integrity of the artist, and, on the other, by introducing stereotypical and gendered ideas that concerned above all women or homosexuals. From a pragmatic point of view, rumour has concrete effects on relationships inside and outside the community, and repeating it means joining a particular ideological group. The moralizing aspect of rumour was used to denigrate a particular artist and particularly to denigrate female artists and young homosexual men in the field of dance, often accusing them of using their charms to secure places for themselves on the artistic scene. It was also a way of trying to push more powerful actors out of the field, though this strategy did not have the desired effects. Confronted by such conflicting notions of the role of rumour, whether as a countervailing power or a form of denigration, the researcher is faced by a phenomenon that she is called upon to examine from both a methodological/ theoretical and an ethical point of view. For both of us, in the cases of the Tunisian artistic fields studied rumour expressed a form of suffering and was the indication of a form of failure – of the possibility or impossibility of transitional justice.

Note 1 For a discussion of the demographic characteristics of Tunisian artists, see Boissier (2017).

Bibliography Boissier, Annabelle. 2017 (16). ‘L’art contemporain tunisien en révolution. Continuité et discontinuité des trajectoires face à l’événement [Tunisian Contemporary Art in Revolution. Continuity and Discontinuity of Careers in the Face of Events]’. L’Année du Maghreb, 359–78. Boltanski, Luc, Yann Darré, and Marie-Ange Schiltz. March 1984. ‘La dénonciation [Denunciation]’. Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 51: 3–40. doi:10.3406/ arss.1984.2212.

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Bourdieu, Pierre. 1991. Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press [translation of Ce que parler veut dire, Paris: Fayard, 1983]. Canut, Cécile. 2008. Le spectre identitaire. Entre langue et pouvoir au Mali [The Spectre of Identity. Language and Power in Mali]. Limoges: Lambert-Lucas. Froissart, Pascal. 2002. La rumeur. Histoire et fantasmes [Rumour. History and Fantasies]. Paris: Belin. Guellouz, Mariem. 2018. ‘La transgression à l’épreuve du corps du performeur dans la Tunisie contemporaine’ in Transgresser au Maghreb. La normalité et ses dépasseement. Philippe Chaudat, and Monia Lacheb eds., Paris: IRMC-Karthala. Harel, Simon. 2004. L’ambiologie, forme contemporaine de la rumeur [Studying the Ambiant, a Contemporary Form of Rumour] Protée 323. pp. 9–24. doi:10.7202/011255ar. Kapferer, Jean-Noël. 1995. Rumeurs. Le plus vieux média du monde [Rumours. The Oldest Media in the World]. Paris: Seuil. Leguy, Cécile. 2001. Le proverbe chez les Bwa du Mali. Parole africaine en situation d’énonciation [The Proverbs of the Bwa of Mali. African Speech in the Speech Situation]. Paris: Karthala. Naepels, Michel. 1998. ‘Une étrange étrangeté. Remarques sur la situation ethnographique [Strange Strangeness. Remarks on the Ethnographic Situation]’. L’Homme 38(148): 185–99. Semujanga, Josias. 2004. ‘La rumeur: Une parole en acte? [Rumour: A Form of Speech Act?]’ Protée 323: 5–8. doi:10.7202/011254ar.

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The Symbolic Power of Syrian Collective Memory since 2011 Alexa Firat

For Syrians and non-Syrians alike, there are many reasons to wake up every morning and reach for the pen, the easel, the camcorder or the laptop – instead of a gun. Halasa et. al. 2014: xv

The stakes of symbolic power in times of crisis In the film, Our Terrible Country (2014), directed by Ali Atassi (‘Alī Atāsī) and Ziyad Humsi (Ziyād Ḥumṣī), a deep connection is made between the past and the ‘revolutionary’ present in both practice and the relationship of the old guard with the new. The film follows writer and dissident Yassin alHajj Saleh’s (Yāsīn al-Ḥajj Ṣāliḥ) desolate journey from the liberated region of Douma (Dūmā) outside of Damascus to Raqqa (al-Raqqa) in north-eastern Syria and eventually to exile in Turkey. He is accompanied by the younger Humsi who is both a comrade (in arms) and film-maker, a co-director of the film. The documentation of this relationship echoes a fundamental concept in Bourdieu’s field studies, that is the struggle between the old guard and the avant-garde, within the unique context of the Syrian uprising beginning in 2011 (Bourdieu 1996 [1992]). The revolutionary struggle represented in this film is armed with guns and pens (i.e. the tools of art, cameras, computers etc.), and the struggle for symbolic power to represent the revolution relies very much on the collaborative relationship of the old guard with the new.

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Bourdieu reminds us that ‘culture producers hold a specific power, the properly symbolic power of showing things and making people believe in them, of revealing, in an explicit, objectified way the more or less confused, vague, unformulated, even unformulable experiences of the natural world and the social world, and of thereby bringing them into existence’ (Bourdieu 1990: 146). As this chapter focuses on Syrian cultural production since 2011, we must acknowledge that this not only designates a time of severe crisis and that this crisis defines intellectual parameters, but also that it includes matters of life and death. Likewise, the stakes claimed in the struggle to narrate the revolution, that is the struggle for symbolic power, embody, I would argue, the very struggle of the revolution itself. This chapter will discuss the symbolic power invested in the struggle to narrate the revolution in Syria since 2011.1 In addition, it will examine how memory is mediated in the processes of collecting, collaborating and disseminating, and how collections and collectives of Syrian revolution art function to engender a Syrian cultural identity centred on this experience. As Syria and Syrians withstand accelerated levels of traumatic experience with each passing day, the interpretation of cultural productions will provide mechanisms to salvage and reconcile the realms of those experiences. In the crisis of war then, the struggle for symbolic power is an essential constituent in the making of cultural memory, one that will be integral to the processing of these traumas.

The cultural practices of revolution It goes without saying that the structural conditions which generated the actors’ habitus in the cultural field before 2011 are being mediated by the practices of the revolution.2 Dissent against authoritarian practices has been one of the key properties of cultural capital in Syria since at least the 1980s. Fluid in practice, we may look to the publication of Cultural Battles (Ma’ārik thaqāfiyya 1977), a collection of articles and essays as a way into reading the debates circulating in the field of culture after the consolidation of power by Hafez al-Assad in 1970. These essays foreshadow the cultural environment artists would negotiate for the next thirty-plus years, not only debating the artist’s role in society, but

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also the dynamic of ruling institutions in their lives. Likewise, the emergence of the genre of ‘prison literature’ in the 1980s, in addition to a number of seminal texts and films, most notably Khalid Khalifa’s novel In Praise of Hatred (Khālid Khalīfa, Madīḥ al-karāhiya 2006) and the late Omar Amiralay’s film A Flood in Baath Country (‘Umar Amīr alāy, d. 2011, Ṭūfān fī bilād al-ba’th 2005), both of which were banned upon issuance, provide a framework for reading creative dissent.3 In reality sweeping criticisms of Syria’s social ills can be found within all the professional fields of culture, especially popular culture, such as television shows like ‘Spotlight’ (Buq’at al-ḍaw’), undertaking themes such as patriarchy, poverty, political hypocrisy, elitism, sectarianism, to name a few.4 Whereas dissent broadly speaking had been produced on a professional level in Syria for decades, the cultural transformations that public demonstrations ushered in alter the dynamics of the field in profound ways. The public demonstrations that marked the first half of 2011 introduced new tendencies that would reconstruct the rules of engagement of dissident art. Perhaps the first essay to recognize this transformation early on was published in the first volume of the recently reformed Syrian Writers’ Association’s (rābiṭat al-kuttāb al-suriyyīn, herein SWA) journal Awrāq in 2013. In his article, ‘Art of the Syrian Revolution: Breaking with the Despotic Past’, the writer Samer Abu Hashim (Sāmir Abū Hāshim) argues that the simplistic slogans of protestors calling for the fall of the regime, in one form or another, mark a discursive break with the past. He examines how the transformations and exchanges between popular slogans and songs, that is spontaneous creations from the side of the public facilitated established (professional) artists’ work (posters, songs, theatre). Hashim’s essay, as I demonstrate, identifies how a key Bourdieusian concept of dispositions is negotiated in times of crisis. The first demonstrations in Damascus were held in front of the Egyptian and Libyan embassies in solidarity with the events in those respective countries. Many professional cultural producers participated and for months were inspired to use the tools of their trade to directly represent and confront what was happening in Syria, at great personal risk. At the same time, as professional cultural producers, they were in need of financing to produce much of their work. Yet, there was another faction of demonstrators, the non-professionals, the everyday people who set out in public to ‘take control of their selves’. These non-professionals, that is the public, had no need for funding or tools.

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According  to Abu Hashim, it is from this faction, the public, that popular revolutionary art in Syria springs because the revolutionary moments would demand new kinds of art and participation (Abū Hāshim 2013: 257). The products of the public are those that took root in the psyche of the demonstrators, fuelling their emotions and feeding their spirits. He presents as crowning examples – for not all experiences were successful – the songs of Ibrahim alQashush (Ibrāhīm al-Qāshūsh) in Hama (Ḥamā) and the slogans and songs of Abd al-Basit al-Sarut (‘Abd al-Bāsiṭ al-Sārūt) in Homs (Ḥumṣ). Likewise, the art does not stay in this realm but rather is adopted and appropriated by the professional class who then transform it into the visual and sonic iconography that becomes the ‘stamp’ of revolutionary Syrian art (Abū Hāshim 2013: 257). The life span of the (revolutionary) moment protracted, it circulates and is sustained according to the logic of the field as a cultural artefact. The struggle for symbolic power of the revolution is the result of the juncture of realms, or experiences – those of the professional intellectuals with those of the street. Concluding his essay, Abu Hashim reminds us that the work of the street, in other words the avant-garde (my term, not his), arrives without contemplating its own nature (i.e. it is organic) and constitutes the fundamentals that initiate the destruction of iconography in traditional Syrian art (of all kinds). That is the semiotic structures which give way to Syrian art. In this way he argues, one can now define Syrian art as either pre- or postrevolution. The break is embedded in past artistic models whose consecration was derived from a reality that had been imposed on them by the ruling power of the past forty years (Abū Hāshim 2013: 258). Abu Hashim’s use of the word ‘break’ should not be taken literally, as the long history of dissident practices in Syria attests, but rather it conveys a discursive shift within the language of culture, one generated by the revolutionary behaviours of the demonstrators. Moreover, the result – post-revolution – demonstrates a strategy in which the durable habitus, that is the Assad regime, is disfigured and symbolically dismantled. Abu Hashim’s recognition of the paradigmatic shifts that emerged from public demonstrations suggests how the cultural history of Syria has been effected. His essay recognizes those shifts in dispositions that allow us to analyse the field. In the first year, the essential struggle of dissident practice, which we may now identify as ‘revolutionary’, had migrated from established practices

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and sites like literature and publishing, plastic art and galleries, and theatre to the decolonized site of the street. It was not long before the terms and images of revolution settled into a recognizable discourse that coalesced around a prorevolutionary grammar and in which we can identify the struggle for symbolic power. The formation of this ‘new grammar’ is one in which the regime is no longer an unspoken signifier – a veiled suggestion, subtext or metaphor – but rather, one that is articulated, tangible and recognizable.

Bridging the divide, representing revolutionary art On 4 June 2012, the exhibition ‘Culture in Defiance’ opened at the Prince Claus Fund Gallery in Amsterdam. The material in the exhibition bridges the pre/post-revolutionary divide and includes ‘established’ dissidents such as Ali Farzat (‘Alī Farzāt), Samih Shuqayr (Samīḥ Shuqayr), Youssef Abdelke (Yūsuf ‘Abdalkī), Rosa Yasin Hasan (Rusā Yāsīn Ḥasan) among others, alongside recently formed and/or recognized collectives and artists whose work originates in the post-2011 environment, such as Massasit Mati (Maṣṣāṣit mati), graffiti art, music and others. The work collected in this show specifically speaks of and for the revolution to signify the new cultural capital in the Syrian field, a clear articulation of positionality. The show harnesses the carnivalesque quality of the first year of demonstrations, while also making legible traces of the past in the present; the full title of the catalogue is Culture in Defiance: Continuing Traditions of Satire, Art and the Struggle for Freedom in Syria (my emphasis). These are crucial linkages that reinforce the culture of dissent without privileging one generation over another. The exhibition publication is much more than a catalogue of the show, rather it is ‘[an] in-depth study on cultural rebellion in Syria’ (Culture in Defiance, introduction), filled with insights, testimonies and images by way of interviews, critical essays, reproductions and memoirs, some of which, like graffiti and protest posters, are in immediate dialogue with the Syrian public and regime, while others inscribe the practice of revolution into the field of culture.5 The caricaturist Ali Farzat reminds us in an interview that his entire career has been based on a commitment to represent the people and the world he

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lives in, while also remaining a fervent critic of unchecked power and never acquiescing to any force exerted on him by the field of power.6 As such, Farzat (and others of his generation) remains a paramount figure in the field of culture. His inclusion in the show illustrates how past struggles for symbolic power not only remain legitimate, but actually coalesce with current prevalent dispositions in the field now that habitus has been transformed. Like the anthology Syria Speaks (which will be discussed in more detail below), the exhibition suggests new centres of cultural power being negotiated outside of Syria.7 As Damascus and Aleppo are subsumed in armed struggle, other exhibitionary sites become necessary. Before 2011, Syrian culture did not have a prominent presence on the global culture scene. The constraints of the Syrian state on modes of production and dissemination made for a narrow field. Only those on film festival circuits and literary prize longlists were well known outside of Syria. Even a figure like the short story writer Zakariya Tamer (Zakariyya Tāmir), who has lived in England since the early 1980s, remains relatively unknown and limited to university Arabic literature classes.8 Furthermore, the Prince Claus Award, located in Amsterdam, not only hosted the exhibition, but also supported the simultaneous publication of Syria Speaks (Sūriyā tataḥaddath) in both English and Arabic by Saqi Books in London in 2014.9 Lamentably, the growing internationalization of Syrian culture corresponds to the escalation of violence and devastation there. For the uninitiated, this may be a defining moment in their cultural awareness of Syrian, or more broadly speaking Arab culture, one that is deftly tied to the ‘Arab Spring’, and more specifically to Syrians’ struggle for the end of a regime.

Affecting cultural memory There is no doubt that the trauma inflicted on Syrians since the onset of violence against protestors and demonstrations marks a departure from the experience of living as a Syrian under the Assad regime before 2011. Previously, much of the violence was sequestered to military prisons and detention centres. Public violence, like the blockade and bombardment of Hama in 1982 by the Syrian army, also known as the ‘events’ left traces, but ones that needed to be decoded, whether by critics or the public.10 Although prison narratives from both

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secularists and Islamists would reveal the depths of horror inflicted on political prisoners, it is with the publication of Khalifa’s novel In Praise of Hatred in 2006 that we find a deep engagement with the trauma of the state-sponsored terror inflicted on Islamists and the Muslim Brotherhood articulated ‘directly’ through the experiences of a fictionalized character. While the real-life massacre of over 800 prisoners, mostly Islamists, in Tadmur prison is woven into the narrative, the ‘events’ of Hama are not. Notably, some survivors of the Hama trauma have found redemption in the historic spaces opened up by the revolution; as the violent quelling of demonstrations made news on a regular basis, the Hama massacre began to (re)appear no longer as a silent gap in a historical conversation, but rather as one articulated by survivors living both in- and outside of Syria.11 The transference of Hama from a silenced collective memory to an articulated one suggests potential transformations in the construction of Syrian identity. Although Bourdieu does not discuss memory and identity explicitly, it can be understood as part of the system of dispositions that comprise habitus. Notably, the first entry of the collection Syria Speaks is a two-page entry (one visual, the other textual) entitled Hama 82. It recounts how one year into the revolution, a number of activists began collecting unpublished eyewitness accounts, information, stories and photographs related to the massacre, including portraits of victims taken from their ID cards when possible. Gaining the courage to remember the Hama massacre out loud enables the cathartic practice of mourning that had been confined to silence since 1982, emancipating the memory of Hama from the dark silences of history to a public articulation of mourning the loss and trauma. This public acting out or articulation is a new form of expression, a disposition that structures habitus. Some of the first actions by Syrians after demonstrations erupted was to destroy the public representations of the regime displayed in most cities and villages. As statues of Hafiz al-Assad were toppled and posters of Bashar trampled on, the visual lacunae were promptly replenished with new banners, protest placards and graffiti by a surge of artists, both old and new practitioners.12 As Wendy Pearlman’s recent oral history of the revolution has shown, participating in demonstrations for Syrians was an irrevocably lifechanging experience. On the one hand, it put their lives in danger, but on the other, it was a moment they could never retreat from (Pearlman 2017).

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To think broadly about cultural memory is to think about ‘the interplay of present and past in socio-cultural contexts’ (Erll 2008: 2).13 The concept of ‘remembering’ – a cognitive process which takes place in individual brains – is metaphorically transferred to the level of culture. Furthermore, it is not only what is remembered, but how it is remembered, that is for the quality and meaning the past assumes (Erll 2008: 7), and as such cultural memory is not interested in history as the past, but rather the remembering of the past in the present. The ensuing exhibitions, collections and texts representing Syrian revolutionary art are powerful tools that collect and exhibit the artefacts of this experience and, as such, help to keep the experience in the foreground of memory. Cultural memory studies distinguish two levels of cultural memory. The first is concerned with biological memory and draws attention to the fact that no memory is ever purely individual, but always inherently shaped by collective contexts. The second level refers to the symbolic order, the media, institutions and practices by which social groups construct a shared past. Here memory is used metaphorically; societies do not remember literally, but much of what is done to reconstruct a shared past bears some resemblance to the processes of individual memory, such as the selectivity and perspectivity inherent in the creation of a version of the past according to present knowledge and needs (Erll 2008: 5). As Pierre Nora has discussed in his work on realms of memory, or lieux de mémoire, memory is very much alive; it is a perpetually actual phenomenon, a bond tying us to the eternal present, [whereas], history is a representation of the past (Nora 1989: 8). The recent memory of the first year of the revolution influences the practice of the revolution itself. To return to the raw material of the street, let us consider the film ‘Return to Homs’, directed by Talal Derki and released in 2013 (Al-‘awda ilā Ḥumṣ, Ṭalāl Dīrkī). The central character and motive of the film is Abd al-Basit al-Sarut (discussed earlier), the soccer player turned popular demonstrator turned armed revolutionary. As much as the film is about the transformation and tragedy of this individual, it is, of course, about much more. For one, al-Sarut’s story embodies the spirit that transformed thousands of Syrians from subjects to citizens. It also documents the narrative of the revolution descending from peaceful public demonstrations to the tragedy of armed struggle and its consequences, not to mention chronicling the physical destruction of much of the city of Homs itself.

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Homs became the epicentre of the first major assault on Syrians by the regime. The large-scale destruction of the neighbourhood Baba Amr stood in stark contrast to the slow attrition of regime violence against Friday demonstrators that marked the first months of protests. No longer bullets, but bombs. The commemoration of this event is embodied in the cover art selected for the publication Syria Speaks in 2014. The cover art is a poster released after the battle of Baba Amr by the anonymous collective The Syrian people know their way (al-sha’b al-sūrī ‘ārif ṭarīq-hu). It is the image of Zaytun (Zaytūn), a character created by Mohammad Tayyib (Muḥammad Ṭayyib) and inspired by the tragedy of the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp outside of Damascus, along with the words ‘Baba Amr’ written in Arabic (Halasa et. al. 2014: 81). Manifest in this poster, two immense humanitarian and geographic tragedies of the Syrian revolution collapse into a hand-drawn image of a child-sized protestor wielding a slingshot accompanied by the name of the devastated neighbourhood in Homs.14 Embodying extreme poles of rebellion and loss, the image captures, as Nora discusses, ‘a maximum of meaning in the fewest of signs’, and as such, exist in their capacity of metamorphosis an endless recycling of their meaning and an unpredictable proliferation of their ramifications (Nora 1989: 19). The commemoration of Baba Amr and Yarmouk becomes then one also of Hama. The silences of the past break through to the present, creating linkages to the historical record, as well as the realm of memory. The struggle for symbolic power does not rest in works of art themselves, but with those who control their posterity. Nora reminds us that realms of memory originate with the sense that there is no spontaneous memory, that we must deliberately create archives, maintain anniversaries, organize celebrations etc. because such activities no longer occur naturally. As minority communities have demonstrated, privileged memories are protected in enclaves that without commemorative vigilance, history would soon sweep them away (Nora 1989: 12). History and memory are constantly in strife, pushing and pulling each other – the active interaction by this play between memory and history is where we locate lieux de mémoire. We might see then that the will and intention to remember as a catalyst behind many of the collections, films and media in which we find representations of revolution. As individual representations they may provoke

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further action, but as the experience fades and newer ones take over, the lieux de mémoire – that struggle between memory and history – preserve the experience of the experience, and perhaps the will to continue living in that tradition (of revolution). This proclivity is relevant to our discussion on the struggle for symbolic power. In her discussion of identity and cultural memory Lilliane Weissberg illustrates how in the experience of trauma, when individuals are somewhat erased, the interpretation and representation of such trauma in a work of [art] inserts it into the collective realm, which makes it then instrumental in forging identities in the present. Likewise, she discusses the need for objects (or language turned into objects) to redress the crisis of memory (Nora 1989: 10). The exhibitions, anthologies, collections and collectives of Syrian revolution art are generators of a future Syrian cultural identity predicated on the experience of the war, and specifically the war as revolution, that work to bind communities together and as such to (re)create social identities after the trauma. The works revisit contextual and totemic meanings embedded in the experience and help to mediate new paradigms of cultural identity.

Legitimating impulses: From the street to the publisher All action in the field, Bourdieu reminds us, is interest oriented; it is a strategy not a rule based on a set of dispositions.15 Who and what then, we might ask, are some of the agents performing in the field now and how might we assess the affect they will have on cultural memory? It is a daunting task to recount all of the cultural work being produced since 2011, but the logic of the market leads us, and especially researchers, to those elements that circulate, make an impact on the field, and shift positions.16 A notable starting point, as mentioned earlier, is the Prince Claus Award exhibit and study-catalogue produced in 2012. Exhibiting both established and newly conceived artists and collectives, it initiated a platform to express Syrian revolutionary dissent as both an artistic language and a product, while also signifying that dissent was no longer the sole purview of an exclusive community, but rather had been reformed to include non-professionals. Like the rhizomatic as discussed by Deleuze and Guattari, representations of

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dissent as sedentary expression stand alongside ‘states of things of differing status’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 7).17 Comparably, the simultaneous publication of Syria Speaks in English and Arabic and the Prince Claus exhibit and catalogue internationalize the reception of Syrian revolutionary dissent, both as artistic and intellectual discourse. For many outside of Syria and especially those who do not read or know Arabic, the texts would be instrumental in relaying to this broad audience the role of culture in the Syrian revolution, in fact they actually import the revolution to the global market.18 Alongside visual and literary culture, both texts include critical essays that historicize the Syrian experience, providing sociopolitical perspectives by established Syrian intellectuals who normally had not been translated out of Arabic, such as Hassan Abbas (Ḥasan ‘Abbās) and Yassin al-Hajj Saleh. In the documentary Our Terrible Country mentioned earlier, we watch as Saleh unwittingly emigrates to Turkey and settles in Istanbul, where he helps to establish the foundation and cultural centre Hamish (Hāmish), as well as the online journal and collective al-Jumhuriya (al-Jumhūriyya), published in both Arabic and English.19 Saleh’s long-standing participation as a dissident has turned him into Syria’s ‘voice of conscience’ and his presence in Syria Speaks strengthens the connection of the larger issue of Syrian revolution art with the long-standing practice of dissidence in Syria.20 Saleh is also the main subject of the third issue of Awrāq (2013), the journal published by the SWA. The introduction is entitled, ‘Rajul sūriyā al-ẓāhir wa-lkhafī’ (Syria’s visible/invisible man), and is penned by the late Syrian philosopher Sadiq Jalal al-Azm (Ṣādiq Jalāl al-Aẓm, d. 2016), the editor-in-chief at the time. Saleh is a way in to unpack the enormity of the experience of revolution underway in Syria; his voice and life experience as a political prisoner and dissident intellectual providing the legitimacy. The journal deterritorializes the experiences and expressions of the revolution, transmuting that which happens on the streets into the intellectual domain of a cultural journal that behaves like a sanctioned Syrian institution, albeit in the diaspora.21 The SWA marks its place in the struggle for symbolic power in a number of ways.22 For instance, not only did it reappropriate the original name of the SWA founded in 1951 – before it was co-opted by the state in the 1960s  – but it also published the letter al-Azm sent to the General Union of Arab Littérateurs and Writers for their meeting in Abu Dhabi in the first issue of

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Awrāq (2013). The letter announced the founding of the SWA and asserted itself as the legitimate representative of Syrian writers in as much as the official union for Syrian writers had shirked its responsibilities to defend the rights of its members, and as such, ‘is no longer suitable to represent Syrian writers in any way’ (Rābiṭat al-kuttāb al-sūriyyīn 2013: 357). The SWA stands unabashedly with the revolution in that it supports a critical discourse that did not have a place in the Syrian cultural field previously. Likewise, as the title of Azm’s inaugural editorial introduction to issue one of Awrāq implies, the SWA considers itself, ‘A Step Toward Freedom’ [Khaṭwa naḥwa al-ḥurriyya]. Moreover, the editorial board of Awrāq features a roster of well-known and respected intellectuals and writers whose work has spanned decades of dissent in Syria, as such, it has a profound effect on the structure of the field.23 With this in mind, the inclusion of work by recently formed and/or recognized individuals and collectives representing the revolution ‘on the ground’ suggests the kind of appropriation (in the positive sense) Hashim’s article suggests. For example, by publishing photos of the Lens Young Collective (LYC, ‘adsat al-shābb) whose work spans both the vernacular and formal language of photography, the SWA both legitimates itself as an arbiter of the field while also providing LYC with the consecration that the social media platform Facebook does not.24 Because the stakes of a revolution are high, the culture that is produced in its name depends on a relationship of legitimacy if it is to remain useful and beneficial long after. Unlike the traditional cultural journal format of Awrāq and the SWA as an organization, ‘Creative Memory of the Syrian Revolution’ (al-dhākira alibdā’iyya li-l-thawra al-sūrīyya), published in Arabic, English and French, uses the internet solely as its platform.25 The site has an open-use format, that is, any user can upload her work to either the map project or the site as a whole. The editors of the site state: This project aims to archive all the intellectual and artistic expressions in the age of revolution; it is writing, recording, and collecting stories of the Syrian people, and those experiences through which they have regained meaning of their social, political and cultural lives.

In practice, the site is more than an archive, it is also a conduit between creative acts and actors. It has catalogued over 24,000 items in three languages according

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to genre (banners, murals, caricature, postage stamps, online publications etc.). Like Syria Speaks and Awraq, it mediates a disposition of dissent through the actors who embody a history of discord in pre-revolution Syria a place next to post-revolution ones. As well, it has also generated its own project entitled, ‘The Story of a Place’, in which geographical tag maps allow users to connect with the creative memories created in and/or about that place by clicking on the tags. In other words, it creates a cultural map of the revolution. This map of cultural interpellations into the revolution provides the guidance to regain a ‘cognizance of the past and promised means to hold on to it’ (Weissberg 1999: 10). It is the space that contains the objects, or language turned into objects, that support memory. Unlike the histories of the revolution (that will be written), a site like ‘Creative Memory of the Syrian Revolution’ provides that ‘guidance and guardianship, and even censorship’ that converts the private realm of memory to the public or collective one (Weissberg 1999: 11). Each time we visit and interact with the work on the site, we activate the memory of the event. As Weissberg discusses in her essay, Halbwachs reminds us that memory is not accidental recall nor an idiosyncratic venture. Rather, he insists on the social constructedness of any memory, and that people acquire or construct memory not as isolated individuals but as members of a society, and, as such, they recall their memories in society (Weissberg 1999: 13). The website is integral to the documentation of contemporary history so as to make way for the future. ‘It is an archive of national legacies; to protect it is to preserve the Syrian memory, a duty because of its total consideration of historical accounts of all Syrian people.’26

Conclusion It is one thing that the Syrian public tore down posters and statutes of the regime, that is the first impulse. But that the impulse has been turned into art and how this art circulates not merely as representation, but also as agent, drives the questions of this essay. In an interview, Charif Kiwan (Sharīf Kīwān), a founding member and spokesperson for the Syrian film collective Abou Naddara (Abū Naḍḍāra), responds to a question about how war stimulates new responses, especially in film-making. His response expresses the core complexity that this essay wrestles with:

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But I feel uncomfortable with this question because we don’t feel we are dealing with a war. We are dealing with a revolution. I don’t know what revolution is; I can’t explain what it is, but we have the feeling that we are in front of huge breakdowns, ruptures, something very violent and also very beautiful. So, we cannot qualify this. We accept the idea that it is a revolution. Of course, it is turning into war, confrontation, but in our minds, in our eyes, also, we are working to represent this explosion of energy. So we are asking ourselves all the time, what kind of history in the making are we dealing with?27

Since 2011 certain subjects, issues, persons and collectives have been circulating with regularity between publications that are claiming their stake in the struggle for symbolic power, an act that also embodies the metaphysical ideals of the revolution itself. Like the chants of al-Sarut and songs of Qashush that have become immortalized through film and music producers, thousands of moments of the Syrian revolution have been and continue to be represented in exhibitions, text collections and on the internet, not for the sake of commemoration of a bygone event, but rather as interpretative acts that then initiate processes of cultural memory making. The ensuing violence in Syria has made a deep connection between crisis and radical creativity. Within the space of this connection we can discover those tendencies that organize people’s perception of the world and their reaction to it. The idea of the revolution is not singular and the imaginary representations of it collected and exhibited in both physical and cyber space hint at symbolic sites that are already being mediated through memory, by revisiting the contextual and totemic meanings embedded in the event. The symbolic nature of memory promotes a collective identity and as such the connection with this material can bind communities together and help them to (re)create their social identities while and after living through the trauma of this war.

Notes 1 I am well aware that using the term ‘revolution’ to describe the war in Syria over the past six years is problematic; it implies a position. It also evokes, I would argue, the range of ambitions of cultural producers under consideration here.

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2 Bourdieu’s concept of habitus has evolved over time, but, in essence, can be understood by some basic and utilitarian concepts. Essentially, it involves the system of durable dispositions, which, being the product of a social trajectory and of a position within a field, find more or less favourable opportunity to be realized (Bourdieu 1996: 214). Likewise, habitus should be understood as an ‘open’ concept, one that is adaptable to change – it represents a mediating concept between practices and structures rather than a structurally determinative construct. Swartz (1997) commits an entire chapter to the evolving concept of habitus throughout Bourdieu’s work, ‘Habitus: A Cultural Theory of Action’, 95–116. 3 There is not enough space for me to create a taxonomy of cultural dissent in this chapter, but two texts which provide a framework for thinking more broadly about it are Miriam Cooke’s Dissident Syria and the volume Insights into Syrian Cinema edited by Rasha Salti, especially her introduction. 4 The show aired from 2001 to 2007. See, Marlin Dick’s ‘Syria under the Spotlight: Television Satire That Is Revolutionary in Form, Reformist in Content’ (2007). For more on television series in general, see Salamandra 2011. 5 The publication can be found online with a search for ‘Culture in Defiance’ and one can download the pdf (accessed 28 December 2016). 6 Farzat suffered greatly for his dissent. On 25 August 2011, he was forced out of his car, beaten and his hands broken on a Damascus road. He narrates this episode and his work as a caricaturist in a short video piece . 7 Eliza Griswold’s recent essay in The New Yorker maps Syrian artists in the diaspora (Griswold 2018). See also Simon Dubois’s chapter in this collection. 8 Even among academic circles, Syrian culture did not receive much attention until the first years of the twenty-first century and especially after 2011 in the Anglosphere. The literary magazine Banipal was one of the first to address this paucity, publishing an issue dedicated solely to Syrian literature in Spring 2008 (No. 31). Rasha Salti edited and wrote a critical introduction on Syrian cinema, Insights into Syrian Cinema. Khalid Khalifa’s novel In Praise of Hatred (Khalifa 2012 [2006]) was the first Syrian novel to be nominated for the International Prize for Arab Fiction in 2008, which, among other benefits, exposes novelists to the international translation market. 9 The translation of material was also supported by PEN. 10 Mohja Kahf ’s article ‘The Silences of Contemporary Syrian Literature’ traces these spaces in literature (Kahf 2001). Mohammad Malas’s film The Night takes

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place in the war-relic city of Qunaitra in which Hama’s shadow looms large. ‘Hama 1982’ refers to the blockade and bombardment of the city by regime forces that resulted in the destruction of parts of the city and the death of tens of thousands of residents, under the pretext of an Islamic Brotherhood conspiracy. 11 See, for example, Suleiman al-Khalidi’s ‘Survivors of Syria’s Hama Massacre Watch and Hope’, and David Arnold’s ‘Syria’s 1982 Hama Massacre Recalled: Lesson for Assad Today?’ 12 Leila al-Shami, ‘Emerging from “The Kingdom of Silence” / Beyond Institutions in Revolutionary Syria’. 13 Halbwachs used the term collective memory. Astrid Erll lays out the argument for cultural memory in the ‘Introduction to Cultural Memory Studies’ (Erll 2008). 14 The image also suggests the first Palestinian intifada (late 1980s–1990s) which was sparked by children throwing rocks at the occupying Israeli soldiers in Gaza and Palestinian guerrillas (fidā’iyyīn) who wrapped their heads with a kūfiyya scarf to hide their identity. 15 See ‘Position, Disposition and Position-Taking’ and ‘The Space of Possibilities’ in chapter 2, ‘The Author’s Point of View’ (Bourdieu 1996: 231–39). 16 See Lois Stonock’s attempt to map cultural players in the field, ‘Mapping the Possible.’ 17 See ‘Introduction: Rhizome’ in A Thousand Plateaus. In essence, what is suggested by rhizomatic is a way of thinking about connections and heterogeneity that is not based on linear models of growth and development, but rather one that contemplates plateaus, layers, and movements and processes of deterritorialization. 18 For example, the back cover of Syria Speaks features an endorsement by the British musician and producer Brian Eno on the back cover, suggesting the Syrian conflict can be said to speak a language that can be understood, appreciated and consumed by any thinking cultural consumer (cf. Halasa et. al. 2014). 19 (accessed 6 March 2017). It is worth noting that alJumhuriyya is supported by European funding: Heinrich Böll Stiftung Middle East (The Green Political Foundation, Germany) and International Media Support (a non-profit media development group based in Denmark). 20 See, for example, an interview with Saleh conducted by Murtaza and Marwan (26 December 2016), Postel and Hashemi’s interview (12 March 2014), as well as reviews of the film Our Terrible Country.

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21 I have written more about the implications of the reformation of the Syrian Writers’ Association and the publication of Awrāq (see Firat 2017). 22 Founded in 2012, it is based in London and claims a roster of over 300 members, mainly Syrian, but not exclusively. It hosts a website (swa.org) and publishes Awraq typically biannually both in print and online. 23 Editor in chief and president of SWA is Sadiq Jalal al-Azm. Managing editors are Ḥusām al-Dīn Muḥammad and Khaṭīb Badla. The editorial board consists of ‘Ādil Bishtāwī, Faraj Bīrqadār, ‘Abd al-Raḥmān Ḥallāq and Aḥmad ‘Umar. Since the passing of al-Azm in December 2016, elections are underway for a new president. 24 The Lens Young Collective (LYC) refers to a number of Facebook pages linked to different Syrian cities, who post photographs daily on their respective pages. Lens Young Dimashqi, Homsi, Dayri etc. Over 6,300 photographs have been posted since 2012. For more on LYC, see the article published by Lens Young (4 April 2017) and Bahā’ (04 April 2017). 25 www.creativememory.org/?lang=ar. 26 (accessed 30 September 2016). 27 An interview conducted by Akram Zaatari in a workshop organized by Sonja Mejcher-Atassi at the American University of Beirut in 2014.

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Lens Young, Talī. ‘Sanabqā naḥmal silāh al-taṣwīr [We Will Continue to Carry the Weapon of Photography]’. Syria Untold. (accessed 04 April 2017). Manṣūr, Muḥammad. 08 June 2014. ‘Al-taṣwīr al-futūghrāfī hiwāya shaghafat aldimashqiyyīn wa-hamalat fī l-thawra ism ‘adasa shābb dimashqī [Photography Is a Hobby That Had Taken Hold of Damascenes and Carries the Name “Lens Young Dimashqi” (Damascene) in the Revolution]’. Al-Quds al-‘Arabī (accessed 04 April 2017). The Night. Directed by Mohammad Malas. 1992. Nora, Pierre. 1989. ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’. Representations (26), Special Issue: Memory and Counter-Memory (Spring): 7–24. Pearlman, Wendy. 2017. We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled. New York: Harper Collins. Rābiṭat al-Kuttāb al-Suriyyīn. 2013. ‘Risālat rābiṭat al-kuttāb al-suriyyīn li-l-ittiḥad al-‘āmm li-l-udabā’ wa-l-kuttāb al-‘arab [Letter of the Syrian Writers’ Association to the General Union of Arab Littérateurs and Writers]’. Awrāq 1: 356–8. http:// syrianwa.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Awraq-1.pdf (accessed 15 December 2017). Salamandra, Christa. 2011. ‘Spotlight on the Bashār al-Asad Era: The Television Drama Outpouring’, Middle East Critique 20(2): 157–67. Salti, Rasha, ed. 2006. Insights into Syrian Cinema. New York: Rattapallax Press and ArteEast. al-Shami, Leila. 12 November 2016. ‘Emerging from “The Kingdom of Silence”/ Beyond Institutions in Revolutionary Syria’. Ibraaz. (accessed 16 December 2016). Stonock, Lois. 09 December 2016. ‘Mapping the Possible: Syrian Organizations, Movements and Platforms’. Ibraaz. (accessed 2 January 2017). Sulaymān, Nabīl, and Yāsīn Bū ‘Alī. 1975. Al-Adab wa-l-idīyūlūjīyyā fī Sūriyyā 1967– 1973 [Literature and Ideology in Syria]. (2nd edition). Al-Lādhiqīyya: Dār al-ḥiwār. Swartz, David 1997. Culture and Power. The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Weissberg, Liliana. 1999. ‘Introduction’. In Cultural Memory and the Construction of Identity, Dan Ben-Amos, and Liliane Weissberg, eds., pp. 7–26. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. Zaatari, Akram. 08 July 2014. ‘Abounaddara’s Take on Images in the Syrian Revolution’. (accessed 04 April 2017).

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Committed Knowledge: Autonomy and Politicization of Research Institutions and Practices in Wartime Lebanon (1975–90) Candice Raymond

In 1992, the Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches sur le Moyen-Orient Contemporain (Centre for the Study of the Contemporary Middle East), a French research institution established in Beirut in 1977, launched a project to list the social science research centres working in Lebanon. This project led to the publication of a guide three years later (Cermoc 1995) and responded to two objectives. On the one hand, it was meant to provide foreign and Lebanese researchers with a practical tool that would assemble relevant information for their research. It also aimed, on the other hand, to ‘provide an account of work carried out in the social sciences in Lebanon between 1975 and 1992, in other words the period of the war in Lebanon and the beginnings of reconstruction’ (Cermoc 1995: 7). The guide thus acknowledged that the Lebanese war (1975– 90) had not led to a collapse of scientific research work. On the contrary, the multiplication of research centres during this period fostered the production of social science. These institutions were relatively new. A dozen of those listed by the guide, most of them housed in universities, had been established in the decade before the war. Seventeen new centres, most of them not linked to universities, were founded between 1975 and 1990. As universities in Beirut were confronted with a deep crisis during the war, the non-university research centres, financed in many cases by parties to the conflict or by their regional supporters, played a major role in bolstering research in the humanities and social sciences. They provided opportunities for employment and various

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forms of assistance in research and publication to a whole generation of Lebanese researchers. They therefore contributed to the professionalization of social science research, recent in Lebanon at the time, by providing institutional support and material means that the university sector alone was no longer able to provide. However, these centres all had it in common to conduct, either at the same time or at separate periods, academic work and ‘politically motivated’ expertise (Kabbanji 2010), blurring the distinction between those two spheres of activity. Because of their mix of genres and the political origin of their financing, these non-university research centres were often dismissed by local critics or external observers as simply pseudoscientific institutions. They were instead regarded as a means to mobilize scholars and to engage them in the ideological competition between the warring parties. In this perspective, the centres constituted a major device for the main actors in the war to enrol researchers into their ideological apparatuses. However, the perceptions of researchers employed or financed by these institutions contradict the idea that they were entirely subservient to their political backers. Those interviewed during my research did not deny the political ends of their work, to which they attributed a ‘noble sense’. Far from being illegitimate, for them the figure of the committed researcher fell within the historical tradition of the nahḍawī intellectual. Yet, they denied any interference by partisan considerations in the agendas and research practices of these centres. In contrast, they often emphasized both the independence they benefited from on a personal level in the choice of their subjects and their autonomy in carrying out their research. Should one see in these statements a simple travesty of the researchers’ past experiences, aiming, retrospectively, to rid them of their activist involvements and their intellectual contributions to the war? Being interviewed by a young French female researcher, more than twenty years after the end of the war, would seem propitious to hiding or describing in euphemistic terms anything that might appear to be related to participation in the war. Or should one rather conclude from such statements that the political actors financing the centres had been careful not to impose their own agendas, settling instead to providing the necessary resources to the researchers for their work, while expecting that they would in fact put themselves at the service of

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their cause? If so, this would be a classic case of the intellectual legitimation of actors in the political field and one that presupposes the preservation of the formal autonomy of academics whose ability to legitimize a given political mobilization largely depends on their perceived distance from the immediate stakes and expected benefits of it (Bourdieu 2011). My hypothesis, developed in this chapter, is that far from operating in a mode of pure and simple subservience, as is suggested by the notion of ideological apparatus, the political contributions made by the researchers who were financed or employed by these centres in fact corresponded to various rationales of intellectual engagement and that these were seen in different repertoires of more or less autonomous practices. The identification of these is one of the aims of the present chapter. In order to understand the relationships that these institutions, born during the war, encouraged between political and academic actors and their effects on the latter’s research practices, it is necessary to take into account the different types of social mediation that existed between the work concerned and its context of production. This procedure is similar to the one employed by Sapiro in her article on the relationship between ideology and literature (Sapiro 2007), with the proviso that her work considered literary works, whereas the emphasis here is on academic ones. Such social mediations are related to ‘institutions and actors as much as the extent of the thinkable and the sayable in social space (censorship and self-censorship) and the space of possibilities within the literary field (in terms of genre, formal constraints, and so on)’ (2007: 6). The civil war taking place in Lebanon from 1975 onwards had major effects in these three areas. First of all, it profoundly affected the institutional configuration of the research field in the social sciences, creating new opportunities as well as new constraints for researchers, particularly in the building of professional careers. This institutional configuration in a time of war, examined in the first part of this chapter, in turn affected the overall amount of freedom enjoyed by those working in the scientific field and above all the concrete forms of control that existed over academic activity, particularly in the research centres concerned. In the Institute for Arab Development (maʿhad al-inmā’ al-‘arabī), founded in 1975 with Libyan financial support, for example, examined here as a case study, it seems that the degree of individual freedom enjoyed by the researchers resulted from constant struggles and negotiations

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between political demands, academic agendas and dynamics of intellectual mobilization that were largely determined by developments in the political context. These struggles and negotiations contributed to the definition and redefinition of the very identity of the institution throughout the war as well as its role and agenda, these things having been far from fixed from the outset.1 They bore witness to the coexistence of competing agendas within the same institution, and over time and as staff came and went they led to reorientations of research practices, changes in disciplinary hierarchies and the substitution of the figure of the expert activist for that of the critical intellectual among the possible different figures of the ‘committed researcher’ that had characterized this generation of Lebanese intellectuals. However, such developments, which constitute practical translations of the increasing political tutelage over this centre, did not lead to its researchers being systematically brought into line. They did mean that the ‘social surface’ of the centre was reduced, as it found itself less and less able to attract the best-positioned individuals within the intellectual and academic fields.2

Impact of the war on the institutional framework of academic research For many generations of Lebanese, the Beirut of the 1960s was the cultural capital of the Arab world. While being a major centre of higher education in the Middle East, Beirut was also a central hub of the Arab publishing industry and a place of refuge for oppositional intellectuals attracted by its liberal traditions and the opportunities it offered for employment in the press or in the publishing industry. The 1960s in Lebanon were later remembered as a veritable cultural golden age, one that came to a brutal end with the outbreak of the civil war in 1975. However, in contrast to commonly held ideas, the onset of the war did not witness the collapse of the Beirut intellectual scene. On the contrary, many new publishing companies, intellectual periodicals and cultural institutions, including research centres, cultural associations and book fairs, were founded between 1975 and the Israeli invasion in 1982 (Mermier 2005; Raymond 2013). Similarly to what could be observed in other critical contexts such as the ‘Arab Spring’ in 2011 (see introduction of this

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book), political mobilization and conflictuality gave a major impetus to the creation of new media, institutions and cultural arenas. As a result, Beirut remained throughout the war a space of creativity and intellectual debate with its ebbs and flows, as well as a place for academic work and the production of knowledge, particularly in the social sciences. However, the war did profoundly change the institutional configuration of Lebanese intellectual life in general and that of the academic field in particular. With the political and territorial fragmentation of the capital there came the creation of competing institutions that were located on one side or other of the main front lines and that further polarized Lebanese scholars. This splitting up of actors and resources between different academic workplaces also took place between university and non-university structures, leading to the disconnection of teaching from research and the outsourcing of the latter outside the university institutions. Since the end of the nineteenth century, Lebanon has possessed two famous universities, both of them relatively elitist, in the shape of the American University of Beirut (AUB) and the Jesuit Université Saint-Joseph (USJ). This sharply polarized university landscape began to see the introduction of new institutions from the 1950s and 1960s onwards with the establishment of various private universities and above all by the foundation of a national public university in the Lebanese University (LU). As a result of the expansion of the university sector, Lebanese higher education also admitted increasing numbers of students and became more diverse in terms of their social backgrounds, sex and sects, and it began adjusting the disequilibrium that had long existed between the access of Christians and Muslims to university education (Labaki 1988). However, the war that began in 1975 plunged the country’s universities into a profound and multifaceted crisis.3 The two oldest private universities, the AUB and the USJ, lost part of their teaching staff and over time were forced to restrict their research activities and the number of publications they could support. On the other hand, LU experienced a crisis of growth and as a result became the largest university employer in the country. Because of the deterioration of the political and security conditions in the capital, LU started to subdivide each of its faculties into quasi-independent sections, at first on each side of the ‘Green Line’ that separated East from West Beirut

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and then in Lebanon’s three main provincial cities. This fragmentation of the public university, largely taking place along the political and sectarian dividing lines drawn by the civil war, saw a major growth in the number of students, going from around 15,000 in 1974 to more than 40,000 in 1979 (Raymond 2013). This extremely rapid increase led to increased job opportunities for new graduates in the university sector and particularly for the newly minted PhDs in the social sciences and humanities now coming onto the job market. At first, such people were recruited either to teach courses on a temporary basis or as full-time teachers on short-term contracts. In the 1980s, many of them were tenured through collective appointments (Al-Amīn 1999). As a result, a whole new generation of teachers that was both larger and more socially diverse than the previous generations entered the university sector during the war years. Yet, while the war opened up access to the higher education sector for many new graduates, it also led to the generalization of multiple employment practices. Although this contravened the ‘full-time law’ (qānūn al-tafarrugh) passed in 1970 that prevented full-time contractual teachers at the LU from taking on additional paid work outside the university, those who wanted to earn more nevertheless approached institutions of secondary education, private universities, research centres or even the press in search of additional work, their choices depending on a combination of factors that included geographical, political and sectarian proximity. Taken as a whole, the holding of multiple jobs by teachers at the LU accentuated the centrifugal tendencies already at work in the institution, as well as the deeper inclusion of university teachers in sectarian or political networks in which they could diversify their activities. It also enabled many of them, while retaining their teaching responsibilities at the LU, to carry on their research work under the kind of favourable conditions that were now lacking in the public university. The stark growth in student numbers that had taken place in the public university had led to a budgetary crisis entailing the suspension of the few structures that existed to support academic research.4 The University, now focused solely on its teaching function, remained the anchoring site of the scholars’ magisterial legitimacy, that is the site where their specific competences in the production and transmission of knowledge were certified. However, it was even less the framework in which knowledge was actually produced than had been the case in the past.

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It was in this context that various newly established research centres began to provide significant support for academic researchers. These were private institutions having the legal status of publishers or associations that supported significant documentation, research and publication work, in most cases bringing together research and activist agendas. It was no accident that the first two centres of this type, founded in Beirut in the 1960s and providing a kind of implicit model to those set up during the war, were dedicated to the study of the Palestinian question and the Israeli–Arab conflict. The foundation of the Institute for Palestinian Studies (1963) and the Palestine Liberation Organization Research Centre (1965) took place against a background of growing political mobilization and of the self-affirmation of the Palestinian national movement. These two centres incarnated a project of activist research in which the ‘weapon of science’5 was vaunted as a major strategic resource in the defence of the Palestinian cause. The two institutions, mobilizing many Palestinian as well as Lebanese intellectuals and researchers, contributed in significant ways to the spread of various types of documentation and publication practices, at the same time popularizing the figure of the activist-researcher, only stopping when the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon put a halt to their activities. In addition to these two centres, numerous new structures saw the light after 1975. The most active during the war years were the Centre for Arab Unity Studies (an independent centre founded in 1975), the Institute for Arab Development (founded in 1975 with Libyan support), the House of the Future with its Centre for Studies, Documentation and Research (CEDRE), founded in 1975 under the patronage of Amine Gemayel and affiliated to the Phalange Party, and, on a smaller scale, the Centre for National Development, founded in 1980 as an independent centre but benefitting from Iraqi financing. The multiplication of these research centres helped speed up the professionalization of intellectual work in Lebanon and structure the field of research in the social sciences and humanities. Up until the 1960s, academic research in Lebanon remained weakly institutionalized and was mostly the expression of individual erudition – that of the few academics whose careers had developed in the older universities and, more often, of polymath intellectuals who had another profession, whether as lawyers, journalists, secondary school teachers or men of religion. However, with the increase in

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university student numbers and, over time, in the numbers of those holding qualifications there emerged a new generation of intellectuals who, unlike most of their elders, had been given special training in one of the disciplines of the social sciences and humanities. In the context of the crisis of the universities experienced during the war, the research centres employed a significant number of the newly minted PhDs arriving on the job market before or in parallel with their recruitment by the universities. They published, having if need be also translated, many doctoral theses abroad, thus enabling their authors to enter, with greater or lesser degrees of fanfare, the circle of those who had been ‘published’. They also launched intellectual periodicals whose number considerably increased during the war, in this way multiplying the outlets for publication available to specialists in the social sciences. Finally, for researchers entering the profession, the research centres of the war years represented alternative spaces for intellectual socialization, as well as, for the youngest of them, recruited as assistants or investigators, places where they could complete their apprenticeships in practical terms. As a result, the centres played a complementary role to that of the universities in training new generations of researchers. However, in the context of the war, the reinforcement of the field of research in the social sciences did not necessarily lead to its greater independence from other professional fields or from the political field. The embedding of the research centres into networks of institutions organized according to political and sectarian affinities, along with the circulation of researchers having multiple jobs in these institutions, kept the boundaries between the journalistic field, the world of publishing, and the academic and educational milieu just as porous as they had ever been. Moreover, the control exercised by political actors over the institutions in these networks also encouraged the ‘transformation of the places and usual frameworks within which jobs were carried out into arenas for mobilization’ (Roussel 2011, 192) where the different commitments of the intellectual actors were expressed through their respective professional practices. In the research centres, the forms taken by such commitments drew on different registers of scholarly practice, accommodating academic rationales and activist goals in a context constrained by the demands of the authorities or of the political patrons of the centres concerned.

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The Institute for Arab Development The study of one of the most important of these centres, the Institute for Arab Development (IAD), enables the ways in which research activities, intellectual mobilization and political demands could be brought together to be studied in more detail. The IAD was founded in Beirut in August 1975 at a time when it was hoped that there might still be a political resolution to the conflict that had led to the first ‘rounds’ of fighting between the Palestinians and the Phalangists. The Institute was very energetic in its early years, but its activities slowed down from the second half of the 1980s onwards, and in 2000 it closed for good. During the twenty-five years of its existence, the IAD either employed or financed the work on a contractual basis of more than 300 researchers (Ḥaṭab 1999). It produced three journals and more than 200 published works, most of them monographs, together with various encyclopaedias and collections of documents. Three-quarters of these appeared during its first ten years of existence between 1976 and 1986 at an average rate of fifteen new titles a year. During the same period, the IAD had the greatest financial means of all the research centres working in the western half of the divided capital, offering significantly higher remuneration and being highly attractive as a result. Only the House of the Future founded by Amin Gemayel in the eastern half of Beirut in 1975 had equivalent material and human resources – hence the implicit rivalry between these two institutions that belonged to one or other of the two major camps of wartime Lebanon. The IAD in Beirut was officially the Lebanese branch of a Libyan institute of the same name founded a few months beforehand in the Libyan capital Tripoli at the beginning of 1975. However, some Lebanese witnesses told me that the initial idea behind the Institute was nevertheless Lebanese and not Libyan. Libyan leader Muammar Qadhafi, at the head of the Libyan state since the Revolution of the Free Officers in 1969 and who liked to think of himself as the spiritual son of Nasser, had taken up the cause of Arab unity after the death of the Egyptian leader in 1970. Following the failure of plans to bring about a union with Syria and Egypt in 1973, these top-down projects falling foul of the vicissitudes of inter-Arab strategic relations, Qadhafi lent an attentive ear to the Syrian and Lebanese intellectuals who came to him proposing the foundation of a research centre dedicated to Arab societies and economies.

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The aim of this centre would be to produce the kind of knowledge that would allow pan-Arabism to be rethought on the basis of development stakes. Beyond its potential interest within the framework of Qadhafi’s pan-Arab ambitions, this idea also represented a dual opportunity for the Libyan leader. On the one hand, it might help Libya make up for its chronic lack of expertise and scholars, and on the other it might help the country develop its influence over both the Arab nationalist intelligentsia, orphaned since the death of Nasser and the young revolutionary Marxist intellectuals that were then on the rise. In 1975, the Libyan government launched an appeal to scientists in the Arab countries to move to Libya, promising them generous financial packages and research facilities (Audibert 1978). The IAD was set up as a way of hosting these scientists, the initial project envisaging nothing less than the foundation of a ‘City of Knowledge’ on the outskirts of Tripoli. However, a branch of the Institute was also set up in the much more attractive city of Beirut, where Lebanese, Palestinian, Egyptian and Syrian intellectuals were converging. The Libyans, like other regional actors such as the Iraqis and Algerians, already financed various press outlets in Beirut, including daily and weekly newspapers and cultural reviews, and these recruited their contributors from among the same intellectual circles. The Beirut branch of the IAD rapidly showed itself to be much more dynamic than its mother institution in Libya, which in the end only published a few titles having to do with Libyan industrial development6 and was later integrated into the National Council for Scientific Research set up by the Libyan government in 1978. However, the Beirut branch developed rapidly at exactly the same moment that the LU was entering into a period of crisis, allowing it to attract a number of promising young researchers either by recruiting them directly, or by awarding them doctoral research grants, or by publishing their dissertations. These were all things that the public university had ceased to do at more or less the same time. According to the first administration of the Beirut centre, the overall objective of the IAD was ‘to bring about a complete and integrated scientific and technical renaissance [nahḍa], building on our culture and our human values, which will contribute to resolving the problems faced by the Arab nation7’. Its mission was to ‘mobilize the efforts of Arab scientists and researchers [by putting in place] frameworks and competences of specialist expertise in every

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domain8’. In order to do so, the IAD was divided into different departments of various sizes, among them Economic Studies, Strategic Studies, Social Studies, Linguistics, History and Philosophy (called ‘Arab Thought’), and this without counting a separate department dedicated to the applied sciences and technology and another to science popularization. The IAD also included a research team working on ‘Lebanese Crises’ (returned to below) from 1976 to 1979. At the end of the 1970s, it occupied a building of ten floors in the southern suburbs of Beirut in addition to the premises in which it had been founded. Economists, political scientists, historians, sociologists, philosophers, linguists and others rubbed shoulders, among them a number of people who would go on to become well-known academics.9 The Institute thus became a sort of breeding ground or incubator for a new generation of researchers, most of them Muslim but not exclusively so, and most of them the holders of doctorates obtained in Europe. One of the questions raised by studying this research centre is the independence of the researchers who worked in it vis-à-vis the Libyan authorities and the latter’s political agenda. Most of the researchers recruited or financed by the IAD were already highly politicized, coming from an intellectual generation that had been shaped by party or student activism during the decade of political and social effervescence that had preceded the war (Favier 2004). All of them shared the same conception of the fundamentally political character of all research in the social sciences, in the sense that for them the production of knowledge was part of a project for the transformation of society. Moreover, they often had in common the fact that in one way or another they brought together party or union activism, secondary and then university teaching, and journalism and opinion-piece writing in their careers. As far as their political affiliations were concerned, the researchers came from different Lebanese political parties and currents active within or on the margins of the pro-Palestinian leftist coalition called the National Movement.10 However, it was far from the case that all the intellectuals working with the IAD were necessarily pro-Libyan. The political and material support provided by the Qadhafi regime to the Palestinian organizations and their Lebanese allies did not always lead to unconditional adhesion to the Libyan line in return on the part of intellectuals sympathizing with the Palestinian cause, and even less did it lead to such adhesion on the part of those who wanted to

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keep themselves at a distance from the Palestinians, as could also be the case among those working at the Institute. When Qadhafi attempted to mobilize the researchers at the IAD in support of his ‘Green Book’,11 inviting them to a congress to promote it in Libya, there were significant tensions in the Institute between those who categorically refused to take part in such an exercise, not seeing it as part of their academic mission, and those who eventually accepted the invitation to go to Tripoli, though only on an individual basis. When asked about the role of the political and academic authorities in Tripoli in determining the research agendas at the Beirut Institute, former researchers at the IAD have said that in general the Libyan patronage of the Institute did not really determine its activities. Research carried out in the IAD was in the main a matter of individual projects emerging from proposals made by researchers to the Beirut direction of the Institute, either within the framework of individual research or publication contracts or within that of the working programme of a specific department. Most researchers thus enjoyed total freedom in the choice of their research, provided that it corresponded to the overall objectives of the Institute. In the early years of its operation, research proposals were judged in an entirely personal way by the Syrian director of the Institute, and in the following years they were judged by a committee of varying composition. According to the researchers interviewed, the effects of Libyan patronage were limited in practice to the tacit imposition of certain ‘red lines’ that should not be crossed – there should be no discussion of Libya,12 for example, and there should be no putting the latter at a disadvantage vis-àvis other major regional actors. The publication of a work by political scientist Ghassan Salamé (Ghassān Salāma) on Saudi foreign policy, a version of his doctoral thesis at the Sorbonne (1979), was delayed for nearly a year, for example, because of the rapprochement between Libya and Saudi Arabia at the time. It was eventually published, though not distributed. Yet, the different departments of the IAD, operating relatively independently of each other, did host researchers whose working methods signalled very different ideas about what could or should be their forms of commitment, as well as their relations with actors in the political field. Some working groups were concerned to preserve their academic freedoms as much as possible and cultivated a certain distance from the Libyans and from Beirut partisan circles as a result. Others were more willing to ‘do politics’, shtaghalū siyāsa (literally

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meaning ‘they worked politics’), as two former employees of the Institute told me. This expression, commonly employed, is used to describe various practices that could include activist network-building, writing opinion pieces in the newspapers and lobbying. Finally, according to some interviews, some employees at the Institute provided political intelligence about local political parties in reports sent to the Libyan authorities. Such information is obviously difficult to verify, but the existence of indirect witness reports is in itself evidence of the troubled image of the IAD during the civil war. While it would not be correct to conclude that there was any overall dependence of the IAD and its researchers on the Libyan agenda of these years, or that any such dependence operated in every case in the same way, it is nevertheless true that the general direction of the Institute and the margins of manoeuvre that its personnel enjoyed gave rise to constant negotiation between the Beirut direction of the IAD and its Libyan patrons, on the one hand, and the direction of the Institute and its researchers on the other. During the first decade of the Institute’s activities, unsatisfied Libyan expectations entailed power struggles on several occasions. A more detailed examination of the history of the Institute during this period will allow various sequences to be identified, these being punctuated by episodes of internal crisis and corresponding to different configurations of the relationship between political demands, academic agendas and dynamics of intellectual mobilization that shaped scholarly practices within the Institute.

Research agendas and practices in context From 1975 to 1979 the Institute was headed by the Syrian writer and philosopher Muṭā‘ Ṣafadī.13 In the foundational phase, the Institute functioned as a traditional publishing company and only possessed a small team of permanent employees whose responsibilities did not go further than preparing manuscripts for publication in collaboration with authors who had signed contracts with the Institute. Ṣafadī mainly published works by university teachers, but he also reached out to young researchers writing doctorates at universities abroad (mostly in France), offering them grants and contracts for eventual translation and publication.

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At the beginning of 1976, Ṣafadī recruited Waddah Charara (Waḍḍāḥ Sharāra) and Ahmad Beydoun (Aḥmad Bayḍūn) as the two first full-time researchers at the Institute. Both men had received an academic training at the university level,14 but both were mainly seen as emblematic figures of the Lebanese New Left. They had been founding members of the Marxist Socialist Lebanon group that was active in the 1960s, and they had played a similar role in the Organization for Communist Action in Lebanon, founded in 1970 (Favier 1997), where they had drawn attention owing to their taste for political theory and their profile as ‘intellectual activists’ (Favier 2004) producing militant publications and works on politics (Bardawil 2016). Their appointment to the IAD came at a particular moment in their careers, since it marked an exit from party activism and a turn towards modes of political engagement that were more strictly intellectual in character. Safadi recruited them on the basis of a work programme that included a list of standard Western works to be translated and of original research that needed to be carried out. The latter was in line with the two men’s previous concerns as activists, this now being transformed into an academic agenda that was for the most part in line with the stated objectives of the IAD since its general aim was to ‘historicize the problem of under-development with a special emphasis on the Arab region’.15 However, the Institute’s first crisis, occurring in 1976, allows the dissatisfaction of the Libyan authorities to be guessed at. For several months, the Libyan government halted its financial contribution to the Institute, meaning that it was no longer able to pay its employees’ salaries. While the reasons behind this suspension are as obscure as those that eventually led to its reinstatement (and subsequent raises in the salaries paid), one witness from the time has spoken of a meeting at which the main Libyan demands were discussed, including that the Institute provide ‘secret reports’ on the Lebanese political situation. The IAD researchers firmly rejected this request. While there is no way of knowing whether this Libyan demand was eventually met, and if so in what form, its mere mention suggests that for the Libyan patrons of the Institute its purpose was not only to undertake research and publication activities that would serve Arab unity. It was also supposed to be part of the apparatus supporting Libyan interventions in the local political scene, in this case by providing ‘useful’ information.

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A new energy was then given to the development of the Institute. While my research has not allowed me fully to understand what was at stake over the course of that year, one of the researchers interviewed situated the growth that took place in the IAD at the time in the context of the breaking off of relations between the Libyans and the Palestinian Fatah movement led by Yasser Arafat, himself a major actor in the Lebanese conflict, and the competition that was taking place between the Libyans and the Iraqis who were then reinforcing their influence over the political bureau of the Lebanese National Movement. The Libyan investment in the Institute was thus intended to increase their visibility on the Lebanese scene. In the spring of 1977, the IAD published a couple of dozen works in one fell swoop, these including works of economics, history, sociology, psychology, linguistics, among other areas.16 A few months later, it moved to new and more spacious premises and set up additional research groups in the form of the ‘Economic Studies’, ‘Strategic Studies’, ‘Arab Thought’ etc., departments, while Charara and Beydoun set up a group dedicated to ‘Lebanese Crises’. While the publications that appeared during this period signalled a focus on economic questions and questions of development, it was nevertheless the ‘Lebanese Crises’ group that was given the largest human and material resources. The other departments had to manage with just two or three full-time researchers or researchers with publication contracts, assisted by secretarial staff, but the ‘Lebanese Crises’ group grew to have up to fifteen or so co-workers recruited on the basis of a first (licence) or Masters (maîtrise) degree and learning the techniques of documentation and interviewing while on the job. Putting their initial plans to one side, the coordinators of the ‘Lebanese Crises’ working group devoted themselves to a new project intended to document the first stage of the war that had ravaged Lebanon between 1975 and 1976 (the ‘Two Year War’) and to establish a detailed chronicle while at the same time analysing the ideological and historical aspects of the conflict. The documentary part of the project gave rise to a thematically organized archive of press cuttings from the national and international press as well as from local papers, the party political press, billboards and posters, and tracts and communiqués of various sorts.17 This collection covered both the political and military aspects of the conflict and the social problems of the time, and it included crime stories and accounts of leisure activities. Rather than just

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aiming to put together an archive of the war itself, the project instead sought to produce a record of Lebanese society in wartime. In parallel with this archiving work, the team also carried out an enquiry into how the war had been lived, undertaken through semi-directive interviews with political figures and military chiefs of the time, along with domestic workers, taxi drivers and prostitutes, among others. Some 250 interviews were carried out, translating once they had been transcribed into 28 bound volumes. The archives and interviews were then used to put together a daily chronicle (yawmiyyāt) of the first two years of the conflict. The ‘analysis’ part of the project involved two research directions, the responsibility of the two researchers at the head of the team. Beydoun studied the confessional ideologies at work in the Lebanese conflict through the work of contemporary historians, a study that was only finished after he had left the IAD in the form of a doctoral thesis submitted to the Sorbonne in Paris (Beydoun 1984). Charara embarked on writing an ambitious history on multiple levels of the period immediately preceding the outbreak of the war, this eventually leading to the appearance of a near 1,000page work on the years between 1964 and 1967 (Sharāra 1980). It has not been finished for subsequent years. The idea of the yawmiyyāt, a ‘total’ chronicle of the war of outsized proportions which in the end were enough to doom it,18 needs to be seen in the context of the intellectual trajectories of the two men behind it, leading away from party activism and also from Marxism. For Beydoun, the yawmiyyāt was ‘a sort of reaction to the partisan discourse that we ourselves had been the victims of at a certain time and that consisted of spouting hot air and of saying things about society and politics and so on that had no real factual basis’. The chronicle, on the other hand, was a way of ‘having a more relevant and more down-to-earth view of things. This was the case even if it didn’t fit very well with Marxism and even if it was against whatever theoretical orientation we might have had at some time or other’.19 Charara, on the other hand, remained more anchored in a particular Marxist tradition, bringing in his reading of Henri Lefebvre’s Critique de la vie quotidienne (Critique of Everyday Life) in the 1960s to explain their ambition to expose the operation of factors and dynamics that were at once local, national, regional and international in the daily chronology of events in Lebanon at war. In aiming to ‘place the crisis in the context of the immeasurable thickness of the social fabric and events’,

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Charara aimed both to ‘de-ideologize’ and to ‘repoliticize’ the analysis. It was intended to ‘de-ideologize’ because the chronicle was also meant to ensure that ‘enormous divergences in the recording of events, and even more so in their interpretation, between the different actors and people from different obediences’ were taken into account by reproducing the many contemporary commentaries and analyses that had been made of events. What we thought we should do, if you want to formulate it in negative terms, was to frustrate any tendency towards a single explanation. To fight against the dominant tendencies reducing the crisis to a story of sectarianism and of sectarian struggles, [or] reducing it to class struggle, [something which appeared] to underlie some statements, in the ideologies enjoying a certain popularity at the time; to rebut the idea that wanted to see it as a regional crisis that had nothing to do with local relationships or local problems; […] and finally to fight against the denial of any personal aspect to people’s actions […]. There was a desire, perhaps paranoid, to multiple the different social and historical layers [of the crisis] by insisting […] not on a totalizing account, but instead on a necessity that came out of the work, which was to challenge those who wanted to put forward monistic or one-sided interpretations of it, and so on.20

There was also an intention to ‘politicize’ the interpretation of the war by producing a daily chronicle of events that would ‘show how power operates’ and ‘the relationship between power and society in daily life’. ‘We used a term taken from Foucault to describe this – effectuation.’21 Charara, whose intellectual background owes a lot to European critical thought, in an interview rejected the idea that he had adopted the stance of the ‘critical intellectual’ at the time, since his work had not led to the development of a genuine critical theory. However, the research on ‘Lebanese Crises’ had indeed seemed to belong to this register, considering the ‘unveiling’ strategy adopted by the two researchers, their polemical intention,22 as well as their fierce determination not to align themselves with the different political tendencies that were at war with each other in the Lebanese intellectual arena at the time. However, this stance did not prevent the research group from benefitting from the largest budget of any working in the IAD up until 1979. This bears witness to the extent of the independence that the group was able to carve out at the Institute at the time, thanks to the trust placed in it by a director whose style of

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management was highly personalized. The suspension of the project and the break-up of the team that took place a few months before Ṣafadī was removed from his position as director of the Institute signalled a change of direction in the history of the IAD that was also seen in the rising influence of another working group dedicated to ‘Strategic Studies’. A second period began in the history of the Institute with the historic turning point that took place in the Middle East in 1978–79. This was marked by the first Israeli invasion of South Lebanon (March 1978), the signature of the Camp David Accords (September 1978) and then the Israeli-Egyptian Peace Treaty (March 1979), and the formation in response of a ‘Refusal Front’ bringing together Libya, Syria, Iraq and the PLO. Then there was the Islamic Revolution in Iran (January 1979). This swift succession of events affecting the geopolitical configuration of the region pushed the management of the IAD towards a research agenda in which the Lebanese crisis became of only secondary importance and where the regional arena became more than ever the major focus of activities. In Beirut, the formation of a ‘Refusal Front’ was seen as at once a Palestinian political victory and a major advance in the direction of Arab unity. At the IAD, the enthusiasm of the direction for such developments, together with its ambition to join the ‘march of history’, was seen at first in the new emphasis now placed on the department of ‘Strategic Studies’. More staff were hired, and these organized seminars and produced reports on the geopolitical situation in the region that were distributed among the local political actors. The spirit of the time was also felt in a new infatuation with ‘forecasting’, now proclaimed as ‘the science of sciences’.23 The direction of the Institute planned to set up a new working group concentrating specifically on this that researchers from the recently dissolved ‘Lebanese Crises’ group would be invited to join. One of the latter commented that ‘in the end we were told “we are suggesting that you join the forecasting team because the qā’id, Qadhafi, wants us to talk about the future and your project was all about the past.” But wasn’t the past about the war in Lebanon – which was still going on? […] Then we told them that “in that case we prefer to quit, because our group has been broken up, and anyway we have no competence in predicting the future – helping the qā’id to see into the future is something we really can’t do”’. This episode once again speaks volumes about the expectations that the Libyans

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had regarding the researchers at the Institute, wanting them to produce knowledge that would be helpful for the purposes of political action and that would be turned towards the future. Moreover, it also indicated a change in the hierarchy at the IAD. While almost half the Institute’s publications had been dedicated to economics during the first few years of its existence, history had been one of the most important disciplines in terms of the amount of activities and the number of staff employed, whether within the vast ‘Lebanese Crises’ group (which saw its work as belonging to this disciplinary field) or the small ‘Historical Studies’ department.24 The initially privileged position of history at the IAD was probably not unrelated to the status the discipline enjoyed during the first years of the war in Lebanon. Established as a result of decades of intellectual jousting as an important way of legitimating political and sectarian demands, history, even more than other academic disciplines, was in fact a major site for the expression of Lebanese national quarrels (Raymond 2013). The fact that the latter were becoming of only secondary importance as a result of the major regional issues being fought out in the Lebanese conflict meant that history as a discipline was also shrinking in importance at the IAD in favour of the growth in importance of ‘Strategic Studies’ and geopolitics. The alliance of convenience between Iraq and Libya within the ‘Refusal Front’ soon began to be undermined as a result of positions taken by Libya in support of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. These renewed tensions were felt within the Institute with the firing of its director, Muṭā‘ Ṣafadī, whose Iraqi sympathies were incompatible with what was then the Libyan line,25 and by the retaking of control of the IAD by the Libyan authorities with a Libyan financial officer being put in charge of administration. It was the latter, working with a new Lebanese director who was both old and ill, who was the real boss of the Institute during this period of reorganization and significant staff turnover. The ‘Strategic Studies’ department reaffirmed its position at the centre of the Institute. The hiring of Egyptian national Maḥmūd ‘Azmī, a lawyer by training and an expert in Israeli military affairs who had previously worked at the PLO Research Centre, and of the Palestinian Muṣṭafā Jaffāl, the holder of a doctorate in political science from the Université Paris II but also a DFLP activist, indicated that the Institute’s hiring policies were now tending towards individuals who possessed less scientific capital, but who were more connected to Libyans and to pro-Palestinian leftist circles. The arrival at the Institute of

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MP Najāh Wākīm, hired as a member of the ‘Political Studies’ group whose composition and activities were particularly obscure, seemed to push such developments to the extreme.26 The IAD also now started to hold expensive conferences at luxury hotels to which Egyptian opponents of Sadat were invited. The proceedings of two of these, held in August and September 1981 and dealing with ‘Israel in the Shadow of the Second Begin Government’ and ‘North-South Dialogue: Arab Viewpoints’, respectively, appeared in an IAD publication in 1982. A selection from the twenty-eight papers given at a third, held in November 1981 and dealing with ‘New Elements in the Arab-Israeli Balance of Power after Camp David’, was published not in a book but instead in the newspaper Al-Safīr which also extensively covered the conference. The presence of representatives of Lebanese and Palestinian political groups at the event, some of them expressing themselves directly from the podium alongside the academic researchers and experts giving papers, indicated both the political aims of the meeting and the deep entanglement of the partisan, expert and intellectual networks that were forming around the IAD at the time. Finally, the ‘Strategic Studies’ department at the IAD launched its own journal, Arab Strategic Thought, at this time, together with a bi-monthly supplement on Arab strategic developments that also came out for a period. Each edition of these two new periodicals dealing with the geostrategic issues of the time contained a preface by the Institute’s Libyan director, ‘Alī bin al-Ashhar, this in itself reasserting the Libyan stranglehold over the most political publications of the Institute and the way these were thought of as ‘intellectual weapons’.27 These activities, regularly covered by the pro-Libyan Lebanese press, fall within a repertoire of ‘activist expertise’ that was openly assumed as such by some of the researchers interviewed, but that was also denounced by others as ‘the work of gladiators fighting in a circus’. These two diverging views converge on a single point – that the activities of the Institute’s researchers were linked to a political agenda that was now more closely determined by the strategic issues of the moment and by a preference for modes of intellectual intervention that had maximum immediate visibility. Even so, while the forms taken by the work of the researchers, now close to those promoted by organizations of the thinktank type, seemed to be taking the IAD away from its initial aims, it never ceased to host or to support research activities of a more properly academic type, like those published in the journal Al-Fikr al-ʿarabī, for example.

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Following these episodes in the career of the Institute, there came a third and last period of slow and progressive decline. The serious deterioration in security in West Beirut after the Israeli invasion in 1982 was one of the main reasons. Three key moments emerge from the interviews as having been particularly important for the IAD. First, during the siege of Beirut in 1982, the Bi’r Ḥasan building became inaccessible to researchers living in other parts of Beirut,28 and while the Institute moved temporarily into more central premises, it also more or less completely suspended its activities. During the following year when newly elected president Amin Gemayel was trying to impose his authority over the western part of Beirut, the IAD, now back in its original premises, came under strong pressure from the Lebanese General Security which raided its premises on several occasions.29 Finally, the occupation of West Beirut by the Shia Amal Movement, fiercely antiLibyan because of the presumed role of Qadhafi in the disappearance of its founder imam Musa Sadr, led to new difficulties for the IAD, which was now the object of armed attacks30 or was caught up in the crossfire between rival militias. To the effects of the deteriorating security situation should be added the Libyan policy of disengagement from the Lebanese quagmire. The forced departure of the Palestinian fighters from Lebanon in 1982, the Syrian stranglehold over the local political system, the stronger and stronger pressures being brought to bear on Libya by the United States and finally the crash in oil prices all lay behind Libya’s interventionist policies in Lebanon. The Libyans now became less and less interested in the IAD, and while recurrent threats to close it only materialized in 2000 it lost most of its budgetary and human resources in the mid-1980s. Its shaky recovery in terms of activities and declining budgets did not allow the Institute to emulate the pace of publication it had seen over the previous decade, even if some ambitious projects did see the light of day, themselves bearing witness to a renewed focus on work of an academic character.31 However, it was above all the severe devaluation of the Lebanese pound from 1984 onwards that emptied the Institute of most of its staff. While the loss of its salaries’ attractiveness was eventually made up for by the decision to pay salaries partially in dollars, most of the full-time positions were replaced by part-time positions or simply publication contracts. From this point onwards, the Institute only housed a small core of permanent staff, and

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it was hardly able to call upon the services of the best-positioned researchers in the intellectual or academic fields, this also having the effect of reducing its ‘social surface’. After the war ended, the IAD struggled on for a decade or so, concentrating its efforts on the last of its still-active journals, Al-Fikr al-‘arabī, until the Libyans decided to close it down.

Conclusion The research centres founded in Lebanon during the war played a major role in the professionalization of research in the social sciences and humanities in the country, acting as surrogates of the universities in providing the infrastructure and material means that enabled the maintenance, and even the development, of academic research over the period. The de facto division between the universities, above all LU which hired more teachers than it had in the past, and the research centres outside of them, giving university staff the facilities they needed for research, also changed the relationship between teaching and research in Lebanon. The latter was no longer seen as subsidiary or subordinate to university teaching, but instead became an independent activity that continued in parallel with it. It even became a way of entering the academic milieu for young graduates taking their first steps as researchers in non-university research centres while studying for the doctorate that could eventually lead to their being hired as university teachers. This arrangement, in which academic actors were encouraged to move between various institutions in which they would undertake multiple activities and have various sources of income, had paradoxical effects. On the one hand, it strongly affected professional careers, which were only able to develop within a network of institutions that were related to one or other of the different ‘camps’ carrying on the war. But on the other hand, it also allowed researchers to maintain some measure of autonomy, as they never wholly depended on a single institution and the resources it made available. It was precisely because opportunities for employment and funding were many that academic actors were able to resign from the centre that employed them or go elsewhere in search of publication contracts, explaining the high staff turnover at the centres.

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As a result, the constraints on researchers at the centres could not come about through imposition (of a research agenda or of precisely defined research topics) but could only work by a process of selecting from proposals put forward by researchers through hiring decisions and priorities of resource allocation. It was for this reason that at an individual level such constraints were rarely perceived by researchers as depriving them of their freedom. It was certainly the case that the numerous episodes of internal crisis that were experienced at the IAD showed that adjustments made between Libyan demands and what the researchers were prepared to supply were often the results of power struggles. But the researchers never found themselves totally helpless in such tussles, and they were able on several occasions to assert their own ideas of what their intellectual contributions could and should consist of. The mediating role played by the direction of the Institute in Beirut was also crucial in this regard, since it allowed different forces to play themselves out, probably giving with one hand whatever was needed to satisfy the Libyan authorities, while at the same time extracting with the other the resources needed to carry on more autonomous activities.32 However, once Libyan tutelage over the Institute started to be exercised in a firmer fashion, promoting forms of intellectual engagement and practices that were perceived as being more immediately useful to Libya’s interventionism on the Lebanese and Middle-Eastern political stage, the hierarchies that had previously structured the research agenda and practices within the IAD were overturned. The redefinition of the identity of the Institute as an arena for mobilization in support of the ‘Refusal Front’ between 1979 and 1982 thus encouraged an area of research, ‘Strategic Studies’, in which the boundaries between the academic field and the political field were particularly porous. And it did this while giving increased legitimacy to practices related to activist expertise at the expense of those carried out by researchers more attached to the critical function of their work. In this respect, the history of the IAD resembles in outline that of other Lebanese research institutions started during the war but on the other side of the main front line. It can thus be observed that the intense focus on history in Lebanese Front intellectual circles during the early years of the conflict when the internal contradictions of Lebanese society came to the fore was later largely replaced by an emphasis on strategic expertise, growing at the House of the Future centre set up by Amine Gemayel from 1979 onwards, for example, when regional stakes prevailed.33

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The shrinking of most of the research centres from the second half of the 1980s onwards, corresponding to the ongoing intellectual demobilization taking place at the same time against a background of economic collapse and the outbreak of increasing numbers of internal conflicts in each of the main camps involved in the war, led many researchers to turn themselves into local experts and put their activist pasts behind them. They now sought to reinvest capital gained from experience at a research centre by repositioning themselves on the international consultancy market, whether United Nations or panArab. However, for all that the figure of the ‘committed researcher’ did not entirely disappear. As can be seen from the role played by some specialists in the social sciences who left the centres behind them for the various initiatives that characterized the last years of the war or the first years of the post-war period,34 such ‘committed researchers’ in fact often reappeared, though now reincarnated in the service of new causes such as, first and foremost, civil peace.

Notes 1 The same phenomenon was studied by Sapiro in the case of French literary institutions during the German occupation of France (Sapiro 1999, p. 245). 2 The research from which this chapter comes drew for its main documentary sources on the publications of the Institute for Arab Development (books and periodicals), a series of interviews and the Lebanese press. The archives of the Institute, repatriated to Libya when it was closed in 2000, could not be consulted, leading to limitations in the research. It was impossible to study the social makeup of the staff of the Institute with any precision, for example, or the allocation of budgets or the development of its organizational structure. 3 The crisis was the result of repercussions from the armed conflict in the country on the university institutions and actors, including material destruction, the massive departure of highly qualified Lebanese and foreign professors, the kidnapping and killing of teachers and administrators, the impossibility of organizing exams, the cutting back of hours and programmes and the pressures brought to bear by political or military groups on behalf of certain students. For a detailed overview, see Awit (1988). 4 Support for research at LU mainly took the forms of research contracts in the gift of the Institute of Social Sciences, the possibility of obtaining a grant or sabbatical

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for research purposes, the financing of academic events or publication by the University’s publishing arm. To these should be added a policy of providing grants to support doctoral research abroad for the best students, who would then be hired when they returned. This policy was continued in principle until LU set up its own doctoral programmes in the 1980s. In practice, most of these forms of support were suspended in the early years of the war. 5 This expression, in Arabic al-silāh al-ʿilmī, was used in a brochure produced by the IPS on its tenth anniversary in 1973. 6 Lisa Anderson pointed out in 1980 that the Libyan branch of the IAD also funded few individual studies on traditional medicine, the marketing of petrochemical products and the administration of development projects (Anderson 1980). 7 ‘Concepts and General Principles of the Institute for Arab Development’, Al-Fikr al-ʿarabī, No. 1, 1978, p. 244. 8 Ibid. 9 Ghassan Salamé, Ahmad Beydoun, Waddah Charara, Ridwan al-Sayyid, Maan Ziadeh, Massoud Daher, Wajih Kawtharani, Mona Fayyad, and Khaled Ziadeh, among others. To these should be added certain ‘fellow travellers’ of the Institute, members of the editorial board of Al-Fikr al-ʿarabī, for example. These included Constantin Zurayk and Georges Corm. 10 The IAD thus counted among its ranks activists and sympathisers with the Lebanese Communist Party, ex-Baathists, former Maoists and Marxist-Leninists from the Organization for Communist Action in Lebanon, Nasserists and proPalestinian Lebanese close to the PFLP and the DFLP etc. 11 Muammar Qadhafi’s ‘Green Book’ was published in three volumes between 1975 and 1979. In it, the Libyan leader set out the foundations of his political thinking and his own version of revolutionary socialism. The ‘Green Book’ provided the official ideological basis for the ‘jamāhīriyya’, a neologism literally meaning ‘republic of the masses’, proclaimed in Libya in 1977. 12 The sociologist Zuhayr Ḥaṭab reports that ‘the Libyans did not interest themselves in the subjects we were working on […]. No one ever said what we should publish. Their role was to coordinate. However, of course there were subjects that if they did not agree to them would not pass. These included everything to do with their confrontations and their policies. The subject they liked the least was the question of the Berbers. They considered that to be something that should not be touched. They wanted Libyan society to be seen as homogeneous’ (interview with Z. Ḥaṭab, Beirut, May 2015). As an illustration, Ḥaṭab referred to the publication of an article by a Moroccan author on the

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Berber question in the centre’s journal Al-Fikr al-ʿarabī. This angered the Libyan authorities and led to a ban on distributing this issue of the journal. 13 Born in 1929 to a family of Damascus intellectuals, Muṭā‘ Ṣafadī studied philosophy at the University of Damascus, where he later taught in the Faculty of Literature before devoting himself entirely to political and literary activities. He was the author of poetry, plays, novels and philosophical works and until the beginning of the 1960s was a supporter of the Baath Party. He then switched allegiance to revolutionary Marxism, which he attempted to include in an Arab nationalist framework (Abdel-Malek 1970). He died in 2016. 14 At the time a secondary school teacher (and beginning to teach at the Faculty of Education of the LU), Charara (born in 1942), obtained a doctorate in Philosophy from the Université Paris IV in 1973. At the time he was hired by the IAD, Beydoun (born in 1943) was also a teacher at secondary school level, but he had not completed his doctorate despite having worked on two theses, one supervised by Paul Ricœur and the other by André Miquel. 15 Interview with Charara in Beirut in September 2014. 16 Al-Safīr, 31 May 1977. 17 The group also managed to gain possession of the internal archives of a Palestinian organization. 18 The first volume of this chronicle covering January to February 1975 and running to more than 900 pages was submitted for approval to the Beirut and Libyan direction of the Institute in 1979, which decided to halt a project considered too costly and unfinishable. 19 Interview with Beydoun (Beirut, February 2014). 20 Interview with Charara (Beirut, September 2014). 21 Ibid. 22 For his part, Beydoun explains the project as ‘a desire to give to a public that remained largely unknown […] a mirror in which it could see itself. To tell it, this is how you have lived, how you are now living, this is what you are now doing to yourselves. […] It was a public that we imagined by drawing on the idea that there were far too many delusions at work in the country, that people deceived themselves, that they invented things, stories, versions of their history and their reality that in fact were unreal. […] Of course, looked at in this way the project was not without a polemical intention – on the contrary, it was meant to be polemical – but it was necessary to take part in a polemic on solid ground’. These remarks can also be applied to his work on the ideologies of Lebanese historians.

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23 The title of the March–April 1979 thematic issue of the journal Al-Fikr al-‘arabî, the tenth number of this journal published on a monthly basis by the IAD since 1978. 24 This department hosted two historians holding publication contracts with the IAD, Massoud Daher (Mas'ūd Ḍāhir, born in 1945) and Wajih Kawtharani (Wajīh al-Kawtharānī, born in 1941), who used it to launch a collection of books entitled ‘Social History of the Arab Nation’. The two historians were given ample means to carry out their work when Mutā‘ Ṣafadī was director of the IAD. The first was given three publication contracts, along with research grants that enabled him to go to study in British and French archives. The second was first given a contract to translate and publish his doctoral thesis, obtained in France. He then got a second contract to conduct original research with the assistance of a small working group responsible for collecting and translating into Arabic a set of documents from French archives that would be published in the book. 25 In 1979, a harsh conflict broke out between the director of the Beirut branch of the IAD and the Libyan authorities in Tripoli and their representatives in Beirut (it was in this context that Ṣafadī refused to participate in the promotion of Qadhafi’s ‘Green Book’, which he said was the reason why he was eventually fired). Ṣafadī and those among the Institute’s staff that supported him tried to obtain the IAD’s independence from the main branch in Tripoli, and they even got to the point of occupying the original premises of the Institute (where the journal, Al-Fikr al-ʿarabī, was still being produced at the time) before being cleared out by force. Following this episode Ṣafadī and members of the foundational team of the IAD set up the Centre for National Development (Markaz al-inmā’ al-qawmī), which then followed the initial agenda of the Institute, though on a much more modest scale, this time with Iraqi financing. 26 The Nasserist Najāh Wākīm was elected to the Greek-Orthodox seat of Beirut in the 1976 parliamentary elections (at the age of 26) thanks to strong support from the Sunni community. A teacher by profession, but not an academic, Wākīm published a work entitled ‘Third World and Revolution’ with the IAD in 1982. Most of those questioned considered his presence in the Institute to be incongruous to say the least, since he was considered to be a politician and not an intellectual or researcher. 27 This expression was employed by ‘Alī bin al-Ashhar in his preface to the first number of the journal Al-Fikr al-istirātījī al-ʿarabī (No. 1, July 1981, p. 5). 28 The Institute lost some Palestinian researchers working in the ‘Strategic Studies’ department at this time, these leaving Lebanon along with the commanders and fighters of the Palestinian National Movement.

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29 Al-Safīr, 2 June 1983. 30 In May 1984, twelve armed men attacked the Institute and made off with files, money and vehicles (Al-Safīr, 25 May 1984). 31 See, for instance, the multivolume al-Mawsū’a al-falsafiyya al-‘arabiyya (Arab Philosophical Encyclopaedia) edited by Ma‘n Ziyāda between 1986 and 1997. 32 The geographical distance of the Libyan authorities in Tripoli, which gave the Beirut direction of the Institute a ‘buffering’ role, was a particular feature of the IAD. Any conclusions reached about this role cannot be extended to other centres, however, since these may have adopted different organizational models. 33 Aside from the CEDRE founded in 1975, the House of the Future also housed an Institute of Strategic Studies for Peace after 1979, and, after the election of Gemayel as president of Lebanon at the end of 1982, a Research and Planning Group was set up to advise the new president. 34 For example, the meetings between academics and politicians that took place in Cyprus before the meeting of Lebanese MPs taking place in Ta’if that enabled the eventual adoption of a peace agreement.

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Roussel, Violaine. 2011. Art vs war. Les artistes américains contre la guerre en Irak [American Artists against the War in Iraq]. Paris: Presses de Sciences Po. Sapiro, Gisèle. 2007 (No. 2). ‘Pour une approche sociologique des relations entre littérature et idéologie [A Sociological Approach to the Relationship between Literature and Ideology]’, COnTEXTES. http://contextes.revues.org/165. Sapiro, Gisèle. 1999. La guerre des écrivains, 1940-1953 [The War of Writers, 1940– 1953]. Paris: Fayard. Sharāra, Waḍḍāḥ. 1980. Al-silm al-ahlī al-bārid. Lubnān al-mujtamaʿ wa-l-dawla 1964–1967 [The Cold Civil Peace. Lebanon, Society and State, 1964–1967]. Beirut: Institute for Arab Development.

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The Crisis as an Institutional Tool: Challenging Anti-Institutional Challenges in the Egyptian Cultural Field Elena Chiti

The notion of crisis is, in itself, highly problematic (Ricœur 1988). The polysemy of the word, which has medical, psychological, social, political and economic meanings, makes its usage difficult for researchers. The negative connotation it came to carry does not allow treating it as a neutral, descriptive term. Moreover, the linear temporality it embodies – onset of crisis, crisis point, crisis exit – is an obstacle for historians. Nevertheless, its overwhelming presence in the Egyptian cultural field nowadays does not justify overlooking its examination. Crisis will be at the very core of this contribution, in two different ways. First, as a notion brought into play by Egyptian institutional or non-institutional actors. In this sense, crisis will be approached as an empty frame, whose meanings will be defined through the contexts in which it appears and the strategies it reveals. Second, and more importantly, as a crucial moment unveiling tensions within the Egyptian society and, consequently, its division into antagonistic groups. In line with Koselleck’s lesson, crisis will be envisioned as the political dimension, or the political issue, of a moral critique (Koselleck 1979). The cultural field will be seen in its interconnection with the political arena, as a battlefield in which institutional and non-institutional actors struggle for regaining control or gaining autonomy. This perspective, illustrated by Pierre Bourdieu (1992), consists in underlining the constraints

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and the possibilities which shape the space where culture is produced. This space, the cultural field, is continuously redesigned by the intervention of different players competing for the monopoly of the power of consecration. This means, in Bourdieusian terms, the authority of establishing the legitimacy of cultural productions, in order to say what is culture and what is not (Bourdieu 1992: 311). This approach has been applied to Egypt by Samia Mehrez (2009) and Richard Jacquemond (2003), proving its capacity for making sense of the Egyptian cultural field. It is still relevant today, at a time when being outside the realm of legitimate culture, for an Egyptian producer, may lead not only to marginalization within the cultural field, but also to legal consequences and even to jail. In terms of temporality, crisis will be here the only crisis point, illuminating the conflict between different actors seeking to impose their vision of legitimate culture, or to defend themselves from the vision that prevails. Leaving all value judgements aside, crisis will be neither condemned as decadence nor celebrated as an opportunity to make change. Two recent case studies will be explored as informative conflicts, in an attempt of contributing an insight into the Egyptian present. They both reached their peak in 2016, one after the other, and were considered interconnected by an actor involved in the latter. Respectively linked to literature and cinema, both cases go beyond their specific domains illustrating the interrelations between them. As shown by Bourdieu, the cultural field functions as a single space, in which producers of plastic arts, literature, comics, movies and TV series may face the same challenges, or may think they do. The two crises, which had a wide echo in Egypt and abroad, are representative of the current situation of the Egyptian cultural field. They reveal both analogies and specificities if compared to the history of the French field, from which Bourdieu drew his theoretical remarks. On the one side, Egypt also witnesses a struggle between the political power and noninstitutional cultural actors that seek to avoid its control and follow their own professional and ethical rules. On the other side, unlike eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France, religious authorities in present-day Egypt are not in a position enabling them to exercise a direct form of coercion over the cultural field. After the removal of former president Mohamed Morsi and the restauration of the military rule under President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi,

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religious actors are also struggling to regain autonomy from the political sphere. While institutions appropriate ‘culture’ as their own secular mission, they simultaneously depict ‘religion’ as a form of backwardness and, ultimately, a factor of crisis. This engenders an ambiguity in the treatment of morals and legitimate culture, which represents a major issue in Egypt nowadays.

‘Crisis’ as an institutional tool The uprisings known as Arab Spring have drawn broader attention to the culture of dissent in the Middle East and its ability to challenge institutional strategies. While being an important element, dissent is not the only factor that reshapes Arab cultural fields. After the uprisings, the institutional involvement in culture is no less relevant than it used to be. This is particularly true for Egypt, where the state has a long history as a cultural actor. After their marginalization under Sadat, artists and intellectuals were seen as potential allies under Mubarak. A constant institutional engagement in culture revealed the attempt to organize the cultural field in a way that could neutralize dissent from inside, only turning to marginalization and prosecution as a last resort to restore control from outside (Mehrez 2009). This strategy was not only applied to institutional milieus, as theatres, museums and state-run cultural associations (Winegar 2010). The authorities also expressed themselves in favour of civilizing religiosity and rationalizing its collective manifestations (Schielke 2006, 2008). The rise of popular forms of Islam, which was seen as a threat because its source was outside state control, was accompanied by an institutional rhetoric treating it as a residue of the past to be marginalized, if not an obstacle for the future to be fought against. Conversely, a culture defined as rational, secular and liberal had to be promoted to keep Egypt among the modern countries and guarantee its development. A sharp dichotomy was shaped between religion (the evil) and culture (the good), as if they were not only two disjoint realms,1 but two forces at war with one another. As Mona Abaza points out, the strong emphasis on the educational mission of power, in the institutional discourse, went hand in hand with an escalation in the repressive measures against the cultural and political fields. The concept of tanwīr (enlightenment) was at the very core of

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this rhetoric, embodying a set of values presented, at the same time, as secular and universal, based upon the democratic heritage of the French Revolution (Abaza 2010). A further dichotomy arose between Islamic-like and Europeanlike societies, the former identified with religious obscurantism and the latter with cultural enlightenment, while the authorities presented themselves as the enlightened power, struggling against the obscure forces still present in Egypt. Repression was then justified in military terms, as a response to an emergency, or even a form of self-defence against a major threat. Farouk Hosni, the two-decade minister of Culture under Mubarak, explicitly defined culture as a ‘weapon’ to be employed in the struggle against obscurantism, and this vision is publicly shared by institutional actors under Sisi. On 9 June 2016, the deputy minister of Culture, Ṣabrī Sa‘īd, declared: Dealing effectively with culture and ideology is itself a weapon. Psychologically balanced societies in which diversity in culture, sciences and the arts form part of the general awareness cannot be Islamic State-like societies. Islamic State ideology infiltrates culturally impoverished societies which are prey to intolerant ideologies. A vibrant culture and arts scene is a sign of social stability and health. (Al-Ahram Weekly 09 June 2016)

Along with military references, the binary opposition between obscurantism (i.e. religion) and enlightenment (i.e. culture) is also formulated in medical terms: a vibrant culture is a sign of ‘health’ and ‘psychological balance’, while a spontaneous, uncontrolled religiosity is a symptom of disease. This is the way the word azma (crisis) is used nowadays by state-run cultural associations and state-controlled media. The 47th edition of Cairo International Book Fair was held – from 27 January to 10 February 2016 – under the slogan ‘Culture on the frontline’ (Althaqāfa fī l-muwājaha, Figure 5.1), where the frontline indicated a boundary between ‘religion’, as a factor of ‘crisis’, and ‘culture’, as an agent of ‘resistance’. The roundtable organized under the same title, on 29 January, tried to give substance to this dichotomy. Nabīl ‘Abd al-Fattāḥ – lawyer, writer of essays on Islamic movements and former co-director of Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies – claimed that we live in a ‘post-post-postmodern world, marked by an overwhelming lack of certainty in every field, and culture is the only way to face it’. Sa‘īd Tawfīq – professor of aesthetics at Cairo University

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Figure 5.1  Cairo Book Fair, January–February 2016 Source: Elena Chiti.

and former Secretary general of the Supreme Council of Culture – explicitly connected the concept of culture with the resistance against the Muslim Brotherhood under Morsi. After a round of applauds, he defined culture as the conviction that no thought is an expression of truth, since ‘the truth is always relative’ (al-ḥaqīqa dā’iman nisbiyya) and – he added – ‘that is why the Muslim Brotherhood had to be defeated’. Continuing the conversation, Nabīl ‘Abd alFattāḥ talked about a current ‘crisis of the Arab thinking’ (azmat al-‘aql al‘arabī), provoked by people who are convinced that a ‘religious specialisation’ is the key to truth.2 These people, endlessly mentioned in conferences and debates, were given a face in the cartoons published by the Book Fair official magazine Al-Kitāb. In one of them (Figure 5.2), we see a man seated on a mountain of books, marked as thaqāfa (culture), whose height represents a protection against the dangerous individuals surrounding him: an incredibly fat man in suit, symbol of ‘corruption’ (al-fasād); an uncombed man dressed in rags, symbol of ‘ignorance’ (al-jahl) and more importantly, in the foreground, a bearded man wearing gallabiyah and traditional slippers, labelled as al-taṭarruf (radicalism).

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Figure 5.2  Cartoon by Samah Farouq, al-Kitāb.

Fiction or non-fiction, is that the question? While associating religion with crisis, the state tries to appear as a moral censor, capable of guaranteeing order and stability in a secular society. Far from being new (Abaza 2010; Winegar 2010), this strategy may explain the institutional involvement in a case that deeply shook Egyptian cultural actors in 2016 and whose conclusion, a few weeks after the Book Fair, was seen by many as inexplicable. In November 2015, writer Ahmed Naji (Aḥmad Nājī) and editor-in-chief of literary magazine Akhbār al-adab Ṭāriq al-Ṭāhir were taken to court by an Egyptian citizen, who claimed to be ‘personally’ affected by their ‘offenses to public morality’. The case followed the publication in August 2014, on Akhbār al-adab issue 1097, of a chapter taken from Ahmed Naji’s book Using Life (Naji 2017 [2014]), published the same year. The explicit references to sex and, secondarily, cannabis use, found in the chapter, motivated the lawsuit.3 After having been acquitted by the first instance court, al-Ṭāhir was fined 10,000 EGP and Naji was sentenced to two years in jail by the court of appeal on 20 February 2016, for ‘offense to public morality’ (khadsh al-ḥayā’ al-‘āmm). He was immediately arrested and only released in 2018.

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The lawsuit against a writer on charges linked to his artistic work led to a wave of indignation in the Egyptian cultural field and a number of initiatives were undertaken to defend Ahmed Naji and, in this way, the autonomy of the field itself. While numerous, these initiatives seemed to rely on two main defence strategies: the focus on the necessity of considering a work of art in its entirety and the emphasis on the distinction between reality and fiction. Both were applied since the beginning of the appeal trial, when three renowned Egyptian cultural actors – writers Sonallah Ibrahim (Ṣun‘allāh Ibrāhīm) and Muḥammad Salmāwī and literary critic and former Minister of Culture Jābir ‘Uṣfūr – were called to court as defence witnesses. Their testimony aimed at justifying sexual contents in the frame of a broader work of art, falling under the category of fiction. Muḥammad Salmāwī, former president of the Writers’ Union of Egypt and then secretary-general of the General Union of Arab Writers, contested the reading of the book chapter as a non-fiction maqāl (essay), made by the prosecutors. He emphasized he did not read an editorial, but a novel chapter, warning that ‘the gap is huge between literary writing and journalistic reporting’. When asked to read it aloud in court, he categorically refused: Salmāwī: It is not feasible. Prosecutor: Because it is offensive to morality (khādish li-l-ḥayā’)? Salmāwī: It is not feasible in literature since extracting an excerpt, and reading it independently from the novel, takes it out of the context in which it was written. (…). In the same way, we cannot cut out a part of the work produced by pioneer of Egyptian modern sculpture Mahmoud Moukhtar, like the peasant-woman’s breast in the statue ‘Egypt’s awakening’ in front of Cairo University, and expose it separately to the public. This would be an actual offense to morals because, cut out of its context, it would lose the patriotic meaning (al-ma‘nā al-waṭanī) that makes it symbolic and would have a mere sensual impact. What does offend morality in life, does not offend it in arts.4

To illustrate the distinction between reality and fiction, Salmāwī gave the example of a naked person walking in the street, and in this way offending morality, while the portrait of a naked person in a museum does not, since it

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is a work of art. However, this example does not totally fit with Naji’s fictional character’s acts. Even mistaking it for an actual person or for the author himself, as the court apparently did, what kind of charges would he have to face in real life? Naji’s character did not do anything openly, publicly, in the street. While cannabis possession is illegal in Egypt, even for personal use, sex is allowed as far as it involves adult and consenting individuals, as was the case for Naji’s character and his partner in the chapter. Then, the court files accusing Naji and al-Ṭāhir seemed to focus on the ‘explicit sexual content’, more than on cannabis use. In this frame, one could hardly see any charge on Naji’s character outside the fictional realm. Sex was had in a flat, behind a closed door. The Egyptian citizen who sued Naji, claiming to be morally outraged by Naji’s character’s acts, had no other possibility of knowing about them, in real life, but being in the very same flat where they occurred, or peeking at them somehow from outside. In both cases, he would have been involved, as a participant or a voyeur, in the very acts he condemned as morally offensive. Beyond its literal meaning, Salmāwī’s focus on the distinction between fiction and reality was a call to Egyptian institutions to give special treatment to the cultural field over the rest of the society, as an autonomous domain governed by different rules. The initiatives that followed Naji’s condemnation verdict are in line with this conception: while a real offense to morals is to be prosecuted, a fictional offense is not. This was the message of a Facebook campaign titled Eḥnā asfīn yā ḥayā’5 (We’re sorry, morality), which collected written and visual examples of sex scenes in Arab literature and arts. The slogan Lā li-muḥākamat al-khayāl (No to trials of imagination) was adopted by artists and intellectuals, gathered in an emergency meeting at Merit publishing house (Zaḥma 2016). The hashtag was launched on social media and shared by several websites and newspapers that joined the campaign. On 23 February 2016, Al-Qāhira magazine presented a blank front page, with only this slogan written in black characters at the bottom: ‘No to trials of imagination’ (Figure 5.3). To the best of my knowledge, no cultural actor raised his voice against trials for ‘offenses to public morality’ in general. In the struggle for gaining autonomy, the cultural field did not demand that secular rules be applied to society as a whole, but only for a separation of arts from the social sphere where religious-like norms apply.

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Figure 5.3  Newspaper al-Qāhira, front page Source: Elena Chiti.

The cultural field, guardian of secular law Indeed, Naji’s prosecution and condemnation were perceived, within the Egyptian cultural field, as a flagrant violation of the spirit of civil laws. Writers and journalists underlined the contradictory institutional position towards Naji’s book: printed in Lebanon by Tanwīr publishing house, which has offices

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in Cairo, Beirut and Tunis, Using Life had already obtained a censorship seal of approval in 2014, before it was imported to Egypt (Lynx Qualey 2015). The institutional involvement in a lawsuit against one of its chapters appeared, consequently, as highly illogic. Moreover, the pre-import examination of books by Egyptian censorship was described as more than a pure formality: while Naji’s book was declared importable, in 2014, several works were prevented from entering Egypt and a number of them were issued by Tanwīr publishing house itself (Lynx Qualey 2014). Not only censorship rules, but the Egyptian Constitution was mentioned as a source for denying legitimacy to Ahmed Naji’s prosecution. Khālid al-Balshī, member of the Journalists’ Union board, highlighted the sharp contrast between the court verdict and the Constitution, implicitly referring to article 65, which guarantees freedom of thought and opinion. The former Minister of Culture, and Naji’s defence witness, Jābir ‘Uṣfūr also brought up the Constitution (‘Abd al-Bāsiṭ 2016), explicitly quoting article 67, which ‘guarantees freedom of artistic and literary creation, as well as the engagement of the state in promoting literature and arts and protecting authors and works’. He reminded that ‘according to the same article, prison is not a sanction that can be applied for publication crimes’ (Hanafy 2016). In many cases, the post-revolutionary character of the Constitution, written in 2014, was emphasized by cultural actors. Right after Naji’s condemnation, during a conference on freedom of thought held in Fayyoum, prominent writer and literary critic ‘Abduh Jubayr said: ‘After two revolutions for freedom, the state bureaucracy and the idiocy of some people pushed us back to the epoch against which we rebelled’ (Fayoumya 2016). While strongly contesting the effect of institutional engagement against Naji, many of these statements implicitly confirmed its logic. The dichotomy they drew, between a previous epoch of oppression and a more progressive present, is in line with the official propaganda, depicting the state as an enlightened power and an opponent to religious forces belonging to a bygone, pre-modern era. In ‘Uṣfūr’s words, it is not the state itself, but a dysfunction of it – namely ‘bureaucracy’ – that is seen as the responsible for Naji’s condemnation. In the same way, the issue is not with society as a whole, or a significant part of it, but with the ‘idiocy of some people’. This idea is even reinforced with the reference to the ‘two revolutions’ against oppression. The two-revolution narrative calls ‘revolution’ (thawra) both the uprisings that started on 25 January 2011, leading

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to Mubarak’s resignation on 11 February, and the massive demonstrations that took place on 30 June 2013, leading to Morsi’s removal by the Egyptian army, on 3 July. Considered by some critical voices as a vicious circle, the transition from a revolution against the military regime, in 2011, to the advent of a new military regime, in 2013, is read by institutional propaganda within a linear temporality and presented as a sort of historical necessity for the sake of Egypt. Furthermore, the emphasis on the post-revolutionary character of 2014 Constitution6 seems to be a rhetorical tool, more than a result of historical analysis. Freedom of thought, research and artistic expression was guaranteed in principle since 1923,7 in the first Constitution that followed Egyptian independence in 1922, and this element was already used in support of intellectuals facing legal prosecution for the books they published. In 1925, ‘Alī ‘Abd al-Rāziq was deprived of his status of ‘ālim for stating, in his book Al-Islām wa-uṣūl al-ḥukm (Islam and the Foundations of Governance), that the caliphate had no foundations in Islamic doctrine, establishing in this way a separation between secular and religious fields. One year later Ṭaha Ḥusayn was prosecuted for his Fī l-shi‘r al-jāhilī (On pre-Islamic poetry), which called for the application of scientific philological method to any written text, including the Coran, and was seen as a secular challenge to Islam. In both cases, cultural actors used 1923 Constitution as a source for secular defence. However, many ambiguities persisted, since the Constitution, which guaranteed freedom of expression within ‘the limits of the law’, had no laws in accordance with it: cut off from the legislative framework of its time, its liberal principles could not be implemented.8 This is also what happens with 2014 Constitution. The same cultural actors who quoted it in support of Naji do not deny its lack of integration within the Egyptian legal field. In fact, the Fayyoum conference on freedom of thought in which ‘Abduh Jubayr took part (Fayoumya 2016) – along with writer ‘Iṣām al-Dīn al-Zuhayrī and lawyer Aḥmad ‘Abd al-Qawī Zaydān – had a more articulated title, explicitly pointing to the problem: ‘Freedom of thought and creation between a Constitution that ennobles it and a law that criminalizes it’ (Ḥurriyat al-fikr wa-l-ibdā‘ bayna dustūr yu‘aẓẓimu-hā wa-qānūn yujrimu-hā). All the participants stressed that laws have not been brought into harmony with the Constitution: article 65,9 which relies on them to define the limits of creative freedom, leaves in fact a grey zone that gives rise to religious-like interpretations of ‘offenses to public morality’.

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The secular state, guardian of religious morality This grey zone, between Constitution and laws, has been used against cultural actors already in 2014. Far from being an exception, Naji’s case follows at least three recent similar lawsuits that underline the unclear connection between religious offenses and secular punishment. In 2014, writer and human rights activist Karam Ṣābir was sentenced to five years in jail by the appeal court for ‘spreading atheism’ through his short story collection Ayna Allāh? (Where is God?) (Iaccino 2014). In December 2015, theologian Islām al-Buḥayrī was sentenced to five years, commuted to one on appeal, for ‘insulting Islam’ in his TV show ‘With Islām al-Buḥayrī’, in which he called for historical contextualization of Islamic heritage, namely aḥādīth collections (Khatib 2016). In January 2016, a three-year imprisonment was the verdict for writer Fāṭima Nā‘ūt, accused of ‘insulting Islam’ through her Facebook page and a press article published by al-Misrī al-Yawm, in which she depicted the slaughtering of sheep for Festival of Sacrifice as a ‘yearly massacre’ that only human greed for blood can justify (Rebello 2016). These verdicts, and Naji’s condemnation after them, were made possible by the grey zone between Constitution and laws, in which the state can act as a public censor of private morals, in a way that closely recalls ḥisba: the institutional involvement of Islamic power in individuals’ life ‘to command good and forbid evil’ (al-amr bi-l-ma‘rūf wa-l-nahī ‘an al-munkar) and keep social order in accordance with religious law (Abaza 1995; Olsson 2008). While Fāṭima Nā‘ūt was sued by an Islamist lawyer and Islām al-Buḥayrī by an al-Azhar committee, it is important to notice that Karam Ṣābir was taken to court by a group of Egyptian citizens, from a village in Beni Suef Governorate, who declared themselves offended by his book that ‘spread atheism, insulted God and incited to bloodshed’. In the same way, according to the information that was made available, Ahmed Naji’s case was filed by a private citizen. Very few details on him were released, mainly his name (Hānī Ṣāliḥ Tawfīq) and his age (65 years old). No mention was made of his professional life, social status, economic condition, political belonging. No picture of him was found. This obscurity surrounding the plaintiff was seen, within the Egyptian cultural field, as an inexcusable lack of information. However, this lacuna is, at the same time, highly informative, for it sheds light on the institutional strategy

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to create consensus: made invisible and unidentifiable as an individual, the plaintiff became the symbol of the average Egyptian, an ordinary man with no peculiar characteristics, representing the common feelings of a whole society. And if a whole society feels offended, the state has no choice but to intervene and punish the offender. The articulation between private and public, secular and religious, can be regarded as the main difference between Ṣābir’s, al-Buḥayrī’s and Nā‘ūt’s trials, on the one hand, and Naji’s, on the other. The first three cases fell under the so-called Blasphemy Law,10 directly connected with religion. Ahmed Naji’s charge was based instead upon article 178 of the Criminal Code, establishing sanctions for spreading contents vaguely defined as ‘violating public decorum’ (munāfiya li-l-ādāb al-‘āmma). In this perspective, a switch had to be made when public prosecutors decided to continue to pursue Naji on the basis of the individual feelings of a private citizen. The media repeated, as a refrain, the text of his lawsuit, in which he claimed he was personally affected by the reading of Ahmed Naji, feeling ‘accelerated heartbeat, extreme weakness and sudden decrease of blood pressure’ (iḍṭirāb fī ḍarabāt al-qalb wa-i‘yā’ shadīd wa-inkhifāḍ ḥādd fī-l-ḍaghṭ). Among artists and writers in the field, these symptoms were considered as an accurate description of a male erection and bitter jokes circulated about the unfairness of a verdict condemning a writer for being good enough to make his reader feel sexually excited while reading a sex scene. A number of cartoons published in solidarity with Naji took this path, making fun of a middle-aged man with a visible erection who condemns the writer’s depravity. As unreasonable as it may appear, the institutional involvement in such a case follows its internal logic, in line with the history of state intervention in culture since Mubarak era. The institutional disavowal of public manifestations of religiosity, as potentially dangerous, leaves the field of morality unattended. Presenting itself as fiercely secular, the state cannot run the risk of appearing, at the same time, immoral. The state control over culture implies, in parallel, the state control over religion and even a struggle with religious institutions for the monopoly on moral censorship.11 As Naji himself pointed out reflecting on the institutional commitment in prosecuting him, which he found difficult to explain from a civil perspective, ‘perhaps it’s because they feel they are the guardians of morality’ (Said 2015a). Morality was in fact

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presented by his prosecutors in both collective and religious terms, for Naji’s writing was accused of ‘profaning the sacredness of collective decorum and the righteousness of morality’ (intihāk li-ḥurmat al-ādāb al-‘āmma wa-ḥusn al-akhlāq) (Said 2015b). Even the contradiction between the seal of approval obtained by Using Life (as a book) and the condemnation of one of its chapters (when republished by literary magazine Akhbār al-adab) finds its explanation within this framework: while the book was issued by a privately owned publishing house, the literary magazine belongs to al-Akhbār group, which is publicly funded and part of the public sector. In other terms, the Egyptian institutions could not run the risk of appearing self-indulgent, by forgiving an offense to public morality they contributed themselves to spread.

To show or not to show the Clash The divide between religious and secular visions, within the Egyptian society, is not simply an internal matter. The complicated relations between presentday Egypt and the rest of the world emerge in another case that made the headlines more than once, in 2016, and provoked harsh debates. At the core of the confrontation is a movie set in Egypt and shot in Egyptian dialect, directed by an Egyptian film-maker, Mohamed Diab (Muḥammad Diyāb), with an Egyptian cast of actors. The story is also Egyptian: titled Eshtebak, the movie turns around the social and political turmoil of summer 2013, when former President Mohamed Morsi, belonging to Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice party, was removed by the Egyptian army. In the movie, pro-Morsi and anti-Morsi demonstrators are portrayed together, after being arrested and placed in the same police truck. This narrow space turns, in this way, into a miniature of the Egyptian society, with men and women of different generations, backgrounds and political affiliations. The camera never leaves the truck, building a plot which is in fact a non-plot, whose empty time, in the middle of action, represents the stuck of an entire country, immobilized by its internal clash. The political yet non-politicized character attributed to the movie, described as a neutral social portrait, is probably one of the main reasons of its success outside of Egypt. The only Egyptian film selected by 2016 edition of Festival de Cannes, Eshtebak was even chosen to open the section

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titled Un Certain Regard (A distinctive glance). Screened in Cannes on 12 May, it attracted since then a growing attention that goes beyond its artistic appraisal. Along with its director Mohamed Diab, Eshtebak was the object of high praise or the target of harsh criticism. Elements such as origins, national belonging and even loyalty to the country played a central role in both cases. On 12 May, French newspaper Le Monde published an interview with Mohamed Diab, in which the film-maker emerged as a critical voice, marginalized in his country and in need of external support. Explicitly linking present-day Egypt to Ahmed Naji’s case, Diab expressed fear over legal proceedings started by private citizens against writers and artists. He recalled the complaints against him for his previous film, 678, treating the topic of sexual harassment in Egypt and accused of distorting reality and staining the reputation of the country. Public obstacles were also mentioned: Diab explained how hard it was to find Egyptian investors, afraid of a political subject and how he managed to solve the problem in 2014, in Cannes itself, when French partners joined the production (Sotinel 2016). American magazine Variety reported, on 13 May, a statement by French co-producer Eric Lagesse, head of Pyramide Distribution Company, who depicted Eshtebak’s international exposure both as a generational trend and a cultural necessity: ‘There is a new generation of Arab directors who understand that they have to make movies with a more universal appeal’ (Vivarelli 2016a). On the same magazine, and the same day, Mohamed Diab confirmed: ‘I wanted to make it as universal as possible, yet it had to express us [Egyptians]. So I tried to examine the origins of violence from every side. From the authorities’ side, from the extremists’ side, from the activists’ side’ (Vivarelli 2016b). In Diab’s words, the claim for universality was constantly accompanied by a claim for neutrality: these two characteristics shaped the director’s position as someone refusing to choose between the authorities and the so-called extremists.

An anti-institutional third side? Presenting itself as a sociopolitical portrait, the movie Eshtebak showed the ambition to universalize the Egyptian reality, making it understandable outside of Egypt. At the same time, Mohamed Diab emphasized its neutrality: instead of choosing between the two fighting sides, he built up a third side for

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Eshtebak, asserting that the movie depicted a crisis with no partial bias. He told Al-Ahrām and other Arabic newspapers: ‘I want people to watch my movie without asking what side I belong to’ (Al-Ahrām 13 May 2016). However, in his interviews, Diab underlined his participation, as an activist, in the 2011 revolution, and his disappointment at its failure. He described the choice of making a movie on the 2013 clash as an active engagement, in response to disappointment. Between what he called ‘the authorities’ and ‘the extremists’, the third side – his own – seemed to be the one of the activists. The cultural shift is not irrelevant: an activist is, by definition, someone who takes action in support of a precise side. Here, the activist’s position was reinterpreted to meet the role of the observer: someone who keeps himself outside of action in order to watch and record it. In societies marked by a strong institutional propaganda, functioning as the main filter between reality and document, the act of observing and relating comes to be a form of activism itself and artists, more than journalists, end up playing the role of witnesses (Chiti 2015). Representing and reforming are more interconnected than it may seem: showing a situation with no way out is already claiming that a way out is needed. Moreover, the third-side strategy is not free of ambiguity, in its relations with the two fighting sides. On 12 May, Egyptian Muslim preacher and TV star Moez Masoud (Mu‘izz Mas‘ūd) revealed, through a tweet, his financial participation in the production of the movie Eshtebak, showing satisfaction for its success in Cannes (Masoud 2016). While Masoud’s tweet did not refer to the Muslim Brotherhood and not even to religion, his followers’ replies openly talked about Islam and implicitly called for a Muslim commitment for the sake of Egypt and beyond. ‘This is the right path’, a lady wrote, ‘to make the world aware of our mission’12. ‘The right path’ (It-Tarīq is-saḥḥ) is the title of a successful TV show launched by Masoud in 2007, in Egyptian dialect, to teach the audience how to face life’s challenges with a positive Muslim attitude. As for ‘our mission’ (risālatu-nā), it is a frequent formula to define the engagement for an Islamic revival within the society. On 13 May, when Masoud appeared in person on Cannes red carpet next to Mohamed Diab, posing for the cameras with the rest of the cast, some Egyptian institutional voices raised to manifest their discontent. The TV show Anā Maṣrī (I am Egyptian), presented by Amany al-Khayat (Amānī al-Khayyāṭ) on state-owned Nile TV channel,

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depicted Mohamed Diab as a suspicious individual, linked to anti-Egyptian interests: ‘Mohamed Diab is a young man who graduated from a faculty of commerce’ – the reportage said – ‘and worked for a foreign bank and, in this period, he presented himself as a political activist (…). In 2005, he suddenly switched to cinema studies at New York Academy’ and in 2010, with his movie on sexual harassment, started ‘giving a distorted picture (ṣūra mushawwaha) of the Egyptian society’.13 Masoud’s funding was mentioned as an evidence of Diab’s connection with the Muslim Brotherhood and this gave more ground for accusing him of ‘hiding his own thoughts behind his scenarios’.14 The release of Eshtebak in Egypt, planned for 27 July 2016, was preceded by institutional attacks: the movie was accused of being equivocally close to both Islamic and foreign interests, serving them by ruining the reputation of Egypt. Many cinemas refused to screen it and a Facebook campaign – Ed‘am ḥaqqak ennak teshūf Eshtebāk (Support your own right to watch Eshtebak) – was launched in response. Mohamed Diab’s self-defence was, once more, abroad oriented, trying to prove national loyalty on the basis of international recognition. On 26 July, Diab published on his Facebook page the photo of a letter in English, signed by Hollywood star Tom Hanks: ‘Few Americans see Egypt as being anything more than terrorists and pyramids. Your film CLASH will go great lengths to enlighten many’ (Scoop Team 2016, emphasis mine). Then he added in Arabic: ‘Daniel Craig, hero of James Bond’s movies, also sent me a similar letter, which means the opposite of distorting (tashwīh) the reputation of Egypt’.

An institutional third side? Preceded by institutional blame, Eshtebak’s release in Egypt was followed by anti-institutional criticism. The Egyptian audience discovered that the movie had to adjust to censorship, putting a sentence, as an initial warning, which closely echoes official propaganda: ‘After the revolution of June 30, the Muslim Brotherhood provoked bloody clashes to prevent the peaceful transition of power.’ Not only the formula ‘revolution of June 30’ was used to brand the military coup of July 2013, as in state-owned TV channels and institutional media, but the responsibility for the violence was put on a single side, while the other was associated with peace. On some Egyptian websites, spectators

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declared themselves disappointed, especially after all the attention the movie attracted worldwide. Its international success, publicized by Diab to prevent national disapproval, was then ironically turned into a sign of a naïve reading from abroad, narrow enough to mistake an inoffensive commercial movie for a courageous, disrupting work. An article titled Mā lā ya‘rifu-hu Tom Hanks (What Tom Hanks Ignores), published on the news website Masralarabia (Midḥat 2016), said it is difficult to grasp why the screening of the film in Egypt was so problematic, given its content and narrative. Not only the initial warning but the positive depiction of the policemen, throughout the movie, was considered as a deliberate distortion of historical reality and, consequently, an unequivocal sign of institutional affiliation. Mistaken for a faithful representation in Hollywood, the distortion could be easily perceived by any Egyptian eye that saw the police in action in 2013. On website za2ed18, an editorial provocatively asked: ‘With whom do we clash, then?’ (Faraj 2016) The author admitted he was initially fascinated by the idea of a movie built around the call ‘down with polarization’ (lā li-l-istiqṭāb), but he found it was made in a superficial way, not far from state TV sermons that invite the victim to reconcile with the aggressor, with no consideration for establishing justice. The representation of the police, exemplified by the episode of the officer kindly advising a lady not to join the demonstrations, was once more criticized: ‘Does such a police officer not exist in reality? Of course he does, but when you release a work in which everything becomes a symbol, the presence of a similar model naturally turns into a propagandistic attempt of cleaning up the image of the police as a whole. Before a cancerous body, do not ask me to notice how white the teeth are!’ The editorial seriously doubted the possibility of a third side. It focused on a scene in which someone, within the police truck, screams: ‘If we take to the streets to join any of the two sides, we will all die!’ Since nobody seems to hear it, the message appears to be addressed to the movie audience, as a metaphorical request to drop the protests and choose stability in order to survive. The rhetoric of the third side is refuted, in the movie itself, by its very characters: citizens of a plural yet peaceful Egypt, isolated from bloody clashes thanks to the police truck which segregates and protects them. For the editorialist the sides are in fact just two, since ‘the people and the police are on the same side’. This last expression –

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which provocatively recalls institutional slogans such as ‘the police in service of the people’ or ‘the police and the people hand in hand’ – sounds like a final disavowal: ‘What does distinguish this movie’s narrative from the state’s propaganda narrative?’ (Faraj 2016).

Conclusion Two cultural conflicts, occurred in Egypt in 2016, reveal the tension between institutional and non-institutional actors, as well as the strategies for keeping control or gaining autonomy. Even if different in causes and effects, Naji’s trial and Clash’s case share common features and show some similarities in the institutional attitude, as in the approach of cultural actors. In both situations, cultural actors targeted by institutional attacks tended to focus on the distinction between fiction and non-fiction, in two different ways. Naji’s lawyers and defence witnesses, along with the intellectuals who took a stand against the trial, put emphasis on the fact that Naji’s work belonged to the fictional realm and, as such, had not to be judged outside of it and certainly not to be prosecuted. On the contrary, director Mohamed Diab, along with his advocates, based the defence of Clash on the claim that, while being a work of art, the movie limited itself to show the Egyptian reality in an unbiased way. Whereas the distinction, or the identification, between fiction and nonfiction was the main defence strategy for cultural actors, the institutional field seemed to move according to different logics. Acting as a guardian of morality, in a way that is not new in Egyptian history, the secular state applied religion-based norms, creating an overlap between public and private spheres, which effectively disregards the distinction between fact and fiction. Naji’s prosecution would not have been possible without this confusion. Had he been guilty, in real life, of the acts committed by his fictional character, he could have hardly been discovered and sued. His trial aimed precisely at punishing a private sexual intercourse between fictional characters, since its actual reading by a private citizen, in a magazine of the public sector, led to a private sexual excitement that was made public and presented as an offense against the society as a whole. In the same way, the realistic paradigm to which Eshtebak claims to conform, exemplified by the third-side narrative, is far from being

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a new, disruptive element in the Egyptian cultural field. One may even say it is the main trend followed by Egyptian fiction since its earlier developments during the Nahḍa (Jacquemond 2000). Global exposure, more than internal power of disruption, made the movie suspicious for the institutions. The way Clash presented the Egyptian internal divide between Sisi’s state and Muslim Brotherhood’s followers at Cannes Film Festival, making it visible worldwide, seems to be the main reason of its condemnation by state-controlled Egyptian media. Once more this could be seen, on an international scale, as a problem of separation between private (Egyptian) and public (global). In present-day Egypt, institutions depict religion as a factor of crisis, associating it with archaic, obscurantist forces. Its public manifestations are disciplined and, eventually, discouraged. The authorities aim at strictly controlling the religious field, delegitimizing its claims for independence. At the same time, they find themselves in the delicate position of dealing with morality. The very same state that presents itself as an enlightened alternative to Islamiclike states, and the ultimate protector of a secular society, acts as a public censor of private morals, in a way that closely recalls Islamic ḥisba. Official discourses on the civilizing mission of culture, as a tool for building liberal societies, go hand in hand with a religious-like condemnation of liberal aspirations in the cultural field. The public involvement in private morality impedes the action of both religious and cultural actors. Both the cultural and the religious fields struggle, in Egypt, to regain autonomy from institutions that seem more and more present in non-institutional domains, reshaping public and private spaces according to religion-based secular norms. Studying the Egyptian cultural field nowadays requires not only, in Bourdieu’s terms, a parallel investigation of both the artistic and the literary scenes, in their interconnected struggle for independence from political power, but also, and for the same reason, an investigation of the cultural field along with the religious field.

Notes I am grateful to Richard Jacquemond and Anne Stensvold for their reading of previous versions of this chapter and their helpful remarks.

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1 Since Durkheim, and Geertz, the role of religion as a form of social regulation has no longer to be proved nor has its mode of operation as a cultural system that shapes and is shaped by other aspects of culture. 2 Notes taken at Cairo Book Fair on 29 January 2016 (Nadwa ‘Al-thaqāfa fī l-muwājaha’). 3 A summary of the lawsuit and a reflection on its implications, in November 2015, can be found in Pepe 2015. 4 For the Arabic transcription of Salmawy’s testimony, see Manṣūr 2015. 5 https://ar-ar.facebook.com/ ‫احنا‬-‫آسفين‬-‫يا‬-‫ حياء‬-195494374141903/ (accessed 12 December 2017). 6 For a historical reading of 2014 Constitution, see Bernard-Maugiron 2015. 7 Article 14 of 1923 Egyptian Constitution reads: ‘Freedom of opinion is guaranteed (makfūla). Any human being (insān) can express his/her own thoughts through words, writings, images or other means within the limits of the law (fī ḥudūd al-qānūn)’. 8 On the ambiguities of 1923 Constitution, see Gayffier-Bonneville 2005. 9 The last two paragraphs of article 65 of 2014 Constitution read (emphasis mine): ‘No lawsuits may be initiated or filed to suspend or confiscate any artistic, literary, or intellectual work, or against their creators except through the public prosecution. No punishments of custodial sanction may be imposed for crimes committed because of the public nature of the artistic, literal or intellectual product. The law shall specify the penalties for crimes related to the incitement of violence, discrimination between citizens, or impugning the honor of individuals.’ 10 That is article 98(f) of the Egyptian Criminal Code, amended by Law 147/2006. 11 A recent example of this confrontation, that has a long history, can be found in the ‘battle’ over Friday sermons that opposed the Egyptian state to Muslim preachers, including al-Azhar scholars, in summer 2016: Abdellah 2016 and ElDin 2016; for a historical overview, see Skovgaard-Petersen 2013. 12 Ibid., reply by @NoorTom. 13 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiwWQxmP5WQ (accessed 12 December2017); see also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lmutjpDCBA (accessed 12 December 2017). 14 At the same time, Diab was blamed for being close to former Minister of Culture Mohamed El Sawy (Muḥammad al- Ṣāwī). Founder of the Cairene cultural centre El Sakia (http://culturewheel.com/) in 2003, Mohamed El Sawy was appointed Minister of Culture in February 2011, after Mubarak’s resignation. He also cofounded, in 2011, al-Ḥaḍāra (The Civilization) party, which merged in 2013 with

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Culture and Crisis in the Arab World Islamic party al-Wasaṭ into Al-Tayyār al-wasaṭī (The Middle Trend). Though Al-Tayyār al-wasaṭī declared itself both civil and based on Islamic religion, it was strongly criticized by secularists.

Bibliography Abaza, Mona. 2010. ‘The Trafficking with Tanwir (Enlightenment)’. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 30(1): 32–46. Abaza, Mona. 1995. ‘Civil Society and Islam in Egypt: The Case of Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd. Journal of Arabic, Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies 2(2): 29–42. Bernard-Maugiron, Nathalie. 2015. ‘La constitution égyptienne de 2014: continuité ou rupture dans l’histoire constitutionnelle de l’Égypte?’. Revue française de droit constitutionnel 103: 517–37. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1992. Les règles de l’art. Paris: Seuil. Chiti, Elena. 2015. ‘La fiction à l’épreuve de la réalité, la légitimité à l’épreuve de la révolution’. In Écrire l’inattendu. Les ‘Printemps Arabes’ entre fictions et histoire. Elena Chiti, Touriya Fili-Tullon, and Blandine Valfort, eds., pp. 61–75. Louvain-laNeuve: Academia. Gayffier-Bonneville, Anne-Claire de. 2005. ‘L’arbre sans racines: la Constitution égyptienne de 1923’. Égypte Monde Arabe 3(2): 37–52. Jacquemond, Richard. 2003. Entre scribes et écrivains. Arles: Actes Sud. Jacquemond, Richard. 2000. ‘Les limites mouvantes du dicible dans la fiction égyptienne’. Egypte Monde arabe. 2(3): 63–83. Koselleck, Reinhart. 1979 [1959]. Le Règne de la Critique. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. Mehrez, Samia. 2009. Egypt’s Culture Wars. New York and London: Routledge. Mustonen, Liina. 2015. ‘The Gender Dimension of the Authoritarian Backlash in Egypt’. Turkish Policy 14(1): 181–9. Nājī, Aḥmad. 2014. Istikhdām al-ḥayā. (Illustrated by Ayman al-Zarqāwī). BeirutCairo-Tunis: Dār al-Tanwīr. Translated by Koerber, Benjamin. 2017. Using Life, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Olsson, Susanne. January 2008. ‘Apostasy in Egypt: Contemporary Cases of Ḥisbah’. The Muslim World 98(1): 95–115. Ricœur, Paul. 1988. ‘La crise: un phénomène spécifiquement moderne?’ Revue de Théologie et de Philosophie 120: 1–19. Schielke, Samuli. 2008. ‘Policing Ambiguity: Muslim Saints-Day Festivals and the Moral Geography of Public Space in Egypt’. American Ethnologist 35(4): 539–52.

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Schielke, Samuli. 2006. ‘On Snacks and Saints: When Discourses of Order and Rationality Enter the Egyptian Mawlid’. Archives de Sciences Sociales des Religions 135: 117–40. Skovgaard-Petersen, Jakob. 2013. ‘Egypt’s Ulama in the State, in Politics, and in the Islamist Vision’. In The Rule of Law, Islam, and Constitutional Politics in Egypt and Iran. Saïd Amir Arjomand, and Nathan Brown, eds., pp. 279–302. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Winegar, Jessica. 2010. ‘Culture Is the Solution: The Civilizing Mission of the Egyptian State’. Review of Middle East Studies 43(2): 189–97.

Online Resources ʾAbd Al-Bāsiṭ, Aḥmad Muḥammad. 2016. ‫ الحكم على أحمد ناجي‬:"‫جابر عصفور لـ"الوطن‬ ‫بالحبس عامين "فضيحة‬." Al-Waṭan, 20 February 2016. http://www.elwatannews.com/ news/details/984316 (accessed 12 December 2017). Abdellah, Mohamed. 2016. ‘Egypt Orders Muslim Preachers to Deliver Identical Weekly Sermons’. Aswat Masriya, 12 July 2016. http://en.aswatmasriya.com/news/ details/17318 (accessed 12 December 2017). Al-Ahrām. 13 May 2016. ‘Ishtibāk: fīlm miṣrī fī iftitāḥ maharajān Kān’. http://gate. ahram.org.eg/News/978271.aspx (accessed 12 December 2017). Al-Ahram Weekly. 09 June 2016. ‘Combating Security Threats’. http://weekly.ahram. org.eg/News/16586.aspx (accessed 12 December 2017). Faraj, Sāmiḥ. 2016. ‘‫ مع من نشتبك إذا؟ إنطباعات سريعة عن فيلم“اشتباك‬:‫’سامح فرج يكتب‬. Za2ed18, 31 July 2016. http://www.za2ed18.com/‫إنطباعات‬-‫إذا؟‬-‫نشتبك‬-‫من‬-‫مع‬-‫يكتب‬-‫فرج‬-‫سامح‬/ (accessed 12 December 2017) Fayoumya. 2016. ‫حرية الفكر واإلبداع بين دستور يعظمعها وقانون يجرمها” في ندوة “والد البلد” بالفيوم‬. Wilād el-Balad, 25 February 2016. http://fayoumya.weladelbalad.com/ ‫يعظمعها‬-‫دستور‬-‫بين‬-‫واإلبداع‬-‫الفكر‬-‫( حرية‬accessed 12 December2017). Hanafy, Rasha. 2016. ‘Les intellectuels se mobilisent’. Al-Ahram Hebdo, 2 March 2016. http://hebdo.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/1116/5/33/15367/Lesintellectuels-se-mobilisent.aspx (accessed 12 December 2017). Iaccino, Ludovica. 2014. ‘Egypt: Writer Karam Saber Sentenced to Five Years in Jail for Atheist Book’. International Business Times, 5 June 2014. http://www.ibtimes. co.uk/egypt-writer-karam-saber-sentenced-five-years-jail-atheist-book-1451453 (accessed 12 December 2017). Khatib, Hakim. 2016. ‘Egypt’s Controversial Blasphemy Law Strikes Down on Free Islamic Thought’. Your Middle East, 7 January 2016. http://www.yourmiddleeast.

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com/culture/the-controversy-of-blasphemy-in-egypt_37886 (accessed 12 December 2017). Lynx Qualey, Marcia. 2014. ‘Egyptian Censors Confiscate Novel and Philosophy Books Coming in from Beirut’. ArabLit, 4 September 2014. https://arablit. org/2014/09/04/egyptian-censors-confiscate-novel-and-philosophy-bookscomingin-from-beirut/ (accessed 12 December 2017). Lynx Qualey, Marcia. 2015. ‘Yes, Ahmed Naji Is a Novelist’. Al-Jazeera, 11 November 2015. http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2015/11/ahmednajinovelist-151108061935691.html (accessed 12 December 2017). Manṣūr, Aḥmad. 2015. ‫ننشر نص شهادة محمد سلماوى فى محاكمة أحمد ناجى‬. Al-Yawm alsābi‘, 13 December 2015. http://www.masress.com/youm7/2488043 (accessed 12 December 2017). Masoud, Moez. 2016. ‘Twitter’. https://twitter.com/MoezMasoud/ status/730910281442971649 (accessed 12 December 2017) Midḥat, Aḥmad. ‫اشتباك فيلم عن هانكس توم يعرفه ال ما‬. 2016. Masralarabiya, 30 July 2016. http://www.masralarabia.com/1180705- /‫مدح‬-‫أحمد‬-907 /‫أحمد‬-‫مدحت‬ ‫ما‬-‫ال‬-‫يعرفه‬-‫توم‬-‫هانكس‬-‫عن‬-‫فيلم‬-‫( اشتباك‬accessed 12 December 2017). Pepe, Teresa. 2015. ‘Literature Is on Trial in Egypt’. MadaMasr, 13 November 2015. https://www.madamasr.com/en/2015/11/13/opinion/culture/literature-is-on-trialin-egypt/. Rebello, Lara. 2016. ‘Egyptian Writer Fatima Naoot Gets 3-Year Sentence for Insulting Islam’. International Business Times, 28 January 2016. http://www. ibtimes.co.uk/egyptian-writer-fatima-naoot-gets-3-year-sentence-insultingislam-1540503 (accessed 12 December 2017). Said, Omar. 2015a. ‘Trial of Ahmed Naji and Editor Begins for Writing Sexually Explicit Text’. MadaMasr, 14 November 2015. http://www.madamasr.com/ news/culture/trial-ahmed-naji-and-editor-begins-writing-sexually-explicit-text (accessed 12 December 2017) Said, Omar. 2015b. ‫ ديسمبر‬١٢ ‫أحمد ناجي إلى جلسة‬. MadaMasr, 14 November 2015. http:// www.madamasr.com/ar/2015/11/14/news/12-‫ثقافة‬/‫تأجيل‬-‫قضية‬-‫الروائي‬-‫أحمد‬-‫ناجي‬-‫إلى‬‫جلسة‬/‫ ديسمب‬12 ‫( تأجيلقضيةالروائيأحمدناجيإلىجلسة‬accessed 12 December 2017). Scoop Team. 2016. ‘Tom Hanks and Daniel Craig Express Their Love for Egyptian Movie “Eshtebak”’. Scoop Empire, 26 July 2016. http://scoopempire.com/eshtebaktom-hanks-daniel-craig/(accessed 12 December 2017). Shams El-Din, Mai. 2016. ‘Al-Azhar Picks Battle with the State over Written Sermons’ MadaMasr July 25, 2016. https://www.madamasr.com/en/2016/07/25/feature/ politics/al-azharpicks-battle-with-the-state-over-written-sermons/(accessed 12 December 2017).

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Sotinel, Thomas. 2016. ‘Clash: après le bus 678, le fourgon de police’. Le Monde, 11 May 2016. http://www.lemonde.fr/festival-de-cannes/article/2016/05/12/ clash-apres-le-bus-678-le-fourgon-de-police_4917875_766360.html (accessed 12 December 2017). Vivarelli, Nick. 2016a. ‘Arab Filmmakers Strive for Wider Audience Reach on Both Local and International Fronts’. Variety, 13 May 2016. http://variety.com/2016/ film/awards/arab-filmmakers-strive-wider-audience-reach-local-foreignfronts-1201771953/ (accessed 12 December 2017). Vivarelli, Nick. 2016b. ‘Cannes Facetime: Director Mohamed Diab’. Variety, 13 May 2016. http://variety.com/2016/film/festivals/cannes-facetime-director-mohameddiab-1201773228/ (accessed 12 December 2017). Zaḥma. 2016. ‘‫ المثقفون يجتمعون في “ميريت” ومؤتمر عام في”التنوير‬:‫’ناجي في السجن‬. Zaḥma, 22 February 2016. https://zahma.cairolive.com/‫مير‬-‫في‬-‫يجتمعون‬-‫المثقفون‬-‫السجن‬-‫في‬-‫ناجي‬/ (accessed 12 December 2017).

6

The Algerian Literary Field in the ‘Black Decade’: A Reinforced Polarization Tristan Leperlier

The Algerian Civil War profoundly affected Algerian writers and intellectuals, with many of them being killed and even more of them – a quarter of all active writers – at one time or another going into exile (Leperlier, 2018a). Various armed groups, some linked to the state and some claiming to be operating for reasons of jihad, fought each other during this decade (Peyroulou, and Ellyas 2002). It is difficult to give a definite chronology of events without appearing to take up a position in the debates among those involved. Some date the beginning of the political crisis that hit the country to the army’s decision to halt the electoral process that would have been won by the Front Islamique du Salut (FIS), calling this a coup d’état. Others, those who consider the Islamist movement itself to have been responsible for the crisis, argue that it began in 1991 during the general strike called by the FIS. Others still point to the riots that took place in October 1988 as these weakened the power of the ruling FLN and led to the introduction of a multi-party system (Ait-Aoudia 2015). However, whichever date is chosen it is always the case that the country’s intellectuals were at the centre of the crisis, particularly during the early years of the violence between 1993 and 1995 when many of those who were politically engaged were the victims of attacks. It is also difficult to date the end of the Civil War, since the number of massacres increased after the surrender of the Armée Islamique du Salut (AIS, Islamic Salvation Army) in 1997, and there have been intermittent acts of terrorism up until the present day. Here again, the date chosen for the end of the Civil War also means taking up a position in the debates, since it means giving the credit for the end of the War either to President Liamine Zéroual or President Abdelaziz Bouteflika. Without getting

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involved in these debates, it can at least be said that the chronology of the Algerian literary field does not follow the country’s political chronology even in broad outline. To what extent was the Algerian literary field affected by the Civil War? The introduction of the ‘field’ as a theoretical tool allows precisely not to slap the political issues and the political chronology on a space that operates to a certain extent in an autonomous way. On the contrary, one must observe the ways in which the politics is ‘refracted’, according to Pierre Bourdieu (1996), in the (relatively autonomous) field in question. Despite the political crisis, the rules of the literary field do not entirely disappear.1 Contrary to the idea that crisis is exceptional, this chapter will show that the Civil War acted on the literary field in a way that was in line with its previous structures. The political crisis acted to reinforce statistical tendencies in the literary field that had already been seen earlier. The Algerian literary field can be described as being both bilingual and transnational (Leperlier, 2018b. See also Lang in this volume). As a result, most of its actors spontaneously cite their peers regardless of this dual dividing line. Indeed, the national paradigm of ‘Algerian literature’ remains central to these peripheral writers and paradoxically also noticeable when some writers try to deny someone else’s belonging to this ‘Algerian literature’ because of their geographical or linguistic choices. It is no less the case that the linguistic division between Arabic and French (Tamazight is still of only secondary importance) is incorporated into separate institutions such as reviews, university departments and publishers, as well as transnational spaces with their capitals in Paris (Casanova 2008) or Beirut (Mermier 2005), leading to talk of two subfields that are relatively independent from each other. By examining the Algerian literary field through the particular prism of a bibliographical database, it will be shown that the effect of the crisis has been the reinforcement of the bipolarization that structures the Algerian literary field. It will also been examined to what extent the entry in crisis of this literary field, as well as its exit from it (its ‘depolarization’), depend on factors external or internal to the field: this will allow us to measure to what extent the field managed to maintain a certain autonomy during the crisis. The study draws on a unique bibliographical database of about 2000 literary works by Algerian writers published between 1998 and 2004. The data were

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put together from information from the Algerian legal deposit system, the Limag database, the Electre database, the records of the King Abdel-Aziz Al Saoud Foundation for Islamic Studies and the Human Sciences in Casablanca, the Website of the Foundation of the Abdel-Aziz Saoud al-Babtain Foundation for Poetic Creativity (Mu’assasat jā’iza ʽAbd al-ʽAzīz Saʽūd al-Bābṯayn li-libdāʽ al-shiʽrī), titles given by Achour Cheurfi in his Ecrivains algériens. Dictionnaire biographique [Algerian Writers: A Biographical Dictionary] (Algiers: Casbah, 2004), titles listed by Mohand Akli Salhi in ‘La nouvelle littérature kabyle et ses rapports à l’oralité traditionnelle’ [The New Kabyle Literature and Its Relationship to Traditional Orality] in La Littérature amazighe [Amazigh Literature] (Rabat: Institut royal de la culture amazighe, 2004), as well as numerous internet searches. The major shortcoming of this database lies in the fact that there is no reliable information available on the literature published in the Arab countries – there is no system of legal deposit in Lebanon, for example – and this is without even mentioning the importance of self-publishing in Algeria and in the other Arab countries, which is even less likely to be recorded. However, numerous internet searches along with the qualitative research and interviews with writers writing in Arabic conducted as part of the study have confirmed that the latter not often publish their works abroad. After coding the data, eight variables were selected for analysis: ‘language of the text’, ‘genre’, ‘publisher’ (and ‘recoded publisher’), ‘place of publication’ (recoded as ‘country of publication’), ‘year of publication’ and ‘version of the text’. The present chapter concentrates on ‘versions’ (first edition, translation, republished in another country and co-edition), ‘languages’ (French, Arabic, Tamazight or others) and ‘country of publication’ (Algeria, France or Other country).

Immune to the crisis? The first observation that can be made from the data is that the production of Algerian writers paradoxically appears to have been unaffected by the political crisis. It will be noted that Algerian literary production as a whole, unchanging since the middle of the previous decade (as can be seen from

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production in French), continues at the same level until 1996. It is only at this date that it begins to increase at a steady rate, almost quadrupling in seven years and going from 72 titles in 1996 to 267 in 2003. As a result, it seems that the multifaceted crisis experienced by Algeria in the 1990s did not affect the overall production of Algerian literature, given that it increased markedly after the most intense period of the political and security crisis in the country between 1993 and 1996. The political and literary chronologies do not overlap, and the political crisis even had a counter-intuitive role to play with regard to literary production. The relationship between the languages also did not change much (Figure 6.2). Even though the number of titles produced in Arabic increased towards the end of the period, quadrupling when the number of titles produced in French only tripled, the overall dominance of publication in French over the two other languages is still noticeable at between three-fifths and threequarters of total production. This can in part be explained by the role played by foreign publishers in publishing Algerian writers, as seen in Figure 6.1. This graph shows that even though the crisis did not affect Algerian production overall, it did have different effects regarding the country of publication. The intertwining curves show the importance of French publishers in the 1990s,

200 180 160 140 120 100 80 60

Other countries France Algeria

40 20 0 1988 1990 1992 1994 1996 1998 2000 2002 2004

Figure 6.1  Publications by country. Field: All literary works by Algerian writers between 1988 and 2004 (n=2002).

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300 250 200 150 100 50

Arabic (Arabic) French Tamazight and other Total

0 1985 1987 1989 1991 1993 1995 1997 1999 2001 2003

Figure 6.2  Publications by language. Field: All literary works by Algerian writers between 1988 and 2004 (n=2002), plus publications in French and Arabic between 1985 and 1987.2

the crisis accentuating their pre-existing importance. Historically speaking, to publish in Paris was a matter of course for francophone writers in Algeria, whether they were Europeans or Muslims, as it was for any other ‘region’ of French literature. While this ‘evidence’ was later called into question by the rise of nationalism, it nevertheless continued because of difficulties in publishing with national publishers, particularly because of censorship. From a third of the total production at the beginning of the 1990s, the proportion of works published in France by Algerian writers increased to more than half during the worst years of the crisis in the second half of the decade and to around 65 per cent in 1995. The stagnation of Algerian production seen in Figure 6.2 in fact conceals a phenomenon of communicating vessels between Algeria and France that the crisis seems only to have accentuated. As for publication in other countries, this was never above 10 per cent of the total, and it hovered around an average of 5 per cent during the period, being divided on an equal basis between the Arab countries (where works were published almost entirely in Arabic) and the European countries and North America (where they were generally in French). Despite the rebound in the production in Algeria in 1997, it was only after 1999 that this began definitively to outweigh that of France. This was not the result of the end of the Civil War in Algeria but instead of the reintroduction of Algerian cultural policies favouring literary publication. As Luis Martinez has shown (Martinez 1998), the return of oil revenues was one of the most

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important factors leading to the victory of the Algerian military over the AIS and the various jihadist groups at the time, but in itself the increase in Algerian publications was not strictly speaking linked to the end of the War. State aid for publishers started in 1997, when the Bibliothèque Nationale d’Algérie, the Algerian National Library, began to buy between 200 and 300 copies of all the books published in the country, which partly explain the rebound in publication in 1997. This was also something like an act of catching-up, as it could be thought that all the books that had been difficult to publish before that date would now be able to find a publisher. In subsequent years, state aid continued to increase with the establishment of the Fonds National pour la Promotion et le développement des Arts et des Lettres, the National Fund for the Promotion and Development of the Arts and Letters, which generally aimed to buy 1,000 copies of selected titles for the country’s public libraries. The upturn in the curve from 2001 to 2003 is directly linked to the Year of Algeria in France (YAF) that took place in 2003. However, as is always the case for events of this kind (Sapiro 2008), the effect of the YAF on literary production was only temporary. After 2003, the level of literary production in Algeria fell back to what could have been expected a few years beforehand. The sudden separation between the curves of publication in France and Algeria should not therefore lead to false conclusions. If we compare the averages of the two periods just before and just after the crisis (1988–93 and 1999–2004), reducing the temporary effect of the YAF, it will be seen that production in Algeria has certainly tripled in size, going from 45 to 135 titles, but that production in France has also doubled (25–55 titles) and that it continues to represent around a third of total production (from 35 to 30 per cent of the whole). More recent data would probably show an increasing separation of the two curves (25 per cent in 2004), but to an extent that must be nuanced, as has been seen. As a result, both the long term and the medium term of fifteen years seem to contradict the idea of the Civil War having a major impact on the literary field. The effects of the crisis are more to be seen in the short term and in the distribution of the languages in the countries: the crisis having had different effects in the two linguistic subfields.

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Reinforced bipolarization of the literary field Figure 6.3 confirms that the political instability seen in Algeria after October 1988 and the processes of liberalization and democratization did not in themselves have a major effect on Algerian literary production. In fact the liberalization of the cultural sector, literature in particular, had already taken place in Algeria from the mid-1980s onwards. The de facto monopoly over Algerian publishing that had previously been enjoyed by the Entreprise nationale algérienne du livre (ENAL – the Algerian National Book Organization) was broken at this time by the upsurge of private publishers, mostly francophone, such as Bouchène and Laphomic. The graph also allows observing that the two languages have two different temporalities. The Arabic production curve can be divided into two periods. From 1988 to 1996, production is stable at around 15 titles on average, but then a leap upwards takes place in 1997 followed by a period of strong growth, with an average of 80 titles being published after 2002. On the other hand, the francophone production curve can be divided into three periods. From 1988 to 1993, it is stable at around twenty-five titles being published per year, before plunging downwards from 1994 to 1999, when only some ten titles were published. It then caught up with Arabic production at the beginning of the new millennium, when around seventy-five titles were published.

100 80 French in France French in Algeria French in Algeria (all) Arabic in Algeria

60 40 20 0 1988

1990

1992

1994

1996

1998

2000

2002

2004

Figure 6.3  Languages by country. Field: First edition of literary works by Algerian writers in Arabic and French, in Algeria and France, between 1988 and 2004 (n=1680), and all literary works in French in Algeria between 1999 and 2004 (n=376).

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It can thus be noted that the crisis in Algeria affected production in French above all, the chronology of which clearly follows that of the political crisis. From 30 titles being published per year in 1993, the number fell to only 3 in 1996, also being outnumbered by production in Tamazight, and it did not return to the level that it had seen at the beginning of the 1990s until the beginning of the 2000s. This fall in numbers is not only to be explained by the political crisis, however. The closure of the public sector company ENAL took place as a result of a decision to reduce costs that was not directly related to the political crisis. But while literature in Arabic began to appear in the private sector, sometimes from publishers close to the Islamist movement (Ibdāʽ) or at least not hostile to it (AlJāḥidhiyya), taking up the slack left by the disappearance of the ENAL, literature in French was left to suffer. Bouchène, a left-wing publisher, was obliged to go into exile in France in the wake of threats against it, and Laphomic ceased its activities because of the security situation in the country. Only Le Fennec, based in the west of the country at Aïn Temouchent and relatively safe from the security standpoint, was able to put together a list that was mostly francophone, but its activities, energetic though they were, were brief in duration. Publishing poetry and short books of various kinds (sixty-five pages on average), Le Fennec seems to have halted its operations for economic reasons. Beyond the economic crisis affecting the whole of the literary field, and the political and security questions that affected Arabic-language production a little less because of the proximity of some Arabic-language writers to the Islamists, it would seem that the main explanation for the very significant fall in the number of publications in French was the ease with which books could be published in France, providing a quick solution to the reduced opportunities available in Algeria. The curves describing French-language production in France and Algeria are the mirror image of each other between 1993 and 1997, indicating the off-shoring process of francophone production during this period. Thus, the proportion produced by the French publisher L’Harmattan, the most important publisher of Algerian writers during the period and one which for the most part publishes books at the author’s expense, went from 7 per cent of total production in French at the beginning of the 1990s to an average of 18 per cent between 1992 and 1995. On the other hand, the later growth in Algerian production that took place in France owed less to the off-shoring of publishing to France by Algerian authors prepared to pay for their books to be

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published than to a French demand in the media and the publishing industry that started, particularly after the 1995 terrorist attacks in France. From this period onwards, the demand of French publishers for books by Algerian writers went hand-in-hand with the supply of Algerian writers themselves, often living in exile for political reasons, and it even led to some career changes, like journalists becoming writers. It was then no longer an off-shored Algerian publishing in France, but more a French publication of Algerian literature. This opportunity for Algerian writers to publish in Paris and come out head high from the tragedy of their exile was also fed by the idea that it was impossible to publish in Algeria, even for those still living there. Nevertheless, a publisher such as Marinoor, owned by a military figure close to the most anti-Islamist side of the regime, was still able to publish literature in French in Algiers after 1996, if only in dribs and drabs. However, while at that time terrorism no longer prevented cultural activities in the big cities, the Civil War remained present in minds, and this delayed any exit of the literary field from the crisis. As a result, for reasons that have as much to do with the political positions taken up by the writers themselves as with the strongly transnational structure of the literary francophone subfield, during the most severe years of the political crisis in Algeria a bipolarization of the Algerian literary field along both territorial and linguistic lines was seen. In Algeria, production in Arabic continued by writers who did not oppose the Islamists directly, or even supported them under their breath. On the contrary, in France was being concentrated nearly all Algerian francophone literature by writers of whom the vast majority were radically anti-Islamist. This phenomenon could support the essentializing discourse of the period, which, promoted by radicals on both sides, held that the Civil War was in fact a ‘war of languages’, French being the language of secularism or Western alienation and Arabic being the language of Islamism or authenticity. On the contrary, it can be seen that this division was in fact the result of a historical process that harked back to earlier trends structuring the field. These included the earlier transnational character of the Algerian literature written in French and the higher concentration of commitment in the left side among French-language writers. This situation thus led a certain number of radically anti-Islamist writers writing in Arabic to publish their work in France, and therefore in French,

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since there was enormous pressure being put on Algerian publishers by jihadists and terrorists at the time. (Something similar was also seen in Lebanon, one writer talking in an interview about his publisher’s fear of being targeted by Hezbollah.) It was the case for writers such as Rachid Boudjedra, Amin Zaoui, Waciny Laredj, Mohamed Sari and Merzak Bagtache. After they started to be published in France in French, they contributed to already existing statistical trends and, despite themselves and their strong denials, to the belief of some in the supposedly essential difference between the French and Arabic languages.

The end of the crisis and reduced polarization Did the bipolarization in Algerian literary production end at the beginning of the new millennium? While up until 1998 translations and the acquisition of international rights represented only at most 5 per cent of total production (reeditions and posthumous editions excluded, according to the way the data are put together), they represented up to 20 per cent of the total in 2002, increasing the circulation of books between the different languages and between the two countries. Figure 6.3 shows that the curves representing production in French and Arabic in Algeria and France also rejoined at this time. In particular, it can be seen that French-language production in Algeria increased very rapidly, catching up with the level of publication in Arabic and ending the situation in which Algerian literature in French had been associated with France. Algerian publishing in French, the disappearance of which had been feared (Sadek 1997) (or hoped for) by some, had thus regained the place it had enjoyed before the crisis. But the increase in French-language production in Algeria does not mean that there was a systematic ‘relocation of production’ from France to Algeria. Generally speaking, less than 5 per cent of all publications are republications in another country (generally from abroad to Algeria, aside from some rare cases such as Rachid Mimouni’s work in the 1980s and more recently books by Barzakh publishing house). Begun at the end of the 1980s by the publishers Bouchène and Laphomic, the strategy of buying up the rights to republish works that had first appeared

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abroad was taken up by Marsa-Alger at the beginning of the 2000s, which published almost 60 per cent of all the titles republished in Algeria in the period covered by the data. This strategy has been greatly assisted by the French government, particularly by the Bureau du Livre of the French Embassy in Algeria and the Bureau du Livre Français à l’Etranger run by the French Ministry of Culture at the beginning of the decade. This aid was almost indispensable, in that the Algerian dinar cannot be used for such transactions, and the Bureau du Livre therefore took charge of them and paid in francs (or euros).3 However, Marsa’s strategy of ‘relocating’ books published in France was later reduced when they became more accessible on the Algerian market. Moreover, few authors publish back to Algeria (‘relocate’) after having first published their books abroad, aside from those who had published their work with very small publishers in France. The continuation of the same level of publication in France after the crisis was essentially due to the fact that Algerian writers, often bound by publishers’ contracts, continued to publish their books in France. French aid in relocating publishing back to Algeria was not negligible, and it indicates something of the role France played in helping to unite (debipolarize) the Algerian literary field. This role was reinforced during the ‘Djazaïr, Year of Algeria in France’ event, which as its name indicates consisted of a set of events designed to promote Algerian culture in France from 31 December 2002 to 31 December 2003 and was agreed by French president Jacques Chirac and Algerian president Abdelaziz Bouteflika during an official visit by the latter to Paris. As far as the publishing industry was concerned, the committee in charge of the YAF oversaw a system of grants: The cultural partnership will cover, in France, 133 authors and 144 publishers, or 275 works by Algerian authors. In order to promote these books, a thousand copies of each title will be given to French municipal libraries and other educational institutions. Monsieur Mohamed Raouraoua, head of the committee organizing the Year of Algeria in France for the Algerian side, said: ‘I am very pleased that this cooperation has come to pass. We have not hesitated to increase the aid budget for publication. The year of Algeria is open to all without exception … ’ It should be remembered that the funds made available for the organization of the Year of Algeria were around 90 billion centimes [of Algerian dinar]. (El Watan 21 April 2002)

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The very extensive Franco-Algerian financing of this event was thus part of the policy of providing grants for publication developed earlier.4 Algerian cultural policy and French soft power5 went hand-in-hand but also with Algerian soft power. The new Algerian government intended to use the YAF as a way of restoring a positive image to the country abroad at a time when the attacks in Algeria had still far from disappeared. It had a definite effect in putting the publishers on more secure foundations and contributed to rebuilding the publishing industry as a whole. ‘The leaders of the publishing industry are grateful to the organizing committee of the Year of Algeria in France for the considerable help it has given in relaunching the publishing sector. This has been seen in the production by the committee of more than 400 titles in various subject areas […]’ (El Watan 19 May 2003). If these figures are to be believed, literature profited by this help in a very significant way: out of our database we count some 80 works ‘published with the support of the organizing committee of the Year of Algeria in France’, according to the formula appearing on their inside pages. This means that one book in five of those supported by the YAF was a work of literature. Moreover, the financial aid played an even more important role if we look only at the francophone literature. Eighty-five per cent of the financial support given by the committee of the YAF was allocated to literature in French, 90 per cent if translations are included. YAF did not have only short-term effects on the francophone subfield. If first editions alone are taken into account, it can be seen that production in French for 2004 is the same as it was in the preceding year, and more recent data would probably also confirm this tendency. Between 2001 and 2002, French-language production went from 28 to 68 titles published as first editions and 85 in 2004. As a result, the YAF acted to help long-term reconstruct Algeria’s francophone literary infrastructure. Despite allegations of nepotism in the handing out of public commissions, which increased sharply in number after the YAF, these nevertheless helped to ensure the financial stability of many Algerian publishers, among them Barzakh, and helped Algerian francophone literature to depend less on the French publishing industry. The international success of Meursault, contre-enquête [The Meursault Investigation] by Kamel Daoud, first published by Barzakh in 2013 before

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the rights were sold to the French publisher Actes Sud in 2014, is an important indication of the renewed capacity of some Algerian publishers at least to recruit promising authors. Production in Arabic was less affected by the financial aid, and with delay: it was only in 2003 that a significant increase in Arabic-language books was seen, with production going from 67 titles in 2002 to 94 in 2003, and even then it seems to be for the committee of YAF a matter of catching up with francophone production or a way of looking for a balance between the two languages after the emphasis had been placed on French. However, this policy of favouring French-language publishing was also clearly explained by the fact that French-language books could be exported to France in order to promote Algerian culture. The whole of the Algerian publishing sector benefitted from this policy in favour of French, and publishers that up until 2003 had only ever published in Arabic, such as the Algerian Writers Union (AWU), or alIkhtilāf, now started to publish authors writing in French (al-ikhtilāf) or to commission translations of their authors into French (AWU) in order to take advantage of the grants. Indeed, the number of translations from Arabic to French considerably increased, the YAF being an opportunity for Arabic-language writers in Algeria to gain greater visibility in France. Such translations amounted to 15 per cent of publications for 2002 and 2003. The events organized in France also brought together francophone and arabophone writers who did not always speak to each other in Algeria. However, this policy did not increase the circulations between the two languages on the long-term scale. The translations stopped after the 2003 YAF. Moreover, the increase in translations from Arabic into French did not result in an increase in the number of translations from French to Arabic that was already rarer than the former. These translations from Arabic to French represent three-quarters of all the translations published in the period, 80 per cent of them done in 2002 and 2003. The bilingualism of many arabophone writers and the relative lack of interest of many francophone writers in the publications of their arabophone peers explain that translation in both ways is the result of a policy – in this case as much French as Algerian. The YAF contributed to the depolarization of the literary field less to the extent that it increased the circulation between the languages than to the extent

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that it was part of the general policy of promoting of the French language, along with the identity campaign launched by President Bouteflika designed to promote the ‘plurality’ of Algeria, as a way of rallying the support of the anti-Islamists and also of papering over the violence that took place in Kabylie after the ‘Black Spring’ of 2001. However, the partial unification (depolarization) of the literary field cannot be reduced to the effects of policy initiatives and diplomatic decisions alone. These in turn relied on an Algerian avant-garde movement that brought together young writers and editors associated with the publishers Barzakh and al-Ikhtilāf, and this alliance between writers and editors working in the two languages of French and Arabic was based on the same opposition to the unprecedented domination of francophone writers publishing in France. It was a literary opposition, against what was castigated as a ‘literature of emergency’ dedicated for foreign market. But this opposition is also to be related to a generational one – the younger writers were born at the end of the 1960s, while the writers exiled in France had been born in the 1950s – and a political one. The younger writers rejected the radical anti-Islamism of the exiles, and for some because of their own sympathies with the Islamists at the beginning of the 1990s.

Conclusion Thanks to the statistical survey of literary works, it can be said that the Algerian literary field retained a certain degree of autonomy even during the worst years of the Civil War. The political and literary chronologies did not overlap, and the effects of the crisis on the literary field were felt in ways that were proper to it, notably in terms of bilingualism and transnationalism. Despite this, the autonomy of the field was strongly affected, and political tendencies in the two linguistic groups led to radically different developments. But the decline in the number of French-language titles published in Algeria cannot be explained by the political variable alone, but must also be put down to variables that are more properly literary, including opportunities for publication in France, that the crisis opened up wider for exiled Algerian writers. By contrast, the end of the crisis afflicting the Algerian literary field was due primarily to factors external to it, such as the intertwined political and diplomatic interests of

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France and Algeria, and only secondarily to factors internal to the field itself, the bilingual alliance that took place in the Algerian literary avant-garde being a way of taking up position against francophone writers publishing in France and dominating the field at the time.

Notes 1 The effects of the ‘synchronization’ of fields (Bourdieu 1988) that the political crisis led to in the intellectual field are not explored here. 2 Arabic-language production for 1985–7 is given in an indicative fashion (as a dotted line) as the way in which Hadj Miliani collected his data differed from that adopted by Jean Déjeux and myself. Miliani used information provided by the Entreprise nationale algérienne du livre (ENAL – the Algerian National Book Organization), which is very misleading as the 800 Dewey class includes works that are not literary and also does not take into account publications not registered by the ENAL. Déjeux, on the other hand, divides the publications he counts into genres, meaning that he has checked all the titles. See Miliani (2002) and Déjeux (1993). 3 Interview in Algiers with Rachid Alik, in charge of the Bureau du Livre at the French Institute in Algiers (27 February 2013). 4 It also provided the model for the policy of making grants to ‘large-scale projects’ that the country later adopted. 5 ‘Richard Jacquemond has underlined the role played by French cultural diplomacy in the exchange of translations with the Arab world’ (Jacquemond 2008: 357–8).

Bibliography Ait-Aoudia, Myriam. 2015. L’Expérience démocratique en Algérie (1988–1992). Apprentissages politiques et changement de régime [The Democratic Experiment in Algeria (1988–1992). Political Lessons Learned and Regime Change]. Paris: Presses de Sciences Po. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1996. The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1988. Homo Academicus. Cambridge: Polity Press. Casanova, Pascale. 2004. The World Republic of Letters. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

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Déjeux, Jean. 1993. Maghreb, littératures de langue francaise [French-Language Literatures of the Maghreb]. Paris: Arcantère. Hadj, Miliani 2002. Une Littérature en sursis? Le champ littéraire de langue francaise en Algérie [Literature on Borrowed Time? The French-Language Literary Field in Algeria]. Paris: L’Harmattan. Hakim, Sadek. ‘Le devoir de témoigner’, Liberté, 3 February 1997, p. 11. Jacquemond, Richard. 2008. ‘Les flux de traduction entre le francais et l’arabe depuis les années 1980 [Translation between French and Arabic since the 1980s]’. In Translatio: Le marché de la traduction en France à l’heure de la mondialisation [The Translation Market in France during the Period of Globalization]. Sapiro, Gisèle, ed., 347–370. Paris: CNRS Editions. Leperlier, Tristan. 2018a. Algérie, Les écrivains dans la décennie noire [Algeria, the Writers During the Black Decade.]. Paris: Editions du CNRS. Leperlier, Tristan. 2018b. ‘Un champ littéraire transnational ? Le cas des écrivains algériens’ [‘A Transnational Literary Field? The Case of Algerian Writers’]. Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 224, 12–33. Martinez, Luis. 1998. La Guerre civile en Algérie: 1990–1998 [The Civil War in Algeria, 1990–1998]. Paris: Karthala. Mermier, Franck. 2005. Le Livre et la ville: Beyrouth et l’édition arabe [The Book and the City: Beirut and Arab Publishing]. Arles: Actes Sud/Sindbad. N.C., ‘Salon national du livre, 200 écrivains au Hamma’. El Watan, 19 May 2003. Peyroulou, Jean-Pierre, and Akram. Ellyas. 2002. L’Algérie en guerre civile [Algeria in Civil War]. Paris: Calmann-Lévy. Sapiro, Gisèle (ed.). 2008. Translatio: Le marché de la traduction en France à l’heure de la mondialisation [The Translation Market in France during the Period of Globalization]. Paris: CNRS Editions. Smaïl, K. ‘Rebond éditorial mais…’. El Watan, 21 April 2002, p. 15. Thibaud, Paul. ‘Génération algérienne ?’ Esprit (161), May 1990, p. 46–60.

7

Successive Shifts in the Yemeni Cultural Field 2011–16 Laurent Damesin

The advent of a ‘modern’ cultural field (novel, short story, poetry, drama) in Yemen was due to a cultural crisis born out of a colonial context when, at the turn of the twentieth century, the new Arab middle-class in Aden was made acutely aware of a ‘profound cultural gap’ between them and the Indian and European communities of Adeni colonial society (Tuchscherer 1985: 334 and 348). This provided the impetus for a profound cultural renewal with the creation of a ‘salon’ culture from the 1920s onwards, which would lead in the 1940s to the first Yemeni novel and short stories published in the first Adeni newspaper in Arabic (Tuchscherer 1985: 334 and 348) and to the Adeni Arab minority choosing Arab Nationalism as a grammar to articulate their first demands for independence (Bin ʿAlī 2002). However, in general, political crises have tended to have, at most, major consequences on cultural production over the medium term, such as when, at the turn of the 1990s, the First Gulf War and the collapse of the Soviet Union forced the Yemen Arab Republic in the north and the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen in the south to seek unification. The constitution of the new Republic of Yemen proved to be more liberal, and brought about a literary boom in the late 1990s (Dawāf 2005: 177), as a new generation of Yemeni writers took on the taboos of Yemeni society.

Yet, if the situation in Yemen is any indication, political crises can often have contradictory effects on cultural producers. They can be an obstacle to creation: prolonged power cuts and water shortages in Sanaa make Yemeni writer Wajdī al-Ahdal state that the people in Sanaa ‘have exited civilisation’

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(Jubrān 2018), while novelist Ali al-Muqri (‘Alī al-Muqrī) (Joubert 2016) says his life as an exile in France cannot afford him the peace of mind he needs to write. However, the media attention given to Yemen in the pan-Arab and Western media meant Ali al-Muqri got to write an op-ed in the New York Times (al-Muqri 2011), Wajdī al-Ahdal is now published by a Lebanese publisher specializing in best-sellers (Librairie Naufal) and both have been translated into French and English. For the minority of writers1 who chose in early 2011 to get involved in the revolutionary movement in Change Square, such as poet and Sanaa University professor ‘Abbās,2 working with the organizers of Change Square meant devoting all his time to that end. Getting involved also meant temporarily putting aside more high-minded literary aspirations to focus on writing literature supporting the movement, as in the case of prize-winning short story writer Ahmad3 who said he only wrote opeds during that period. Such individual testimonies can be insightful to understand the influence of the revolutionary movement, just as exploring the aesthetics of Change Square (face painting, pictures of Che Guevara and Mahatma Gandhi) and its new forms of cultural production (reggae and rap); however, addressing only those aspects just tells half the story of the effects of the revolutionary movement on cultural production. In order to do so, we need to study cultural producers as a group rather than focusing on certain members and, rather than Anselm Strauss’s ‘social worlds’ (1978) or Becker’s ‘art world’ (2008), resort to a conceptual framework designed specifically to analyse the influence of one major sphere of social activity on another, Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of ‘social fields’, as exemplified in his own analysis of nineteenthcentury French cultural producers. The theory was amended and expanded by Bourdieu himself in his lifetime (more specifically the ‘literary’ field) (Bourdieu 1992), as well as later researchers such as Bernard Lahire, Pascale Casanova and Gisèle Sapiro, thus granting the concept a certain flexibility. What is important is that some basic rules remain: for instance, members of a social field need to be involved in ‘symbolic competition’, and members of the group position themselves strategically based on what the other group members are doing. More central to my research is the expansion of the concept by Pascale Casanova dealing with power relations between a literary centre and its periphery. Her ideas are central to addressing the relationship

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between Yemeni writers and actors in the literary capitals of the Arab world: Cairo and Beirut, and the new cultural pole in the Gulf. As such, Bourdieu’s theory of the literary field is the only conceptual framework able to address such complex issues. Finally, because actually ‘producing’ contemporary Yemeni literature is integral to the workings of the Yemeni cultural field, I also draw heavily on Howard Becker’s notion of ‘art world’ (2008) whereby literary production encompasses the audience, critics, institutional backing, all the way to the publisher and his machines. Regarding the Yemeni cultural field from 2011 onwards, in the first section, we address the emergence of new forms of cultural production born out of Change Square, a sit-in area which spanned over three kilometres, was defended by a division of the army and lasted three years. This provided a safe space for the revolutionary movement to showcase their programme and the youth culture of the movement. However, we also examine how the revolutionary movement created a tension in the relations between cultural producers and the regime, to the point that the Yemeni Writers’ Union was shut down and that Yemen’s unique ecosystem for literary publishing collapsed. In our second section, we examine the reaction in 2012–13 to the spread of the culture of Change Square to mainstream Yemeni society as various religious actors resort to declaring ‘kāfir’ (infidel) several members of the progressive cultural field, who aim through their work to address the taboos of Yemeni society, and write according to what is acceptable in the literary capitals of Cairo and Beirut. Finally, in our last section, as Yemen descends into civil war, we take a look at how Yemeni writers in particular are dealing with the wartime context, while both warring parties are fighting to co-opt cultural producers for their own propaganda purposes. Most of the material for this chapter is based on over a hundred interviews between 2008 and 2016 in Yemen and abroad of Yemeni writers, academics, journalists, heads of institutions, publishers and bookshop owners. The cultural actors interviewed have been anonymized to guarantee their privacy and, because of the few female Yemeni writers where providing any information might be enough to give away their identity, all female interviewees are referred to as male.

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Change Square But first, we need to examine what was probably one of the most important events in the history of Yemen in the last twenty years not only as a challenge to the regime of Ali Abdallah Saleh, but also as an opportunity to radically potentially change certain major traits of Yemeni society. In February 2011, protesters started a sit-in at the gate of the New University of Sanaa, demanding an end to the regime of President Ali Abdallah Saleh. Three months later, the sit-in consisted of hundreds of tents (Poirier 2013) spanning over three kilometres of the old Sanaa ring road and was renamed Change Square. After fifty protesters were killed in Change Square on 18 March 2011 (Friday of Dignity, Jumʿat al-Karāma), a breakaway division of the Yemeni Army (the 1st Armoured Brigade) moved in to protect the sit-in area. Change Square thus provided a safe space for the revolutionary movement to showcase their slogans: non-violence (a non-violent revolution and an end to tribal violence), equality (gender equality as well as an end to the strict traditional Yemeni social hierarchy) and a dialogue throughout the hundreds of tents over the meaning of the ‘civil state’ (al-dawla al-madaniyya). Furthermore, in an endeavour to boost morale among protesters and to draw visitors to the sit-in area, the organizers of Change Square decided to hold daily cultural events from around 4:00 PM onwards (Bonnefoy 2012: 903).

The culture of Change Square: Between youth culture and NGO culture: Revolutionary bodies Walled off from the rest of Sanaa, protesters started appropriating the sit-in area, redecorating the streets with banners and photo-shopped collages of the martyrs. The aesthetics of Change Square probably drew heavily from the demonstrations themselves, at least those witnessed at the beginning of the movement. There was something carnival-like about the processions: large groups of – mostly – young men and women, banging on drums while singing or chanting, some of the young men actually marching shirtless (something generally frowned upon), the Yemeni flags painted on their faces rendering them all hard to recognize. As part of the carnival atmosphere, certain rules as to how people went about in Change Square would loosen up, most noticeably

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for women. As such, quite a few women would wear a hijab rather than a niqab and attend the daily cultural events and take part in protests alongside their male counterparts – something quite unique for all to see – thus Change Square stood out in stark contrast with the rest of Sanaa. In addition to the makeup, the protesters, who – initially at least – were mostly young jobless university graduates, dressed according to the codes of a globalized youth culture. Effigies of handsome young Che Guevara recast as a romantic revolutionary, or a non-violent Gandhi were omnipresent, either as badges worn on regular clothes, on tee-shirts, or on headbands (not unlike the Hamas headbands handed out in support of Gaza in 2008). These symbols of a globalized Western culture also extend to musical forms expressing dissent, such as local variations of reggae and rap. Not that these forms of music were very new in Yemen by 2011 but, rather, they used to be the preserve of a wellto-do Westernized elite: instead of playing for the customers of Sanaa’s trendy coffee shops, these musicians suddenly found themselves playing on a regular basis to audiences of several hundreds.

Change Square as a new source of cultural legitimacy It is interesting to note that Change Square started being a reference: bands like Yemeni reggae band ‘3 Meters Away’ would be asked to play at certain progressive forums (muntadayāt, weekly get-togethers where like-minded people chew qat leaves, a stimulant, and discuss politics and culture) where they were presented as the ‘sound of Change Square’, after having been seen on the main stage there. Thus, for a while at least, the sit-in area seemed to function as a unique source of legitimacy for creative forms that had not previously had any: regarding forms of music such as rap and reggae, although traditional Yemeni performers such as Ayūb Ṭārish ʿAbsī had achieved considerable recognition within the cultural field and the public at large and while Lebanese and Egyptian pop music are quite popular, music genres such as rap and reggae were virtually unheard of. Finally, as is the case when several actors compete for recognition (symbolic capital), this led to symbolic fighting whereby the various actors of Change Square would argue to define who ‘belonged’ to Change Square, thus resorting to delegitimizing discourses

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to tarnish the reputation of competing actors (‘He is not a true believer in the revolution, he’s only in it for the fame!’4).

The negative impact of Change Square on the cultural field Although Change Square did have a positive effect on the careers of some of the writers who sided with the revolutionary movement, such as novelist Ali alMuqri, longlisted twice for the Arab Booker Prize, who got to write a column in the New York Times (al-Muqri 2011) and in the French daily Libération, the rise of the revolutionary movement did negatively impact writers as a whole: leading to both the temporary implosion of one of the cultural field’s oldest institutions, the Yemeni Writers’ Union and – more permanently – the end of the eco-system for literary publishing, representing a potential measure of financial autonomy for Yemeni writers.

The Yemeni Writers’ Union The Yemeni Writers’ Union (Ittiḥād al-udabāʾ wa-l-kuttāb al-yamaniyyīn) is one of the oldest and largest institutions in the Yemeni cultural field. The Union was created in 1970 and was open to writers of both North and South Yemen at the time. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Yemeni Writers’ Union helped publish in association with the socialist regime of South Yemen collections of short stories regarded as ‘classics’ of modern Yemeni literature that had hitherto only been published in the Adeni press.5 During the 2004 Sanaa Capital of Arab Culture festival, the Writers’ Union co-published about 400 young Yemeni writers, in association with private publisher, the Obadi Centre for Research and Publishing (Markaz ʿUbādī li-l-dirāsāt wa-l-nashr). The Union had branches in eleven out of the twenty-one governorates in Yemen, most of which also had their own magazine in addition to the head office’s nationwide publication. Furthermore, the main branch in Sanaa as well as the other branches in the governorates would also provide a functions room for writers to host launch parties, a crucial event especially for young writers in Yemen. Finally, because the Yemeni health infrastructure is rather lacking and any sophisticated treatment entails a trip abroad (generally to Jordan), the Writers’

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Union also helped its members pay for healthcare. Over the last forty years, the Writers’ Union has generally sided with its members on the issue of freedom of artistic expression against censorship by the regime. Also, the progressive values of the Writers’ Union seemed quite similar to those advertised by the revolutionary movement. So, why did the rise of the revolutionary movement cause the Union to shut down after forty years of existence? In fact, when the sit-in area first appeared in Sanaa, the Union issued a statement supporting it. However, according to Hussein,6 employee at the ministry of Culture and member of the Writers’ Union, when the Saleh administration heard about the Writers’ Union siding with the revolutionary movement, the Minister of Finance threatened to cut the subsidies to the Writers’ Union. Indeed, the branches in far-removed governorates, the magazines they published and the healthcare benefits, none of these came cheap. Although the Union has some real estate holdings in Aden, neither those nor the members’ subscription fees covered the budget of the Union. As such, the Ministry of Culture had always subsidized the Unions’ activities, as much as USD 100,000 per year (Jenvrin 2006–7: 82). These threats by the Minister of Finance proved to be more than the Writers’ Union could handle and by May 2011, the head office of the Union had closed down. Secretary General Hudā Ablān was appointed head of the cinema department for the capital’s cultural bureau. According to her, the Union head office was shut down for security reasons, as the building was located on the edge of the sit-in area.

The end of the Yemeni system for literary publishing However, the closure of the Writers’ Union turned out to be something temporary, while the most detrimental effect of the revolutionary movement to the cultural field in general was only clear by 2014 when, compounded by an extended financial crisis brought on by years of consecutive political crises, the only Yemeni publisher specializing in contemporary Yemeni literature, the Obadi Centre for Research and Publishing, finally shut down. The Obadi Centre was important in that it was at the heart of an organic system that had come into being at the end of the 1990s and which had helped hundreds of writers publish their writings at a low cost (Damesin 2009–10).

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The system involved writers using a post-press publishing incentive by which certain government institutions (‘al-muʾassasāt’, the Ministries of Information, Education and Culture, and Sanaa and Aden Universities) would buy copies of any new book up to four times its market price, and the Obadi Centre was willing to integrate the post-press measure into the printing process. Writers would pay an advance of about USD 90 (20,000 YER), receive about thirty copies of their book, do the rounds of the ‘institutions’, then come back and pay for the rest of the print run with the money raised. After which, having been reimbursed for most of the cost of the print run, they would generally hand out most of the print run for free to their fellow writers, the cultural editors in the Yemeni press and those in charge of the major literary institutions in Yemen, as well as anyone abroad. Regarding the process per se, the system worked because the printing machines of the Obadi Centre could turn out print runs that were small enough (200–500 copies) that their cost corresponded to the practically guaranteed sale of thirty copies at 1,000 YER a copy to the Ministry of Culture, and thanks to the publisher’s willingness to go ahead with the print run without having been paid in full. There was however a downside to the process: it was time-consuming and would generally take several months. This system was especially interesting in that, although selling copies to some institutions required being on good terms with the respective minister,7 other institutions (such as the Ministry of Culture and Sanaa University) had a more automated process. Thus, the system seemed to be teetering between some measure of financial autonomy for Yemeni writers and a new form of patronage. The revolutionary movement, however, put an end to this speculation by causing a shift in the writers’ doxa, the set of informal rules regarding what is acceptable behaviour for members of the group. As the repression of the revolutionary movement by the supporters of President Ali Abdallah Saleh intensified, supporters of the revolutionary movement within the cultural field started criticizing those writers who kept on selling their books to the institutions representing the regime of Ali Abdallah Saleh in the cultural field. In May 2011, poet Rashid8 expressed his surprise when he was reprimanded by his friends for having sold copies of his new poetry collection to the ‘institutions’, something he had been doing for years.

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Publishing without the Obadi Centre: Money as the first criterion to literary creation Other than issues of doxa, the end of the Obadi Centre for Research and Publishing raises several issues. Although the Obadi Centre was not the only publisher in Yemen, it was the only publisher to specialize in literature, to offer writers a certain measure of payment flexibility, at a low cost and with a modicum of quality. Currently, due to the civil war, Yemeni writers have no choice but to get published abroad. This has always been a common feature of the Yemeni literary scene, as it is generally considered more prestigious, and better for distribution abroad. The process has also become considerably easier with the advent of the internet; according to Lebanese and Jordanian publishers, most of their business with Yemeni writers is conducted online: manuscripts are sent by email, payments are made via Western Union. However, there are limits to the digital revolution, specifically when it comes to writers in Yemen getting their share of the print run, which can be a lengthy process. Yemeni writer Ahmad who lives in Jeddah met with an Egyptian publisher at the Jeddah Book fair one year, sent them his manuscript via email, paid via Western Union and then had to wait for the next book fair in Jeddah before getting his copies of the book. But the greater issue here is not so much those writers who were published abroad even when the Obadi Centre was still present, but rather those writers – especially young writers – with limited means for whom the Centre was often the only option to get published, a necessary requirement and a rite of passage in the Yemeni cultural field. Indeed, one of the main problems Yemeni writers face, as do writers all over the Arab world, is that they generally have to contribute at least part of – if not all – the cost of printing their books. Generally speaking, the only writers in the Arab world who get publishing deals resembling those in Europe and in the United States (with an advance and royalties, distribution across the Arab world and the writer does not pay for anything) are those ‘discovered’ by one of the prestigious Lebanese or Egyptian publishing houses specializing in literature (Dār al-Ādāb, Dār alSāqī etc.), but this is only the case for a ‘happy few’. In Yemen, a few more (28 books published in 2008, all in all, fiction and non-fiction) might have been published by the Yemeni General Books Organisation: writers do not have to pay for anything, rights are settled in kind (generally 15 per cent of the print

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run) and the books are only distributed via the book fairs in Yemen that the institution organizes. All the other writers have to pay, which poses several issues. In Europe or in the United States, the criterion for publishing a literary work is still believed to be some measure of literary merit, and its economic potential (either now or in the future), even if writers are intensely aware of the importance of networking and of the sheer number of manuscripts that publishers receive. However, going to a ‘vanity’ publisher, and paying them to publish your work is extremely frowned upon – to quote a French writer it is ‘cheating’ (Lahire 2006) – as it goes against the rules of the literary ‘game’ (Lahire 2006) whereby landing a publishing deal is a major milestone in a literary career. In Yemen however – as in most Arab countries – the first condition to publishing one’s writings is a financial one: Does the writer have the means to pay the printer or publisher, generally in cash and upfront? Granted, once the writer has published their book and handed it out among their fellow writers and critics, literary merit can become a criterion in the reception of said book, but the first obstacle is still a financial one. Prices vary of course around the Arab world: in Jordan, it is about USD 2,000 for a normal-sized print run, this is especially crucial in Yemen where even the USD 90 upfront required by the Obadi Centre was already the equivalent of one month’s wages for a junior government clerk. In 2013, novelist Yasir ʿAbd al-Bāqī published his novel Trāwdīl thanks to a grant by the Arab cultural institution AFAQ, but the number of grants is finite, and it would be troubling to see literary creation, said to be the freest kind of creation because it requires the least investment, have to meet the criteria of international NGOs. The most troubling aspect of the end of some form of low-cost publishing is that of class. Ali,9 a writer and a government employee, vividly criticized the ‘aristocracy’ of the Yemeni literary scene: writers such as Muḥammad alGharbī ʿAmrān, Wajdī al-Ahdal and several members of the al-Iryānī family who all come from families that were part of the two upper castes (Sādāt and Quzhāʾ) in the days of the imamate in north Yemen, and which turned out high-ranking civil servants and/or literati. Although all the writers I have interviewed were all at least middle class, having to get published abroad might make literary creation a strictly upper-class affair.

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2012–13: Reaction and Takfīr Over the next few years, specifically 2012 and 2013, another shift in the cultural field took place. In December 2012, President Ali Abdallah Saleh resigned in accordance with the ‘Gulf initiative’, whereby he and his family were granted immunity from any prosecution, he was allowed to remain in Yemen and to stay on as leader of the ex-ruling party. He was replaced by his vice president, Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi who would be the interim president until a new constitution was drawn up. Many protesters were angered by the fact that Ali Abdallah Saleh would not be tried and that, although he was out of power, several of his family members still held major positions in the state apparatus. The years 2012 and 2013 stand out in that, Yemen witnessed a resurgence of non-state ‘informal’ (Jacquemond 2003) censorship exercised by religious actors wielding both considerable symbolic violence and actual physical violence, as they declared members of the cultural field to be apostates (kāfir) (Aḥmad 2014). In this part, we focus on the scandal over the novel Hurma by Ali al-Muqri (2017 [2013]), which is especially telling, and a statement by seventy sheikhs declaring several members of the cultural field to be ‘unbelievers’. As we shall see, these campaigns do no come ‘out of the blue’ and are most probably a reaction to the changes which had occurred after the revolutionary movement of 2011–2012.

Hurma First, the scandal over Hurma is definitely one of the major events of 2013 for the Yemeni cultural field. The novel was published in 2011 by Lebanese publisher Dār al-Sāqī and was written by novelist Ali al-Muqri, longlisted twice for the Arab Booker Prize. The novel is an imaginary diary of a young Yemeni woman brought up in the Salafi school system who becomes a jihadi bride, while trying to come to grips with her own sexuality. Apparently, Aḥmad al-ʿArrāmī, who taught literature at a university in Radāʿ, a rural part of Yemen, put the book on a reading list for his male students. Word got out to the students’ parents who demanded the university fire the professor (Saʿīd 2013). Regarding the religious climate in Yemen, one should bear in mind several things: first, at the last elections in 2003, the Islamist party al-

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Islah was second only to the president’s ruling party, also that Salafism then was so popular among the young generation that Laurent Bonnefoy likened it to an expression of teenage rebellion10; finally, writers residing in parts of the country other than Sanaa, Aden and Taiz often mention the difficult social climate they have to work with.11 Versions differ of what happened next, but what we know with certainty is that the lecturer in question was promptly fired by the university, and called upon the intellectual community to organize. Ali al-Muqri, the author of the novel, sided with the university professor, Aḥmad al-ʿArrāmī. Petitions circulated online in support of the two writers, many articles were devoted to the matter, denouncing the university. On the other side of that debate, people also got organized: both Ali al-Muqri and Aḥmad al-ʿArrāmī were declared ‘kāfir’ and started getting death threats. If this was not the first time for Ali al-Muqri, previously condemned for an essay entitled Alcohol and Wine in Islam (published in Lebanon), the death threats proved to be too much for Aḥmad al-ʿArrāmī who lived with his family in the same area as the university, and they ended up leaving the country and living in exile.

Reaction and ‘owning’ the revolution? In February 2012, a group of seventy religious sheikhs released a statement condemning several members of the cultural field, including short story writer and playwright Fikrī Qāsim and novelist and short story writer Bushrā alMaqṭarī. In my opinion, the text is especially telling as I believe that, other than the names of the people condemned, it was a statement about the direction the country seemed to be taking since the creation of Change Square. Indeed, given the current civil war in Yemen, it is easy nowadays to overlook the innovations introduced by Change Square, most noticeably for women’s rights (wearing a hijab rather than the niqab, little gender segregation and women taking part in demonstrations alongside men). Although such occurrences were not unprecedented in Yemeni society, it was the first time, however, that all these took place at the same time and place, and all for all to see. Also, in 2011, female political activist (and member of al-Islah Islamist party) Tawakkol Karman had become the first Yemeni to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. All of this contributed to the idea that the progressive influence of Change Square

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had to be curtailed: this was evidenced as early as April 2011 when four female protesters were beaten by a member of the al-Islah Islamist party for wanting to take part in a demonstration alongside men. One might ask, however, how attempts to censure Yemeni members of the cultural field fit in with countering the perceived advances of progressivism in Yemeni society? Although we are loath to use the trope of the ongoing struggle between the leftist ‘secular’ (ʿalmānī, lībrālī) intellectual and the reactionary Islamist, in the case of the Yemeni cultural field, there might be some truth to it. If writer Bushrā al-Maqṭarī was declared ‘kāfira’, it was not for her novel or short stories, but rather for her article entitled ‘Year One of the Revolution’ (Akhbār alsāʿa. 01 February 2012) where she criticizes what she sees as attempts by the Salafi current to ‘hijack the revolution’ (Māniʿ 2016). Bushrā al-Maqṭarī had also by then become famous for a photo where she is wearing a grey headscarf with a red head band with the effigy of Che Guevara, and which had made her a symbol of women’s participation in the revolutionary movement. Recently, she has also cowritten the memoirs of Lebanese leftist intellectual Fawwaz Traboulsi regarding his involvement in the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen. The fact of the matter is, out of that minority of Yemeni writers that did embrace the revolutionary movement of 2011, most of them did so based on some form of prior political engagement or NGO activism: Arwā ʿUthmān is a short story writer, but she also heads an NGO and is a member of the Socialist Party; Ḥamdī Aḥmad is a writer, but he is also a journalist who has denounced Salafism in his articles. Thus, if trying to wind back such advances as the first Yemeni – woman – to get the Nobel Peace Prize might make for a unpopular subject; writers on the other hand, such as staunch pro-revolutionary novelist Ali al-Muqri make for ‘easy targets’ according to writer Aḥmad Shawqī Aḥmad (2014), with such books as Alcohol and Wine in Islam or Hurma denouncing Salafism, two highly controversial subjects for mainstream Yemeni society (a good illustration of Bourdieu’s notion of ‘mediation’).

Periphery and audience However, regardless of attempts to censor people by declaring writers ‘kāfir’, controversial writings such as Hurma do raise another point, that of the

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audience for such works. As Nathalie Heinich pointed out regarding artistic scandals (2005: 121–36), these occur when one given work of art is circulated beyond the community of people it is intended for, and this is true in the Arab world as it is elsewhere (such as the scandal in the United States at the turn of the 1990s surrounding a photograph entitled ‘Immersion [Piss Christ]’). However, this common divide between the cultural field and mainstream society is compounded in Yemen by how writers from the ‘nineties generation’ have been achieving recognition on a regional scale. Indeed, the first Yemeni writer to do so was Wajdī al-Ahdal in 2003, with his novel Qawārib jabaliyya (Mountainous Boats), published by the previously mentioned Obadi Centre for Research and Publishing. The book depicts Yemeni society through rather extreme and grotesque Rabelaisian goggles: at one point an Islamist monster made up of all the other smaller Islamists inserts its arm into its behind, then its head, then its whole body until it altogether disappears (Deheuvels 2003). The Ministry of Culture decided to take both the writer and publisher to court. As with other scandals, the cultural field mobilized, yet the Obadi Centre was (temporarily) shut down, and writer Wajdī al-Ahdal fled to Syria to escape death threats and a prison sentence. In the end, it took Nobel laureate Günther Grass to secure President Saleh’s pardon and to allow Wajdī al-Ahdal back into Yemen. The story got considerable attention from the Arab media, Qawārib Jabaliyya got ‘picked up’ by a Lebanese publisher, became a bestseller in the Arab world and Wajdī al-Ahdal achieved regional recognition. One of the main tenets of Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of field is that members of the same field position themselves strategically based on how other members operate. In the case of Yemeni writers, this has led to quite a few writers getting ‘noticed’ by the literary centres of the Arab world thanks to a scandal: Muḥammad al-Gharbī ʿAmrān with his novel Muṣḥaf aḥmar (The Red Scriptures, 2010), Ali al-Muqri and his novel Hurma, or Nabīla al-Zubayr’s novel Zawj ḥidhāʾ li-ʿĀʾisha (A pair of Shoes for ‘Aysha’, 2012) about prostitution in Sanaa. However, this is in actual fact more than just a strategy to get the attention of the pan-Arab media and publishers in the literary centres of the Arab world. For Luc Deheuvels, Wajdī al-Ahdal’s Qawārib Jabaliyya is part of a broader trend in Arabic literature which he refers to as a ‘literature of extremes’ (Deheuvels 2003), with well-known Arab writers such as Egyptian writers Edouard al-Kharrât (Idwār al-Kharrāṭ) and Sonallah Ibrahim, or Syrian writer Ḥaydar Ḥaydar, whereby

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the goal of literature is to denounce the shortfalls of mainstream Arab societies by shocking them into awareness with extreme depictions. Finally, Wajdī alAhdal is not the only Yemeni writer to incorporate regional literary trends: according to Géraldine Jenvrin (2006–7), writers there are eager to keep up with these regional trends by reading literary and cultural magazines from the literary capitals of the Arab world (Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and the Gulf to a lesser extent). But maybe most telling of all is that writers generally long to be published either in Cairo by currently trendy publishers (Dār ʿAyn or Dār Mīrīt), or by one of their more established Lebanese counterparts (such as Dār al-Ādāb or Dār al-Sāqī, Ali al-Muqri’s publisher), and not just because of the better publishing deals nor because of the publisher’s distribution network. As we mentioned earlier, if writers have the means to do so, they generally prefer to pay more than they would in Yemen, just to be published abroad, as abroad is always more prestigious, and can even afterwards help secure recognition within the Yemeni cultural field. As pointed out by Géraldine Jenvrin (2006–7), Muḥammad ‘Uthmān found it hard to get recognition as a writer in Yemen, but when he won a literary prize abroad, he won recognition on the Yemeni literary scene as well. The fact of the matter is that, although Yemen has a history of literary and colloquial poetry that is centuries old, it does not have a long history of ‘modern’ literature. The first Yemeni novel written by a Yemeni in Yemen only dates back to 1939, and the first Yemeni short stories to the 1940s. Cairo, Damascus and Beirut are the literary capitals of the Arab world, while Yemen and the other countries are more ‘peripheral’, to use an expression by Pascale Casanova. As such, the centre sets the trends for the regional scene, while those writers from ‘peripheral’ countries aspiring to recognition by the said centre (maybe a publishing deal, a literary prize or a glowing review) try to keep up with those trends, as Géraldine Jenvrin points out for Yemeni writers (2006–7). However, writing in Yemen according to the criteria from the regional literary scene does give rise to two problems. First of all, the concept of ‘literature of the extreme’ to shock Arab societies into awareness is difficult enough to apply in Egypt where a case similar to that of Hurma (a professor at the American University in Cairo decided to teach a novel by Mohamed

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Choukri entitled For Bread Alone [al-Khubz al-ḥāfī] also sparked widespread protest among parents. In the end, in Egypt, the novel in question was simply removed from the reading list, and the professor also got to keep her position [Jacquemond 2003]). However, it is an entirely different matter in a more conservative and traditional society such as Yemen, where writers are declared ‘infidels’, get death threats and sometimes choose exile (Aḥmad al-ʿArrāmī). This in turn raises another issue: if most writers from the periphery keep abreast of developments in the literary capitals, there is, according to Pascale Casanova, a strong chance that writings from the periphery, once they reach the centres, may be stripped of their initial meaning and be interpreted solely according to the issues and debates at hand in the literary centres. As such, something similar happened with Ali al-Muqri’s Al-Yahūdī al-ḥālī (The Fair Jew), a love story between a young Jewish boy and a mufti’s daughter set in seventeenth-century Yemen, which sparked a debate in the literary centres around portraying Jewish characters in literature in a favourable light. This leads to another concern regarding the literary boom not only in Yemen, but also in the rest of the Arabian Peninsula, such as Saudi Arabia where books like Rajaa Alsanea’s novel Girls of Riyadh which exposes the taboos of Saudi society have become bestsellers across the Arab world. As such, one cannot help but feel there is a certain amount of voyeurism and exoticism on behalf of the literary centres in their complex relationship with a region that may still be culturally dominated, but is otherwise, politically and economically dominant. This is exemplified in Ḥubb fī al-Saʿūdiyya (Love in Saudi Arabia) by Saudi writer Ibrāhīm Bādī, when his narrator thinks that if he adds a sex scene to his novel, it will sell well (Almaiman 2014).

2016 Finally, this last section is not so much a shift in the Yemeni cultural field, as it is a snapshot of the current situation. According to Sheila Carapico (2016), the National Dialogue Conference outlined in the Gulf initiative ended with the administration of interim president Hadi pressuring the Houthi delegates (from the northwest of the country) and Southern separatists to opt for a federal solution. A few months later, surfing on the unpopularity of interim

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President Hadi, the Houthi rebel movement, which had been very active in Change Square, staged a coup in December 2014, with the support of exPresident Ali Abdallah Saleh. Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi and his government fled to Aden, then to Saudi Arabia. As of March 2015, a coalition led by Saudi Arabia and comprising several gulf States has been conducting a vast military campaign to restore the unpopular interim president back to power, although it is better known for its intense use of bombing raids, resulting in over 8,600 raids (according to figures by The Guardian) between the beginning of the operation in March 2015 and September 2016, of which a third ended up hitting civilian targets. A total of 10,000 people have already been killed in the conflict, with questionable results for the Saudi intervention: after two years of intense fighting, the Hadi administration still currently only controls about half the country including Aden (the second largest town and former capital of South Yemen), while the remainder is controlled by either al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQPA), or the Houthis and Ali Abdallah Saleh (such as Sanaa and Taiz, the third largest city). Although the crisis in Yemen pales in comparison with the civil war in Syria, Yemen was already one the poorest12 and most underdeveloped (UNDP 2009) countries in the Arab world before the war. In this context, both sides in the conflict are pressuring members in the cultural field to pick a side and help with their respective propaganda efforts, which very few have actually done so.

Picking sides In fact, maybe the only member of the cultural field to have publicly chosen one side is the previously mentioned secretary general of the Yemeni Writers’ Union, former Deputy Minister of Culture under the Hadi administration and now current Minister of Culture, Hudā Ablān. For most of the members of the cultural field that do choose to get involved, this involvement is more of a spectrum, defending themes that are easy to convey, rather than actually siding with everything either of the warring parties have done. For example, Ibtisām al-Mutawakkil is a poetess and a professor at Sanaa University and was a strong supporter of the 2011–12 revolutionary movement. She created the ‘Cultural Front against the Aggression’ and has taken part in talk shows on Yemeni

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satellite TV, started a Facebook page for the association to raise awareness and held cultural events commemorating the achievements of modern Yemeni writers that have become ‘classics’. Finally, she has also composed poems in literary Arabic denouncing the ‘Saudi aggression’. Although Ibtisām alMutawakkil has not actually publicly sided with the Houthi government, its representatives have attended events organized by the association. At the other end of the spectrum is previously mentioned Arwā ʿUthmān, writer, columnist, head of an NGO, member of the Socialist Party and a strong supporter of the revolutionary movement. Arwā ʿUthmān was made Minister of Culture just before the Houthi coup of December 2014. Unfortunately, after a clip was circulated showing the minister dancing at a rally of the Socialist Party, she was barred by Houthi militiamen from entering her office at the Ministry of Culture. Lately she has communicated a lot via social media, launching semiofficial campaigns over Twitter with such hashtags as ‘Stop the Fighting! Kids just wanna learn’ (tawaqqafū ʿan al-qitāl! Neshtū netʿallam). She also writes many articles in the Gulf feminine press in which she violently criticizes the Houthis.

Treading and redefining the intellectual As mentioned previously, there is considerable pressure on writers to pick a side and contribute to their propaganda effort, just as we mentioned how difficult it was to publicly justify siding with either of the warring parties. However, finding a third way is becoming increasingly dangerous, according to Laurent Bonnefoy, as moderates or activists denouncing both parties are increasingly subject to death threats, beatings and assassination attempts. If one is a sheikh, or a major political player, one can rely on tribal protection or an apparatus in times of violence; however, the same cannot be said for isolated individuals such as writers. As such, in a context where siding with either side seems morally indefensible, and opening a third way is fraught with physical violence, the situation begs the question: What can writers do and how much can they actually hope to accomplish? Does claiming to be an ‘intellectual’ (muthaqqaf) necessarily mean being morally compelled to a seemingly suicidal stance and if so, to what avail? This moral quandary has prompted a new debate about what it means to be an intellectual.

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If the revolutionary movement bolstered political involvement to a certain extent, this was within the context of a carnival-like safe space with non-violence as one of its core values, with like-minded people, overseen by organizing committees and protected by a brigade on the outside. It is vastly different from the current conflict where the writer/intellectual has become a totally isolated individual. According to Fatḥī Abū al-Naṣr (2016), this seems to have led to what Michael Barnett refers to a ‘dialogue’ (1998), that is, a moment in time when the members of a group get together and discuss some of its core values and, in this specific case: what it means to be an ‘intellectual’ (muthaqqaf). While some members of the cultural field such as Bushrā alMaqṭarī and film-maker and poetess Samāḥ al-Shughdurī reaffirm the mission of the ‘intellectual’ as a peacemaker, Bushrā al-Maqṭarī and short story writer Asmāʾ Ḍayf Allāh condemn those members of the group who have picked a side. While acknowledging the role of the intellectual is to ‘bring together’ the warring parties, poet Mujīb al-Raḥmān Harrāsh admits ‘he is currently impotent’. Other writers such as novelist Sumayya Ṭāhā also acknowledge this and see a mission to come, only once the conflict is over can the intellectual step in and help heal his country (Iryānī). And then there are those who do what they can to help people’s morale. Thanks to a grant from the Netherlands, Samāḥ al-Shughdurī has set up a cinema theatre every Wednesday night in a coffee shop in an upscale suburb of Sanaa. Samāḥ al-Shughdurī shows films ranging from her own short films on women’s rights in Yemen, to Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, to the teen sci-fi box office hit Divergent. Films are always followed by a discussion and everyone is welcome. Finally, there are those who have removed themselves – willingly or not – from the question altogether, by leaving the country. This is the case of Ali al-Muqri, the previously mentioned novelist who had already been declared ‘kāfir’ several times by Sunni Salafis for his books and was also finally declared ‘kāfir’ by the new Houthi government in Sanaa. This proved to be too much for the novelist who took a boat across the Bab al-Mandeb Strait to Djibouti. There, he applied for and finally got a visa to Egypt, where he lived for several months before applying for political asylum in France while receiving a literary prize there for Hurma. He currently lives in Paris where he has met other Arab writers who reside there, such as Algerian Waciny Laredj and Lebanese Hudā Barakāt.

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Conclusion In conclusion, the Revolutionary movement of 2011–12, and especially the sit-in area named Change Square, exerted a major influence on the cultural field. Although some of these effects were positive insofar as it helped to bring to a mainstream audience certain musical and artistic productions (reggae, rap and graffiti), the revolutionary movement also changed the status quo between writers and the political sphere, leading to a renegotiation of the doxa among writers. This resulted in the implosion of the Yemeni Writers’ Union, one of the main institutions in the cultural field, and in the destruction of the fragile literary publishing ecosystem. In 2012 and 2013, religious and political actors reacted to the perceived advances in Yemeni society of the culture of Change Square with several campaigns declaring certain members of the cultural field to be ‘kāfir’. These also further demonstrated the considerable gap between local audiences and contemporary Yemeni writers, whose creed, to shock mainstream society into awareness, is part of a trend in the Arab literary field, yet a trend which was created in the literary centres of the Arab world, in more liberal societies, where there is less physical danger to taking on the taboos of society. We have also pointed out the difficult situation of Yemeni writers where creating media attention via scandals is still the best path to achieving recognition on the Arab literary scene. Finally, in the current civil war, the impossibility of siding with either of the warring parties for most writers or of finding a third way (as moderates and critics of both sides are killed) has led to a dialogue among writers about what it means to be an ‘intellectual’ (muthaqqaf). Writers tend to either wait for the war to end to help heal the country, or focus on morale (a cinema has opened again in Sanaa), or to get out of an untenable situation over which they have little control, and choose exile.

Notes 1 Muhammad, writer, interview in Sanaa, Spring 2011. 2 ‘Abbās, poet and Sanaa University professor, interview in Sanaa, June 2011. 3 Ahmad, prize-winning short story writer and op-ed writer, interview in Sanaa, Spring 2011.

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4 Ali, interview April 2011, Sanaa. 5 Hussein, member of the Yemeni Writers’ Union, Interview in Sanaa, Spring 2010. 6 Hussein, interview in Sanaa, 15 May 2011. 7 Ahmad, researcher, interview in Sanaa 2010. 8 Rashid, poet, interview in Sanaa 2011. 9 Ali, writer and civil servant, interview, Sanaa, Spring 2011. 10 Bonnefoy Laurent, Lecture on Salafism in Yemen, IISMM/EHESS, 2012. 11 Mustafa, novelist and member of the Yemeni Writers’ Union, phone interview summer 2009. 12 In terms of GDP and in 2008.

Bibliography Abū al-Nasr, Fatḥī. August 2016. ‘Al-Muthaqqafūn al-yamaniyyūn wa-l-‘awda ila al-tasharnuq wa-l-‘adamiyya’ (Yemeni Intellectuals and the Return to Introversion and Nihilism). al-Mudun. http://thaqafat.com/2016/08/60800/. Akhbār al-Sāʿa. 01 February 2012. ‘Al-Naṣṣ wa-ṣūrat al-fatwā’ (The Text and Copy of the Fatwa). http://hournews.net/news-8356.htm (accessed 13 December 2017). Almaiman, Salwa. 2014. ‘Le roman saoudien contemporain face à ses défis’. Arabian Humanities 3. http://cy.revues.org/2793; DOI: 10.4000/cy.2793 (accessed 13 April 2017) Barnett, Michael. 1998. Dialogues in Arab Politics. New York: Columbia University Press. Becker, Howard S. 2008. (new edition). Art Worlds. Oakland: University of California Press. Bin ‘Alī, Hishām Alī. 2002. Al-Muthaqqafūn al-yamaniyyūn wa-l-nahḍa (Yemeni Intellectuals and the Arab Renaissance). Sanaa: Maktabat al-Irshād. Bonnefoy, Laurent et Poirier Marine 2012/5. ‘La structuration de la révolution yéménite. Essai d’analyse d’un processus en marche’. Revue française de science politique 52: 895–913. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1992. Les règles de l‘art. Genèse et structure du champ littéraire. Paris: Le Seuil. Carapico, Sheila. 2016. ‘Demonstrators, Dialogues, Drones and Dialectics’. MERIP 269. http://www.merip.org/mer/mer269/demonstrators-dialogues-dronesdialectics. Casanova, Pascale. 1999. La République mondiale des lettres. Paris: Le Seuil. Damesin, Laurent. 2009–10. L’éditeur Obadi au Yémen: entre risāla et sinā‘a, une contribution au mouvement culturel. Unpublished Masters thesis under the supervision of Luc-Willy Deheuvels, Inalco.

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al-Dawāf, Hiyām. 2005. Ḥarakat nashr al-kutub khilāl al-qarnayn al-tāsiʿ ʿashar wa-lʿishrīn (Book Publishing in Yemen in the 19th and 20th c.). Sanaa: Sanaa University. Deheuvels, Luc-Willy. 2003. ‘Violence, écriture et société au Yémen: Qawārib jabaliyya de Wajdī al-Ahdal’. Chroniques Yéménites 11. Heinich, Nathalie. 2005/3. ‘L’art du scandale. Indignation esthétique et sociologie des valeurs’. Politix, 71. pp. 121–136. al-Iryānī, Maysūn. 2015. Al-Muthaqqaf al-yamanī wa-l-ḥarb: ḍidd al-mu‘askarayn wa-idānat al-jamī‘ (Yemeni Intellectuals and the War: Against Both Sides and Their Condemnation). Thaqāfāt. http://thaqafat.com/2015/08/27602/. Jacquemond, Richard. 2000. ‘Les limites mouvantes du dicible dans la fiction égyptienne’. Égypte Monde arabe 1 (3). http://ema.revues.org/790. Jacquemond, Richard. 2003. Entre scribes et écrivains. Le champ littéraire dans l’Egypte contemporaine. Arles: Actes Sud. Jenvrin, Géraldine. 2006–7. Voies novatrices dans la nouvelle yéménite contemporaine, Unpublished Masters thesis in Arabic literature under the supervision of LucWilly Deheuvels. Paris: Inalco. Joubert, Sophie. 29 December 2016. Ali al-Muqri: ‘ Toutes les religions coupent le désir’. L’Humanité. https://www.humanite.fr/ali-al-muqri-toutes-les-religionscoupent-le-desir-629364. Jubrān, Jamāl. 28 August 2018. Wajdī al-Ahdal: Ḥadīth min ard al-mu’āmarāt al-sa‘īda. Al-‘Arabī al-Jadīd. https://www.alaraby.co.uk/culture/2018/8/26/-‫وجدي‬ ‫السعيدة‬-‫المؤامرات‬-‫أرض‬-‫من‬-‫حديث‬-‫األهدل‬. Lahire, Bernard. 2006. La condition littéraire: La double vie des écrivains. Paris: La Découverte. Māniʿ, Walīd. 22 May 2016. Al-Tuham al-kafīla bi-hadr dimāʾi-kum fī al-Yaman. Raseef22. https://raseef22.com/politics/2016/05/22/-‫في‬-‫دمائكم‬-‫بهدر‬-‫الكفيلة‬-‫التهم‬ ‫اليمن‬/. Mehrez, Samia. 2008. Egypt’s Culture Wars: Politics and Practice. Abingdon-onThames: Routledge. al-Muqri, Ali. 17 February 2011. ‘Qat Got Their Tongues’. New York Times. http:// www.nytimes.com/2011/02/18/opinion/18muqri.html. al-Muqri, Ali. 2017. Hurma, translated by Thomas Aplin. London: Darf Publishers. (Arabic original: Ḥurma, Beirut: Dār al-Sāqī, 2013). Poirier, Marine. 2013. ‘De la Place de la Libération (al-Tahrir) a la Place du Changement (al-Taghyir): transformations des espaces et expressions du politique au Yémen’. In Au coeur des révolutions arabes. Devenirs révolutionnaires. Allal A. Et Pierret T. (dir.). Paris: Armand Colin.

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Saʿīd, Ayman. 20 May 2013. ‘Al-Shāʿir al-yamanī Aḥmad al-ʿArrāmī yakshif ʿan taʿarruḍi-hi li-l-tahdīd bi-l-qatl wa faṣli-hi ʿan ʿamali-hi’ (Yemeni Poet Aḥmad al-ʿArrāmī Tells How He Was Threatened of Dying and Fired). Al-Mujaz. http:// www.elmogaz.com/node/85299. Shawqī Aḥmad, Aḥmad. 2014. ‘Al-Funūn fī l-Yaman: dhabīḥat al-qabīla’ (The Arts in Yemen: A Tribal Sacrifice). Al-ʿArabī, 25-07-2014. https://www.alaraby.co.uk/ culture/2014/7/25/‫القبيلة‬-‫ذبيحة‬-‫اليمن‬-‫في‬-‫الفنون‬. Strauss, Anselm. 1978. A Social World Perspective. Studies in Symbolic Interaction 1: 119–28. Tuchscherer, Michel. 1985. ‘La littérature contemporaine en Arabie du Sud et ses aspects sociaux’. In L‘Arabie du Sud. Histoire et civilisation, tome 3: Culture et institutions du Yémen. Chelhod Joseph et al. Paris: G.-P. Maisonneuve et Larose. UNDP. 2009. Human Development Data for the Arab States. Yemen, 2009. Arab Human Development Reports. http://www.arab-hdr.org/data/profiles/YEM.aspx (accessed 13 May 2013).

8

A Field in Exile: The Syrian Theatre Scene in Movement Simon Dubois

Art in Syria was not immune to the earthquake of the 2011 Arab Spring, its creativity exploded and was all over international screens, exhibitions, books etc., in the same way as it did in Egypt with the graffiti of the Revolution or in Tunisia with rap music. The fall of the ‘wall of fear’ freed the expression that sprang with energy. However, this romantic vision of things does not give a wholly adequate explanation of the artistic excitement that took place. The end of censorship, whether external or internal, was certainly a catalyst in the emergence of unknown artists. Many of these young artists had an artistic background and far-reaching changes in the national artistic field had allowed them to come to prominence. The dictatorship in Syria had produced rigid forms of artistic creation that were in the service of the official nationalist and pan-Arab ideology of the state. When the Baath Party took power in 1963, it declared the state of emergency, leading to system-wide controls being put in place over cultural production. This system was reinforced in 1970 with the coup d’état of Hafez al-Assad that purged the country’s bureaucracy in order to re-establish control over the cultural institutions (Boëx 2011: 70 and 116). The artistic field then saw various changes. First, there was the opening up to the private sector that took place in the 1990s and saw the arrival of the television series industry (Boëx 2011: 98). The decade beginning in 2000 with the arrival of Bashar al-Assad in power was also an important watershed that needs to be taken into account when considering the changes that took place after 2011 (Donati 2009). In particular, there was hope, and then disappointment, in the opposition that

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Bashar al-Assad’s elevation to the presidency would see a softening of the authoritarian regime. At the time when the succession of power was taking place, intellectuals in Syria set up more than 250 debating forums. From these emerged the ‘Manifesto of the 99’ published in the Lebanese press in September 2000 that called for the lifting of the state of emergency, the release of political prisoners and the drafting of a new constitution. However, this wave of contestation, called the ‘Damascus Spring’, was rapidly crushed by the authorities. At the beginning of 2001, the forums were closed, and their participants were either put in prison or went into exile. The regime offered the possibility of dialogue to some of them, and Elisabeth Picard (2004: 763) has spoken of its dual strategy of exclusion and co-optation. Nevertheless, the end result was the shattering of opposition hopes for political change, and some opposition figures made the choice of continuing with only ‘cultural’ activism. Despite the continuing repression that was just as severe as it had been previously, these years were characterized by economic change and particularly by the partial liberalization of the economy. Wanting international respectability, the regime lifted its controls over the cultural milieu. The generation of artists that now occupies the most visible place on the Syrian artistic scene in exile was formed at this time. This chapter is an attempt at grasping the Syrian Spring as a turning point, but not as a reset, in the cultural subfield of theatre. In line with the analytical frame of this collection set out by Jacquemond and Lang in the introduction, it moves the scope away from post-2011 artistic production to encompass artists’ trajectories that trace back to the first decade of the twenty-first century, a time before emigration and exile as major effects of the political crisis began to contribute to the emergence of a de-territorialized artistic field where regional and international players challenge the state’s centrality. The focus on the careers of three young playwrights trained in Syria at the beginning of this century allows us to follow the development of the Syrian performing arts scene. Wāʾil Qaddūr (born in 1981), ʿAbdullāh al-Kafrī (born in 1982) and Muḍar al-Ḥajjī (born in 1981) are among the newly known playwrights today. Their careers are presented here in two parts: first, their entry into the field up until the eve of the Syrian Spring, and second their careers in exile. Their positioning in the field sheds light on the new structure of the cultural capital distribution.

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The three men are friends from the same age group, students from the same period in college (give or take a year) and writers who began to work collectively as soon as they had graduated. These common features allow a ‘common career’ to be constructed for them up until their entrance to the artistic field. Analysing their activities following the emergence of the contestation movement in 2011 sheds light on new ways of working due to the upheaval in the national field. Observing the different directions they took allows hypotheses to be formed that link their artistic production with the exile that was forced upon the vast majority of those belonging to the Syrian cultural milieu.

The Maʿhad Most actors, directors, playwrights, critics, set designers and others working in the theatre field in Syria have long been trained at the Higher Institute of Dramatic Arts (HIDA; al-maʿhad al-ʿālī li-l-funūn al-masraḥiyya), the equivalent of a Syrian conservatoire, that was founded in Damascus by some of the major names from Syrian theatre in 1977. Each year group is made up of fifteen or so students chosen by an entrance exam (written and oral) and not by the results of the baccalauréat as is usually the case for universities in Syria. It is difficult to say how much co-optation by the regime is necessary in order to enter the HIDA, and it seems that there has been a real desire on the part of its professors to choose students according to their talents. Many of the professors are well known for their impartiality. Today, it is divided into five departments – theatre studies, dance, acting/drama, set design/design studies and theatre technics. Diplomas are awarded at the end of four years of study in each section. The HIDA is remarkable for its elitist character, which is quite at odds with the ‘open to all’ image of the University of Damascus. After changes to the teaching staff in 2000, demonstrations by the students took place, and Riyāḍ ʿIṣmat, the new director of the HIDA, appealed to the state security forces to end them. Some of the students who had gone on strike, chiefly from the 2001 and 2002 year groups, were visited at home by the security services. Such actions angered some of the professors, among them Marie Elias (Mārī Ilyās) and Hanane Qassab Hassan (Ḥanān Qaṣab Ḥasan),

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who resigned in protest. These two professors enjoyed wide recognition at the time, in particular for their work in the theatre studies department. It is not necessary to review their careers in detail here, but both had been trained in French literature, and both had made major contributions to the introduction of French literature to the student curriculum. Both are recognized today as authorities on the theatre field in Syria. Wāʾil Qaddūr, ʿAbdullāh al-Kafrī and Muḍar al-Ḥajjī are graduates of the theatre studies department at the HIDA where the two professors taught. Traditionally, this department has trained critics, theatre directors and playwrights. The three men graduated between 2004 and 2006, years tending to be considered as ‘sink years’ at the HIDA. In the wake of the 2000 protests, the professors who had the most symbolic capital resigned from the HIDA and therefore did not teach students beginning their studies in 2000–1. (The situation returned to normal after 2006 when some of these professors returned to their jobs.) This led some of the students to form an independent working group to try to make up for the absence of professors, and this was essential to the careers of the three playwrights considered here, all three of them seeing their present success as having come from the earlier experience of being forced to work together independently.1 For these three playwrights, as for many of their colleagues, the HIDA and the training it offers had not been called into question, however, unlike that of other arts schools in Syria, such as the Faculty of Fine Arts. The HIDA represents the main access point to the legitimate section of the subfield of the performing arts, and attending it is a first step in artistic socialization.

Professional opportunities There are few opportunities on leaving the HIDA, especially for graduates from the theatre studies department. Those coming at the top of their respective year groups sometimes manage to obtain grants to continue their studies abroad for a master’s degree or a doctorate, especially in France. For many, the first choice is to head towards the ‘commercial’ side of the field, notably represented by the television series industry. This is a flourishing industry in Syria, and more than forty series are produced each year, each with

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a considerable budget. Aspiring entrants to the industry have to write scripts for series to be shown on television during the month of Ramadan. However, the competition is intense, and as Rebecca Joubin (2013: 4) has noted, most of the scriptwriters are writers, poets and journalists. This kind of production for the entertainment industry is considered to be poor-quality hackwork, with those interviewed for this chapter wanting to see themselves as belonging to the ‘noble’ side of the field instead (Boëx 2011: 73). Perhaps this is also because they have set themselves in opposition to HIDA graduates from previous years, particularly actors, who have massively gravitated towards the TV industry. In the case of theatre, the state side of the field is mainly represented by the Theatre Section (mudīriyyat al-masāriḥ), which is part of the Syrian Ministry of Culture. This manages the national theatres, regulating and censoring the texts that are performed in them as well as the performances themselves. Joining the Theatre Section of the Ministry means becoming a government employee and being paid a modest monthly salary. As is often the case in Syria, patronage and nepotism are the rule, and some members of the older generation have fought for years to obtain employee status.2 It is possible to work for the Theatre Section on a freelance basis, but this pays poorly and often late. However, new graduates have little choice if they want to continue with their artistic activities, since in order to put on a play or have a place to work it is necessary to go through the Theatre Section. Administrative delays and corruption at every level, among other things, can be discouraging for young creative workers, and Cécile Boëx (2011: 103) has pointed to the discourse of the institution as a whole, perceived as out of date, of building a national culture. Moreover, the Section refuses to support playwrights or others lacking experience. Another option was to seek support from one of the foreign cultural centres. They have increased their importance over the ‘independent part’ of the field during the last decade.

Foreign cultural centres There is a network of foreign cultural centres in Damascus that is active in the local arts scene, including the French Cultural Centre (FCC), the British Council (BC), the Goethe-Institut, the Instituto Cervantes, the Danish Cultural

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Institute etc. Their cooperation with local artists was tolerated by the state, and until the beginning of this century they were the main foreign sources of support for cultural creation in Syria. More recently, there have been changes in the law that have led to the appearance of international funding and NGOs in the Syrian artistic field. The cultural centres obviously carry out the cultural diplomacy of their respective countries. The FCC, for example, is described as being chiefly concerned with francophone matters and the promotion of French culture, unlike the BC which does not support the translation of texts from English into Arabic.3 The cultural policies of the centres seem to change according to their local management.4 For Syrians, this network of foreign cultural centres represents an alternative to the state network for ‘noble’ cultural productions. The name of the BC often appears in accounts by artists working in contemporary theatre, particularly as a result of initiatives carried out by two local staff members, Laylā Ḥūrānī and Alma Sālim. The BC’s culture of cooperation tends to favour residencies being offered to artists in England. A three-year theatre writing workshop directed by Scottish director David Greig together with the Royal Court Theatre in London also took place in Syria in the same period. Such programmes allow young playwrights and theatre directors to travel abroad. Wāʾil Qaddūr benefitted from one of these programmes, for example, describing the impact of it for the present chapter. He regretted that the HIDA did not work with young playwrights in the same way. He said: You need an organisation, not to cover you or to give you money, but to provide other types of support. They [the BC] gave us artistic help by organising workshops, and they supported us by translating our work and introducing us in England. They gave us support by providing us with a theatre, which played an essential role. Obviously, the ideal situation would be if the HIDA could also play this role, but unfortunately it has not done so.5

The Street Workshop Various texts were selected to be read during the ‘Syria Week’ held in the small theatre at the Royal Court in winter 2007, and their authors were invited to London. On their return to Syria, five of the writers decided to start a writing

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workshop – the Street Workshop for Play-Writing (Warshat al-shāriʿ li-lkitāba al-masraḥiyya) – made up of eight young writers, among them Wāʾil Qaddūr, ʿAbdullāh al-Kafrī and Muḍar al-Ḥajjī. ‘I learned about something that I had not known about before – the idea of the writing programme in the sense of a writing workshop. I discovered this in London. We asked people there what a writing workshop was, and they said “we work, we read each other’s work, and then we go back over our work to make revisions to it, etc.” I hadn’t known any of this existed before that’, alKafrī said.6 As a result of the momentum provided by the London experience and with the help of the BC which made one of its rooms available, the new workshop was formed. Those taking part were driven by a desire to strengthen dramatic writing in Syria, considering it to be weak at the time. The leading playwrights of the 1970s and 1980s had then only recently died, and it is interesting to consider the perceptions that circulated at the time of the new writing. According to ʿAbdullāh al-Kafrī, a major difference between this new writing off and what had gone before was the willingness of the new authors to ‘consider writing as a way of analysing the self and society […]. Grand gestures and large concepts disappeared from these texts to be replaced by private and local ones’ (al-Kafrī 2015: 6). He contrasts this with the attitude of precursors such as Saadallah Wannous (Sa‘d Allāh Wannūs 1941–97) and Mamdouh Udwan (Mamdūḥ ‘Udwān 1941–2004), both of whom tried to write about the present during a period of censorship, using the disguise of a past or imaginary space in order to write about it. The new writing, on the other hand, focused on the individual and the private in today’s society, al-Kafrī said, sometimes conjuring up feelings of claustrophobia. Earlier graduates (from the end of the 1990s up until 2001) were seen as coming from the ‘good years’ of the HIDA, not only because they had been taught by the two professors who later resigned, but also because they had been the first to benefit from their new style of teaching. These graduates found their own theatres and directed their own plays. The drama section of the field had recently lost its major names, some of whom had enjoyed international recognition. Wannous, for example, had been the first Arab author to make the opening address at the 1996 World Theatre Day. The position of the older generation in the subfield of the performing arts (they had founded the HIDA)

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and in the national artistic field should at first glance have made it impossible for the younger generation to gain recognition through their writing, since the competition was so unequal. However, it was exactly this positioning in the field, now relatively empty, which attracted the attention of HIDA graduates between 2002 and 2006. For them, concentrating on dramatic writing was one way of entering the Syrian artistic field, and it was one that had not been taken by the new graduates’ older peers. In setting up their workshop these young graduates were not seeking to promote any particular political cause. Instead, they thought of writing as a practice. Every three months they would decide upon a theme for their writing, such as ‘fear’, ‘honour’ or ‘the city’, and they were then free to write whatever they chose about it. As a result, the texts written during this period all reflect a thematic approach. Al-Fayrūs (The Virus) by Wāʾil Qaddūr links the theme of infamy to that of the relationship between parents and children, for example. The writers’ first plays also came out of this workshop. The Virus appeared in an anthology of work by young Syrian playwrights published by the Mamdouh Adwan publishing house in 2008. In 2010, four texts were published by the Lebanese publisher Dār al-Fārābī with the support of the Mawred Al Thaqafy (discussed below) – Brūnz (Bronze) by Muḍar al-Ḥajjī, Khārij al-sayṭara (Out of Control) by Wāʾil Qaddūr and Dimashq Ḥalab (Damascus-Aleppo) by ʿAbdullāh al-Kafrī.7 Members of the workshop also held a stage reading entitled Ḥubb, khawf, Dimashq … wa-aṣdiqā’ ākharūn (Love, Fear, Damascus and Other Friends) in 2008 as part of the celebration of Damascus as the Arab Capital of Culture. While the workshop later went into a slow decline, before it did so it provided the first direct experience of writing for its members – four of the eight participants continued to write or to direct – as well as a first form of contact with various non-state or foreign organizations that could support artistic production in Syria that was called at this time independent.

The development of international networks The celebrations around Damascus as the Arab Capital of Culture for 2008 are an illustration of the relaxed attitude of the post-Hafez al-Assad regime

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to a cultural milieu that was not directly part of the state institutions, as well as the change of face that Syria was now presenting to the outside world. The diplomatic respectability that Bashar al-Assad now enjoyed led to his being invited to attend the 14 July military parade in France in the same year, for example. Caroline Donati (2009: 333) writes: The event [Damascus Arab Capital of Culture in 2008] created great excitement on the alternative cultural scene: artists of recognised competence and enjoying a certain degree of independence from the regime were associated with it, though the event also saw a renewal of certain modes of co-optation of artists by the regime. The artists responded to the invitation to take part because they saw in this event a relatively open space in which to produce their work, something they could not find in traditional structures riven by rivalries and cronyism.

It gave a first experience of cultural planning in an international context to young artists. It seems to have encouraged ways of working that had been foreign to cultural professionals working in Syria up until that point, and the figure of the ‘independent artist’ (paradoxical in the context of a state event) was highlighted throughout the pre-2011 period. It was with these things in mind that some young graduates of the HIDA started to work for the Syria Trust for Development (STD), a sort of umbrella organization for local NGOs. This brought together four NGO projects, three of which had been set up by Syrian first lady Asma al-Assad: Firdos (concentrating on rural development), Massar (children’s education) and Shabāb (education and training for students and young professionals). Rawafed (concentrating on heritage and culture) was founded in 2007 (Fioroni 2012: 72) to promote a modernizing agenda that would ‘prepare the population for gradual privatisation and the “discharging” of responsibilities by the state by encouraging particularly young people to become more active and to head towards the private sector, without this leading to any increase in participation in the political system’ (Ruiz de Elvira Carrascal 2013: 441). The STD was an organization, therefore, that though it presented itself as independent was in fact a more or less directly controlled extension of the regime. However, it was nevertheless an interesting opportunity for an artistic milieu that was in touch with the outside world. In addition to being paid

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a salary, its employees were trained by foreign experts in the methods and concepts of international cooperation (Fioroni 2012: 77). Wāʾil Qaddūr and ʿAbdullāh al-Kafrī were hired by Rawafed in 2009, occupying different positions during the two years they worked there, including as project manager and in monitoring and coordination. Muḍar al-Ḥajjī and Wāʾil Qaddūr worked for Massar after they graduated. While the capital provided by the STD was of relatively little value in the artistic field at that time, in the wake of the events of the Syrian Spring it became essential.

The 2011 uprising The outbreak of the March 2011 demonstrations and of what would come to be called the Syrian Spring brought about huge changes in the local artistic field. It is difficult to determine the size of the break that took place between the before and after, however. There were very varied degrees of mobilization in the artistic milieu, even if extraordinary levels of excitement reigned throughout. Some artists who had committed themselves early on put their skills at the service of the demonstrators. Painters drew calligraphy on banners and designed placards, graphic designers produced posters and film-makers documented demonstrations. All this represented the emergence of a committed form of artistic production that aimed to mobilize, to inform and to break with the internal censorship. Abou Naddara, a film-makers collective, accompanied the demonstrations by putting short films on line every Friday, the day the demonstrations took place, that were somewhere between activist cinema and art (Boëx 2013a). Filmmakers also helped train activists to use tools from paint brushes to graphics and video-editing software as part of their commitment to the demonstrations. This led to the appearance of ‘amateur’ forms of artistic production that were meant to serve the Revolution and were distributed outside the usual channels, usually online. The regime swiftly responded by taking a repressive line and retaking control of certain areas of the cultural milieu. This was the case for drama production, for example, where several TV stars had tried to become involved. However, this industry is under the indirect control of the regime, with the

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production companies being controlled by businessmen thought to be close to it (Boëx 2013b: 90). Two petitions were produced in April and May 2011 signed by several Syrian TV stars. As Yves Gonzalez-Quijano (2011) has pointed out, the petition entitled ‘Under the Roof of the Homeland’ calling for an investigation into the repression in the town of Deraa illustrates the moderate tone of their involvement. Nevertheless, there was a violent reaction to the petition, and a smear campaign was started against its signatories. This was widely broadcast in the official media, and the production companies closed their doors on anyone who did not make amends by re-swearing their allegiance to the regime on television. Perhaps the TV stars had become too visibly involved in the contestation for a regime that was trying to break the link between the streets and the cultural milieu, especially since the series were among the most popular products of the Syrian cultural industry. However, this did not stop some actors from continuing to attend the demonstrations, rapidly becoming their symbols. Subfields such as theatre did not provide the same visibility, and this ‘anonymity’ allowed those working in the theatre milieu to continue to take part discreetly in the demonstrations, complicating the work of researchers trying to estimate the extent of their involvement (Boëx 2013b: 102). Since they did not depend directly on the state section of the field or the television industry, Wāʾil Qaddūr, ʿAbdullāh al-Kafrī and their colleagues who were also graduates of the HIDA and were working for Rawafed perhaps had more freedom of choice. The sector in which they worked had not been taken in hand in an authoritarian fashion, even if the STD programmes that received funds from abroad were stopped. Over the course of 2011, these young writers deserted Rawafed, either by resigning or by not having their contracts renewed, separating themselves from the traditional professional milieu in the first year of the Revolution in a way that could have been part of a strategy to minimize risks (Baczko et al. 2016: 88). Since relationships with colleagues were uncertain, those working in the STD chose to concentrate on the relationships that were the strongest instead. Moreover, the perceptions of the STD were beginning to change, and it was now being more clearly seen as an instrument of the regime. The impression that the regime was on the verge of collapse led many artists to leave the STD, and not only the most committed.

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Ettijahat: Independent Culture The revolutionary wave that swept across Syria in 2011 called much into question and opened up new perspectives for the future. Most of those who took part in the demonstrations were convinced that the regime would fall during the same year in the same way as those in Tunisia and Egypt had done. It was during this period of turmoil that the idea of Ettijahat was born as an organization to support Syrian cultural creativity. The playwrights Wāʾil Qaddūr and ʿAbdullāh al-Kafrī took part in its foundation, as did to a lesser extent Muḍar al-Ḥajjī. An analysis of the positioning of this organization that was born during the revolutionary period yields a better understanding of the changing distribution of the capital within the field. First of all, the Arab Spring emphasized the role of the young people who had started the demonstrations, presenting them as ‘modern’ Facebook users and so forth. This ‘youth’ capital was all the more valuable when it was associated with emerging artists like the young playwrights who are the subject of this chapter. The whole world looked on amazed at the spectacle of these young creative types who had dared to defy the ageing authoritarianism of the regime. Ettijahat succeeded in obtaining vital support from Al-Mawrid al-thaqafī (translated as Culture Resource, but commonly known by its Arabic name of Mawred), an Arab NGO based in Cairo that supports artistic creation in the region.8 As with the Yemeni authors (see Laurent Damesin’s chapter), an alternative to the state sponsorship over culture lies in the regional level within the network of institutions supporting Arab art. During the Arab Spring, the Mawred set up a long-term grants programme of at least a year called ‘Abbara’ that aimed to support independent Arab cultural organizations ‘during the period of the transition to democracy’.9 In the words of those who set Ettijahat up, the projects were evaluated according to their goals, their ways of working and their internal structure. It was here that the training gained at the STD came into its own. ‘Ettijahat: Independent Culture’ took up the same position within the field as the one taken by some of its founders in Syria. At this revolutionary moment when the power of the state was being questioned, it tried to introduce a model for artistic creation that would support the Syrian cultural sector while

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at the same time maintaining its independence. It positioned itself at the furthest point from the state-controlled section of the field and in relation to international organizations. In 2012, the Syrian Writers Association (Rābitat al-kuttāb al-suriyyīn) was established in a break with the regime organization the Union of Arab Writers (see Alexa Firat’s chapter). According to Elena Chiti (2015: 71), anyone joining this new Association was taking up a political stance against the regime, since it clearly positioned itself as revolutionary. Ettijahat was different from the other cultural structures that are politically engaged and relying on a revolutionary capital. It did not promote a committed form of art as such, but rather argued that setting up frameworks for artistic creation in itself meant taking part in building democracy,10 a position that was in line with the priorities of international donors. Moreover, since the Syrian Spring, art production per se offers a place for symbolic struggle. In Alexa Firat’s chapter, building an archive of the revolution creativity is regarded as a highly political process. Ettijahat was founded at the end of 2011 and was registered in Syria as a ‘non-profit making organisation’. At the end of 2012, the group’s founding members went into exile in neighbouring countries such as Jordan and Lebanon for reasons that were linked to the Syrian political situation, notably the emergence of the armed conflict, the need to avoid conscription and the greater professional opportunities available elsewhere. The individuals who had contributed to the foundation of the organization were not necessarily employed by it, and their going into exile led to the transfer of its headquarters to Beirut with only a branch office being kept in Damascus.

Exile in Beirut The transfer of the organization to Beirut did not happen by chance, as Lebanon has been the country of exile of choice for Syrian artists since 2012 over and above Turkey and Jordan. It was in Beirut that Ettijahat came into its own as a major source of support for Syrian cultural production, its links to the Mawred Al Thaqafy allowing it to establish itself quickly in the city. The Théâtre du Tournesol, known on the Lebanese theatre scene for its work crossing sectarian boundaries and for its commitment during the Lebanese

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Civil War, rented Ettijahat office space in its buildings. One of the members of the Théâtre du Tournesol is Hanane Hajj Ali (Ḥanān Ḥajj ‘Alī), also a founder of Mawred. Lebanon has a lively cultural and artistic scene, and the country is very open to the outside world and is keen on contemporary art, unlike Syria where the arts scene is more conservative both in terms of the forms of art it encourages and their content. The roots of the Lebanese contemporary arts scene lie in the post-war years. Hanan Toukan (2010: 121) has written interestingly on the development of the arts in Lebanon, particularly on the increasingly important role played by international donors after the end of the Civil War. Ettijahat is thus fully in tune with its new cultural environment. The organization’s command of the language of international cooperation, a form of capital mentioned above, meant it could obtain financing according to the methods in place in Lebanon. In Toukan’s view (2010: 138), this way of working, a legacy of the liberal period and one that operated entirely through NGOs, emerged in the cultural field at the beginning of the new millennium following pressure from the West for greater intercultural dialogue in the aftermath of the 11 September attacks. In a similar way as happened in Egypt (see Ilka Eikhof ’s chapter), the 2011 Syrian revolution brought a structural change by allowing the creative industries model to enter the Syrian artistic field. Various organizations supporting Syrian culture were formed in exile. ‘Citizens Artists’, an organization supporting Syrian theatre, was set up by Marie Elias as an extension of her work in Syria. Using various foreign donors, she was financing theatre considered to be independent. Wāʾil Qaddūr was a beneficiary of this organization’s ‘Writing for the Stage’ programme, allowing him to complete his play L’aveu in 2013. Unlike Ettijahat, Citizens Artists belonged in the main to the restricted production side of the Syrian field in exile. It enjoyed little visibility among foreign NGOs working on Syrian culture in Lebanon, unlike its founder who was always being invited to take part in various projects. It had a limited communications strategy, just a Facebook page, and it was known above all in the Syrian theatre milieu. This comparison further illustrates the new dynamics operating in the Syrian field in exile. Seniority, experience and training became less important compared to skills such as fluency in English and the ability to shape a project

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in a way attractive to donors. The importance of networks also seems to have changed in the new environment, and having already completed an artistic project with some form of external support was now seen as an advantage when applying for further funding.11 Ettijahat, whose activities relied on its ability to follow rules of this sort, nevertheless paradoxically protested against this way of working.

A binding donation? The question of donor influence is at the heart of Ettijahat’s concerns, reflecting worries also expressed by many artists. They see that the conditions attached to funding can constrain both the content and the form of an artistic work. Donors are sometimes even perceived as standing in a voyeuristic position where Syria offers them an attractive form of drama that drives their interest for the local art. ʿAbdullāh al-Kafrī together with Zoukak, a Lebanese theatre company, set up I Hate Theatre, I Love Pornography in Beirut in spring 2015. The play deals with the Syrian situation attractiveness for foreign donors. A Lebanese theatre company is looking for a Syrian playwright in order to get a grant from abroad because foreign demand for what is ‘Syrian’ is greater than that for what is Lebanese. The title of al-Kafri’s play is a response to an international media request, which had suggested that he rewrites his 2008 play ‘Damascus-Aleppo’ in 2015 by introducing the 2011 Revolution in Syria and its consequences into it (Haddad 2015). The ‘pornography’ in the eyes of the author comes from the demand for Syrian cultural products that provide information and/ or descriptions of the situation in Syria and that makes Syrian artists the spokesmen of the situation and their works valuable simply to the extent that they bear witness to it. Such concerns echo a remark made by Toukan (2010: 123) about development NGOs supporting the arts in Lebanon, pointing to ‘the possibility of funders in Lebanon and elsewhere actually supporting “art” with the stated mandate of social engineering rather than a comprehensive consideration of the intricacies involved in the evolving role of the aesthetic as more than merely a social agent in “peripheral” settings’. This observation also applies to the Syrian artists in

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exile. They had been turned into leading interlocutors who could help to diagnose the problems of their society and analyse its present crisis. In order to obtain funding from a development NGO, it would be better to take a social or political approach to the Syrian crisis, or one that touched on cultural policy, in the projects presented. Paradoxically, this was precisely the position of Ettijahat in terms of its own goals – to contribute to democratic change in Syria by working in the field of the arts. However, the organization refuses to use criteria other than an artistic one when evaluating projects for funding purposes. But the situation is not black-and-white, and there are committed artists who produce work in line with the international interest in the situation in Syria. Art products dealing with the Syrian question and mostly directed to foreign audiences have been produced by Syrian artists living in exile, and documentary theatre pieces are just one example of them. They are built on realty description and are frequently using witness statements as material. This type of production, tending towards committed art, is close to the economic section of the field occupied by the donor organizations and elements from the international cultural scene. Through their criticisms, the artists point out a new pole of heteronomy linked with international donors where artistic legitimacy seems to be weaker. Regarding the local or regional organizations working with such donors, it appears that it is not so much the artistic quality of the projects that they support that has been questioned. Indeed, artists not benefitting from their support condemn mainly their supposed corrupt way of operating that relies upon cronyism and networks of friends.

A second exile Ettijahat moved to Lebanon under relatively promising conditions in 2012 at a time when Syrian artists at the beginning or middle of their careers (graduating before 2009–10) were moving en masse to Beirut. However, there was also no policy in place to welcome them, and only NGOs and certain foreign cultural centres along with individual initiatives offered financial support for the arts. As a result, artists working under the patronage of European or American donors and international foundations travelled abroad to festivals and exhibitions,

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also submitting demands for asylum abroad or settling in countries where they could benefit from visa systems or residence permits related to the arts. The career of Wāʾil Qaddūr follows this pattern. His play Al-ghuraf al-ṣaghīra was translated into French as part of the ‘Dramaturgie arabe contemporaine’ (Contemporary Arab Drama) programme at the Friche de la Belle de Mai arts centre in Marseilles in 2013 and was then published in a bilingual version by the Tunisian publisher Elyzad.12 Later, he received an invitation to attend stage readings organized by the Cannes École Régionale d’Acteurs in France, but owing to a problem with his passport the Jordanian authorities did not allow him to leave the country despite his having obtained a French visa. Three other readings of his work took place at literary festivals in France, and it was through the translations that were made for these that it was first received in France. When he requested asylum in France in 2014, the visas he had earlier been given to attend these events, as well as the artistic recognition he was beginning to enjoy in France, would certainly have played a role in ensuring that the response was positive. It was also because the residence requirements for Syrians in Lebanon were being tightened up that many of the Syrian artists began to move out of the country, mostly to Europe. Yet, members of the younger generations, particularly those who had graduated after 2011, remained stuck in Beirut or Turkey because they had not yet gained recognition in Europe and thus had difficulty getting the kinds of invitations and support that are essential for obtaining visas. Many of them chose to try to enter Europe illegally via Greece and then travel to Western Europe along the ‘migrant corridor’ that was open between 2014 and the end of 2015. At the same time, the sources of funding that had emerged after the Syrian Spring were now declining in number. The reason for this given by those involved was that the open-ended nature of the conflict in Syria, clear by 2013, had meant that NGOs that had set up funding programmes over two years in 2011 now did not renew them. Over this period, Ettijahat had succeeded in finding funding and increasing its sponsors, allowing it to double the number of grants it was able to make. It had established itself in the Syrian field in exile, though the second wave of migration meant that it lost Muḍar al-Ḥajjī, who moved to Berlin, and Wāʾil Qaddūr, who moved to Paris. It is also interesting to note that when Ettijahat launched its grant programme ‘Laboratory of the

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Arts’ in 2014, it limited it to Syrian artists living in the Arab countries or Turkey. In the second edition of the programme launched in 2015, it opened it up to artists living elsewhere, with 20 per cent of applications coming from Europe. In 2016, the latter made up 40 per cent of the total, and today the organization is experimenting with grants entirely limited to artists living in Europe. On the individual level, Ettijahat also opened up opportunities for its members. Muḍar al-Ḥajjī took part in an exchange programme in the summer of 2012 called ‘Tandem Shaml’ organized by the European Cultural Foundation (ECF, a Dutch foundation) and MitOSt (a German NGO) with the support of Mawred and aimed at individuals working for a cultural organization and wanting to work on collaborative projects. Muḍar al-Ḥajjī took part in his capacity as an artist and as a member of Ettijahat, even if not a salaried one, and working with a German artist Stella Cristofolini he staged his play Al-Ān hunāk (Now There) in June 2013. He used the experience to write another play, ʿIndamā tabkī Faraḥ (When Farah Cries). Muḍar al-Ḥajjī suggested publishing this play during a grant workshop organized by the BC in Lebanon in 2014, and it duly appeared from Dār alFārābī in 2015. In 2016, the ECF published Another Europe, a book looking back on the Foundation’s activities over the previous fifteen years, and ʿIndama tabkī Faraḥ, now translated into English, was included in it. Al-Ḥajjī’s participation in Ettijahat was thus turned into capital that could be drawn upon to write an original work, publish it and build connections with the Syrian artistic community in exile. He also obtained a German visa, allowing him to continue on the programme. The new relationships he developed and the first visa he obtained through the programme later enabled him to move permanently to Berlin. In 2016, his play was staged in Germany. He entered a dominated section of the German artistic field and began to direct writing workshops with Syrian refugees in German theatres. The place of exile in determining positioning in the field is underlined by that of ʿAbdullāh al-Kafrī in contrast to Muḍar al-Ḥajjī. On arriving in Lebanon at the end of 2011, al-Kafrī worked as a teacher at the Institut Français du Proche-Orient (IFPO) in its Arabic language programme that had moved to Beirut at the beginning of the Syrian Spring. Thanks to the ‘protection’ given by his position as an employee of the IFPO, he was able to live in Lebanon legally and did not have to face the vicissitudes of the Lebanese legal system.

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This also helped him in being appointed as head of Ettijahat at the same time, among other things, and his position as the organization’s head enabled him to travel to Europe, the United States, Morocco, India and elsewhere at different times, always as a result of invitations from partner organizations. ʿAbdullāh al-Kafrī did not have the same kind of visa problems that other members of Ettijahat might have had, and their strategy of converting artistic capital into opportunities abroad was not essential to him. Immersion in the NGO and donor community meant that the expertise of members of Ettijahat was recognized in the Syrian field and was translated into requests for the organization to assist in seeking funding for various artistic projects and for its members to cooperate with other organizations. ʿAbdullāh al-Kafrī was able to build up such added value and begin a career as an expert on contemporary Syrian culture. The result of this, as he himself has remarked, has been that he has produced fewer and fewer creative works himself. Sitting on selection committees for various grants and programmes has meant that he has been automatically disqualified from applying for grants himself for years. According to Wāʾil Qaddūr, this was precisely the reason he refused to go down this route, and as a result al-Kafrī, unlike the other two authors, has published nothing since ʿAtabat al-alam ladā al-sayyida Ghāda (Mrs Ghada’s Pain Threshold) in 2012. However, his decision to stay in Lebanon even at the expense of his literary work paradoxically made working with the local arts scene easier. The fact that he stayed in the same place gave him greater visibility, and today he is one of the few recognized artists from the Syrian scene still present in Lebanon. By moving into the expertise section of the field he has also come close to its academic side (occupied by Marie Elias and Hanane Qassab Hassan), enhancing his artistic legitimacy. He is now regularly asked to work on various Syrian projects or in cooperation with Lebanese ones (such as with the Zoukak theatre company) as a dramatist or director.

Conclusion The careers of these three young Syrian playwrights, only briefly sketched here, illustrate aspects of the development of the Syrian artistic field after the

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Revolution broke out in March 2011. This chapter only deals with part of the new artistic creation that emerged from an environment that had previously entered the world of art through its academic curriculum. It does not deal with the artists or the work that emerged directly from the mobilization against the regime and were able to convert revolutionary into cultural capital. For the three artists considered here, a perceived lack of initial capital led to their being placed in the subfield of drama, a space which had been marginalized by the presence in it of certain internationally recognized writers who had died some ten years earlier. The real innovation lies in the new relationship with the power of the state. The artistic field in Syria is organized around the state and its agency the Ministry of Culture along with the latter’s various departments. Escaping from state control is possible for well-established artists, but only with the support of an external market. The small number of private galleries that existed in Syria in the 1990s shows how difficult this was to do at the time. But the changes that took place at the beginning of the new millennium with the arrival of a new generation in some areas of the dictatorship led to a softening, or more accurately a redefinition, of the relationship between the artistic field and the regime. As a result, it was possible for some new entrants to the field to position themselves in ways seen as independent that is to say not wholly dependent on traditional state structures. The Syrian Spring led to political turmoil, but for the artists interviewed for this chapter it also led to a calling into question of the system of artistic production. Having some early experience behind them, though limited by the para-state form of the STD, they created an independent organization that supported and acted as an incubator for Syrian art. Capital and skills that had up to then been seen as being of little account were invested in this organization, they have been reassessed due to the reorganization of the national field. Moreover, the contacts that these artists had established with international partners were used to promote the rapid establishment of the new organization. The dual commitment, artistic and political–cultural, that the young artists argued for through Ettijahat coincided with the development-centric views of the donor organizations that were present particularly in Lebanon, the first port of call for exiled Syrian artists. The international connections

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that these donors provided meant that first works and then individuals could travel abroad. It is obvious that the positioning of a given artist in the artistic field would directly determine the opportunities that artist would find in exile. Unlike the generations that had been consecrated before 2011, whose members could count on support from international arts networks and/ or the diplomatic services when they wanted to travel abroad, the younger artists used the capital they had acquired in exile. The generation discussed in this chapter took advantage of the opportunities that were available to them in Lebanon, seemingly an exceptional place for artistic experimentation. European governments invited these artists to come to Europe through the ‘migrant window’ that opened between 2014 and the end of 2015, particularly when they were supported by local structures such as NGOs, foundations, cultural centres etc., in a way of working reminiscent of ‘chosen immigration’. As a result, as well as being an important political moment, the Syrian Spring also had the effect of redefining an artistic space that goes beyond the ‘national’. It marked the transition between forms of creation hemmed in by the state and production connected to the international arena, as well as the appearance of new geographical spaces. The issue of migration profoundly affected individual artistic careers, though it does not seem to have called national belonging into question, at least not for the time being. Artists continue to situate themselves in the Syrian field even if they live in exile. While their insertion into the artistic fields of their host countries is ongoing, this does not mean that the Syrian field, though fragmented geographically, will eventually disappear. Indeed, observing this transformation phase is an opportunity to look more closely at issues of migration and artistic practice and thus to go beyond the traditionally national framework of a field analysis, in a similar way to what Tristan Leperlier has done in his analysis of the Algerian literary field during the ‘Black Decade’ in Algeria.

Notes 1 Interview with Wāʾil Qaddūr (Amman, 31 March 2015). 2 Interview in Marseilles with an actress formerly employed by the Syrian Theatre Section (24 April 2016).

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3 Interview in Beirut with a former Syrian freelancer with the FCC (8 November 2015). 4 Different conceptions of their role have been analysed in depth in the cases of Madagascar and Morocco (Kiwan and Meinhof 2011). 5 Interview with Wāʾil Qaddūr (Paris, 8 October 2016). 6 Interview with ʿAbdullāh al-Kafrī (Beirut, 19 November 2015). 7 Ḥakāyā al-rūḥ wa-l-asmant (Stories of soul and concrete), Beirut: Dār al-Fārābī, 2010.

http://dar-alfarabi.com/product/‫واالسمنت‬-‫الروح‬-‫حكايا‬/ (accessed 7 October 2016).

8 Al-Mawrid al-thaqafī: http://mawred.org (accessed 24 September 2016). 9 ‘Abbara’, Al-Mawrid al-thaqafī: http://mawred.org/grants/abbara-grant (accessed 25 September 2016). 10 ‘Ettijahat. Independent Culture: http://ettijahat.org/page/21 (accessed 8 October 2016). 11 The director of a foreign NGO in Lebanon explained that it preferred to support artists who had already proven themselves, estimating that fewer than 20 per cent of grants went to unknowns (interview in Beirut, 27 October 2015). 12 ‘Dramaturgie arabe contemporaine: publications Friche la Belle de Mai’, [Contemporary Arab Drama: Publications of the Friche la Belle de Mai]. http://ancien.lafriche.org/content/dramaturgie-arabe-contemporainepublications (accessed 29 October 2016); Kaddour, Waël, Les petites chambres [Small Rooms], Wissam Arbache & Hala Omran (trads.), Tunis: Elyzad, 2013.

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Boëx, Cécile. 2013b. ‘Mobilisation d’artistes dans le mouvement de révolte en Syrie: modes d’action et limites de l’engagement’. In Au cœur des révoltes arabes: devenir révolutionnaires. Amin Allal, and Thomas Pierret, eds., pp. 87–107. Paris: Armand Colin. Chiti, Elena. 2015. ‘La fiction à l’épreuve de la réalité, la légitimité à l’épreuve de la révolution. Un regard sur les écrivains de Syrie’. In Ecrire l’inattendu. Les printemps arabes entre fictions et histoire. Touriya Fili-Tullon, Blandine Valfort, and Elena Chiti, eds., pp. 61–75. Louvain-La-Neuve: Academia Press. Donati, Caroline. 2009. L’exception syrienne: entre modernisation et résistance. Paris: La Découverte. Fioroni, Claudie. 2012. ‘Le Syria Trust for Development. Un cas d’auto-reproduction du regime?’. In Le développement, une affaire d’ONG? Associations, Etats et bailleurs dans le monde arabe. Caroline Abu-Sada and Challand Benoit. Paris: Karthala. Press. 69–93. Gonzalez-Quijano, Yves. 2011. ‘La révolution: un drame pour la télé arabe!’. Culture et politique arabes. 14 June 2011. http://cpa.hypotheses.org/2796. Haddad, Emmanuel. 2015. ‘Théâtre syrien, art hors-sol’. Le Courrier, 1 August 2015. http://www.lecourrier.ch/131652/theatre_syrien_art_hors_sol. Joubin, Rebecca. 2013. The Politics of Love: Sexuality, Gender, and Marriage in Syrian Television Drama. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. al-Kafrī, ʿAbdullāh. 2015. al-Khitāb fī al-naṣṣ al-masraḥī al-sūrī al-muʿāṣir. Riwāyat al-rāhin wa-kitābat al-dhāt [Discourse in the Text of Contemporary Syrian Theatre. Narrating the Present and Writing the Intimate]. Beirut: Masters Thesis, Université Saint-Joseph. Kiwan, Nadia, and Ulrike Hanna Meinhof. 2011. Cultural Globalization and Music: African Artists in Transnational Networks. Houndmills, Hampshire & New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Picard, Elizabeth. 2004. ‘Syrie: la coalition autoritaire fait de la résistance’. Politique étrangère volume hiver(4). Winter 2004/5: 755–68. DOI: 10.3917/pe.054.0755. Ruiz de Elvira Carrascal, Laura. 2013. Associations de bienfaisance et ingénieries politiques dans la Syrie de Bachar al-Assad: Emergence d’une société civile autonome et retrait de l’Etat? Doctoral Thesis, EHESS and Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Toukan, Hanan. 2010. ‘On Being the Other in Post-Civil War Lebanon: Aid and the Politics of Art in Processes of Contemporary Cultural Production’. Arab Studies Journal 18 (1), Visual Arts and Art Practices in the Middle East (Spring): pp. 118–61.

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Class and Creative Economies: The Cultural Field in Cairo Ilka Eickhof

Contextualizing the contemporary cultural field in Cairo ‘The question of doing “political work” is at the heart of most contemporary art making in Egypt’, writes art critique Ismail Fayed in an account of a group exhibition in Cairo (Fayed 2016). According to the author, those who do not abide this unwritten law fear to be marginalized from the artistic community, including the funders. Ismail Fayed gives two reasons for this phenomenon: the role of US and European grant-making institutions since the 1990s and their market logics, and ‘a global move to consider art a dumping ground for everything the state should be dealing with and is not’ (Fayed 2016). These two dynamics – northern European funding of arts and cultural productions in Cairo tied to a developmental frame that prioritizes the political, and the reinforcement of creative industries structures since the revolution in 2011 – set the frame for the negotiations of power that I will discuss in this chapter. Starting off with a brief description of the creative economies field, I will then zoom in and discuss intertwined capitals in flux that play a role in Cairo’s current cultural field and its specific sociocultural context in regard to access to the market of available funding. One of the actors that play a dominant role in the contemporary cultural field in Cairo are the European cultural institutions and their employees. Their interventions and cultural programming go beyond the field of art-internal concerns, but produce a hegemonic discourse. Interviewees are kept anonymous due to privacy protection. All interviews are transcripts from audio recordings.

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Pierre Bourdieu’s theory allows us to conduct an analysis of the formation of hegemonic structures and discourses across different fields in which hegemony is seen as relational, situated within this field of forces. For Pierre Bourdieu, every field – economic, political or artistic – is characterized by a certain predominance of certain types of capital such as economic, cultural or social capital, and certain rules and conditions of access in this field. He locates the art field as well as the cultural field in general within the field of power in which social relations between actors and institutions are negotiated. The common characteristic of these social actors is their capital which allows them to occupy dominant positions in the cultural field. Here, the social field, the power field and the cultural field are interlaced, and hence the art field is anything but a power-free space, but a space in which social actors exercise seemingly self-evident practices and ideas (illusio and doxa, in Bourdieusian terms) which secure a social order that is perceived as normal. The capitals that position one in the cultural field include financial capital (being able to provide free labour such as volunteerism, internships, having the time to be present for networking), social and symbolic capital (social circle, taste, habitus, performance within social Spiel) and educative capital (school education, choice of university, English proficiency). The European institutions regulate the contemporary cultural field in Cairo through the funding structures of their programmes which are part of foreign cultural aid. This in itself inherently carries within it the idea of the gift and giving which, according to Ilan Kapoor, involves recompense, interest or debt, or some other form of recognition. Recognizing the donor as such, as a gift giver (funding), refers to the self-recognition which is integral to the gift and the donor identity. It is the nature of the social relationship between the donor and the receiver of funding that turns the gift into a commodity. This was especially visible shortly after the uprising in Egypt in 2011, when European cultural institutions supported more and more artists and art projects in Cairo and invited them to present their work and/or voice in Europe – mostly art works in connection to the revolution, and so-called revolutionary art. In this context, foreign cultural aid is particularly linked to social solidarity and the gift, a theoretical intersection explored in depth by Sociologist Aafke Komter (2005). The cultural programmes entail the developmental notion of aid while simultaneously operating on the basis of an audience-driven programming

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market structure. Here, the presence of the social actor in the cultural field – the possibility of permanent availability and the knowledge of being in the right place at the right time – is part of their symbolic capital, specifically in neoliberal structures such as the creative economies. It is the market that links accessibility and practices of consumption with existing social and economic power in the cultural field. In the following I will analyse how a structural perpetuation of inequality and with it the reproduction of social hierarchies unfolds concurrently with the strengthening of the creative economics in the frame of prevalent neoliberal–capitalist conditions of production.

The market and the revolution Since the revolution in 2011 (and until recently), the social actors of Cairo’s contemporary culture scene have been in the spotlight of various fields: the socalled alternative art and cultural field, European art/culture and development politics (often with a focus on activists and ‘youth’), academic and/or journalistic research foci, or transnational projects of cultural organizations – overall, the most prominent buzz words being ‘revolutionary’ and ‘graffiti art’. Some of these collaborations and approaches were triggered through market economies tied to a general interest in the revolutions (for a wider discussion of this phenomenon in the academic field see POMEPS Studies 8, The Ethics of Research in the Middle East, 2015). It was at that time that the budgets of the northern European cultural institutions received new funding possibilities based on bilateral agreements between states. One example is the ‘Transformation Partnership’ between Germany and Egypt, a carefully constructed agreement entitled ‘Berlin Declaration’, signed in August 2011 and reaffirmed and concretized in November 2012. The Partnership opened up opportunities for projects in cooperation with the German Goethe-Institute and other cooperation partners in order to support Egypt ‘in its efforts to modernise society and bring about democratic change, among other things’, according to the website of the German Foreign Ministry. The partnership allocated around 30 million euros in 2012 and 2013 to project executing agencies (see website auswaertiges-amt.de; Michou 2016).

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However, the specific funding situation in Cairo where a large part of the contemporary art scene depends on the financial support of northern European cultural institutions like the German Goethe-Institute or the British Council goes back to the 1990s. Anthropologist Jessica Winegar has extensively written about the change from post-1989 state cultural policy in Egypt to the privatization of the culture industries (Winegar 2006a, 2006b; for articles which discuss the recent situation, see Evans 2013, Fayed 2014, Nagi 2014, Eickhof 2015, among others). In her article ‘Cultural Sovereignty in a Global Art Economy’ she takes a critical stance on the asymmetrical evaluation of art, the Western curators’ universal hierarchy of value paired with the teleological idea of development and progress, and the changes that the art scene went through from the late 1980s (‘paternalist gerontocracy’) to the mid-2000s (‘neoliberal artistic subjectivity’ and investment as ‘creating opportunities’). Winegar analyses the situation of young Egyptian artists who at that time were trapped between ‘two regimes of power’: either being instrumentalized to represent a progressive, modern state, or being framed by Western curators through the developmental lens which ‘emphasizes Western cultural superiority’ (Winegar 2006a: 182). Not much has changed when it comes to these two described poles within the cultural field, and the discussions surrounding them. However, by now the cultural landscape in Cairo feels scarce. Some of the smaller institutions and NGOs shut down or operate behind closed doors, on a low level, or organizing mainly private events/events in private households, others slimmed down their programmes. The crackdown on cultural spaces by the state specifically in 2015 and 2016 suffocated projects that were in their beginnings, scared others off, or made working situations more and more difficult with different strategies of wearing people down: turning an event idea into an endless chase for the correct legal documents in order to realize it (see also Habiba Effat’s take on the local music scene, Effat 2016), ask for tax bills from years ago or take important means of work away, like computers (information from conversation with curator from local cultural institution, 2016). However, the often raised critique of local state support of the arts as limiting and controlling emphasizes the supposed autonomy of the socalled alternative culture scene. Meanwhile, local artists might see the retreat of the state and the concurrent rise of foreign capital and interest

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‘as both liberating and predatory’ (Winegar 2006a: 174). At the same time, the current crackdown on local human rights organizations and local cultural institutions complicate the legal and structural challenges of both local and foreign funding. Local funding requires more local publicity and exposure and a dependency on donors from the local elite, both are factors which might influence and limit the content of the cultural project. On the other side, authoritarian regimes argue that (Western) foreign funding is undermining their sovereignty, leaving the local cultural practitioners between a rock and a hard place when it comes to the question of seeking funding (see also Baoumi 2016). The funding situation for cultural projects and events remains dominated by northern European players and the grants they make available on the basis of the diplomatic ties between the countries. The work of these institutions is closely linked to the foreign offices and therefore carries the status of public/cultural diplomacy, which gives the actors more freedom to manoeuvre within the laws of the Egyptian state. Yet, often being regarded as an alternative to local state funding (if the latter is available), it is easily overlooked that this funding is still state or governmental funding, derived from another state’s budget. This is also the case despite the reasoning that the budgets are geared towards the private sector, which promises less strings attached because of the logic of the creative industries’ market liberalization. In the following I will take a closer look at the construction of cultural funding as developmental support and part of the creative economies in juxtaposition of notions and negotiations of responsibility and empathy from the side of the cultural practitioner as well as the donors (Komter 2005, Kapoor 2008, Pedwell 2012).

Cultural field, creative economies and development policies The European Parliament states that the competitiveness of the European Union (EU) in the frame of todays ‘postindustrial economy’ will be strengthened in particular through the cultural and creative sector, which is referred to as a new growing industry of a ‘dynamic, knowledge-based economy’ with 654 billion euro revenue in 2003 (Türkmen 2010)/535.9 billion euro in 2014 (EY 2014).

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However, the growing industry of the creative sector is not just narrowed down to the logics of market, but also to more fluid concepts of morals, values and identity politics, as stated on the website of the European Commission on Growth, published in July 2016: ‘Cultural and creative industries (CCIs) are at the heart of the creative economy: knowledge-intensive, based on individual creativity and talent, they generate huge economic wealth and preserve European identity, culture and values.’ It is at this intersecting point of economic growth with identity politics that media and communication scholar David Hesmondhalgh introduces the term neo-liberalism (Hesmondhalgh 2008). Cultural and creative industries are not interchangeable terms, says Hesmondhalgh. ‘Creative industries’ refers to a ‘refusal’ of the forms of critical analysis that the cultural industries approach brings with it. The common replacement of one term with the other only signals the ‘degree of accommodation with neoliberalism’ (Hesmondhalgh 2008: 552). In its beginnings, the cultural industries approach was connected with the discussion around the political economy of culture, and ethical and normative questions attached to it. The debates of cultural industries in the 1980s and 1990s primarily in Great Britain attest a change towards the economization of culture itself. Sociologist Ceren Türkmen refers to this turning point as the ‘dematerialization of economy’ (Entmaterialisierung von Ökonomie) which shifts the economic system from the traditional material industrial sector towards the information technology-based communication and creativity sector (Türkmen 2010: 290). The ‘underlying rationale’ of neoliberalism here is ‘a government policy which proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade’ (Hesmondhalgh 2008: 556). The establishment of economical cultural policy discourses within the European cultural politics is also visible in its wording and use of business vocabulary: most distinct and already normalized is the switch from the term ‘culture and creative field’ or ‘sector’ to ‘industry’ or ‘economy’. Policy speak like strengthening capacities, sustainable and integrative growth, efficiency, audience development, social leadership, cultural entrepreneurs, reports and sales figures, or cultural governance (see Good Governance for Cultural Policy, Gad/Schneider 2014) are just a few examples for the economized discourse of

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the arts and culture sector (Bruell 2012). ‘Young, gifted and entrepreneurial’ reads one of the titles in the commissioned analyses of global cultural and creative markets, ‘Cultural times. The first global map of cultural and creative industries’ (EY 2015). Also this work carries the distinct economic lingo: productivity, entrepreneurship, creative industries and cultural tourism, culture as an ‘asset for countries seeking to attract corporate executives and talented employees’ (p. 22), the rising middle class, creative class, drivers of urban regeneration etc. and so forth. The economic wording of the progress-related European art and culture politics indicates the connection of social goals and development strategies with funding policies. This echoes in recently established institutions and consultancy committees. A few examples are the 2013 inaugurated UNESCO Chair in ‘Cultural Policy for the Arts in Development’, initiatives like ‘The Culture in EU External Relations’ (a strategic group developed by the European Commission and the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy), diplomacy platforms like ‘More Europe’, funded by the GoetheInstitute and the British Council, among others, publishing advocacy papers on ‘Culture in EU development policies’, or the ‘Cultural Diplomacy Platform’ established in 2016 with, again, the Goethe-Institute as their Consortium leader (other partners of the consortium are the British Council, the Centre for Fine Arts Brussels, the European Cultural Foundation, EUNIC Global and the Institut français). A few of the platform’s aims are to advise on cultural policy, to develop training programmes for so-called cultural leadership (often referred to in the creative economies as ‘core actors of the cultural field’) and to ‘contribute to the development of the EU’s international cultural relations’ (EU strategy paper for international cultural relations 2016). ‘The aim [of the British Council] is to support and encourage innovative creative responses to development challenges and targeted social engagement through artistic interventions’, states Ciarán Devane, Chief Executive Officer of the British Council in an interview (E-International Relations 2016). ‘The creative industries also have a vital role to play in development, both in terms of employment and wealth creation, and as flagship businesses for their culture or nation.’ ‘The neo-liberal discourses on “Creative Industries” and on “Culture and Development” has led to the idealization of the cultural entrepreneur, a chameleonic if not opportunistic artistic role model’, states a review of Nicola

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Lauré al-Samarai’s case study on artistic learning in Africa amid a Westerndominated funding landscape (Schemmel 2014). However, there is a grey zone between the static and stiff representations of these EU initiatives and institutions and the realities including the personal work and connections of the employees who act on the ground. A local cultural practitioner recounts her/his own experience after working with EUROMED, ‘another one of those unilateral decisions to fund the Mediterranean basin sort of cultural exchange thing’: The program is coming to an end […], and they have a little money left […] and they don’t know what to do with it. Just as much as they had no way of knowing, they had no clue what to spend the money on, for three years, just creating hap hazard networks and completely ad hoc partnerships […] and then this Europe German guy who calls himself cross culture expert, no, consultant, such a patronizing term to begin with […] these are the people who are lobbying, these are the people who are meeting in Berlin and Brussels and sitting around and discussing, what we need, at this end of the world, and how much funding we need, to do what, what is missing, what gaps to be filled […] and they devise the politics for it, the strategies for it, and find the financial means to make it happen and come and introduce these programs, and we are supposed to respond to them, to fill in already made roles, it’s like a play that has been written […] And this is the model of the calls, of the EU calls, all the EU calls are like that, it’s a play, it’s a set, they decide the themes, we don’t decide the themes. (Interview, 2013)

Moving away from the policy frames, this quote gives us an idea of one of the local receiver’s perspective and local negotiations of the situation. ‘If you can’t find an opportunity, then you make an opportunity’, remarks a visitor of an informative meeting on funding possibilities in Cairo 2016. ‘Creative entrepreneurship works really well’, confirms one of the representatives of a northern European cultural institution. ‘They do their own promotion, and resources can be shared, and the message is that creativity has a future to it!’ However, ethical notions of these patterns are negotiated locally as well: They decide on Egypt now this x topic. Who the hell decided that topic? We just need to play in it. All we need to do is to respond to it, and become part of it, and then after a few years, unfortunately what happens is that you end up with these places that are actually believing that way, and

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thats the sad part. When you start losing, completely losing your identity.’ (Interview, 2014)

This last quote is a reminder of how these structures of the cultural field to which social actors are exposed and with which they interact actually shape subjectivities. The technical description of foreign policies do not take into account the actual effect that neoliberal politics have on body and mind, and how it is being received and negotiated by the social actors. In the following section I will take a closer look at these dynamics in the cultural landscape of Cairo, specifically in the post-revolutionary situation – a situation that in retrospect somehow resembled a fantasmatic playground of ideas and opportunities compared to the state-controlled and repressed place now and before.

Development policies, funding and friendship ‘There is no exchange, there’s never been. There is inequality and delusional thoughts about equality, surrounded by very good intentions’, comments one local actor of Cairo’s cultural field (Facebook comment 2015). ‘We are here with good intentions’, states a representative of one of the northern European cultural institutions during a public panel discussion in Cairo (2015). These two comments illustrate the underlying power dynamics of the field. The first comment indicates the impossibility of overcoming the historicity of the given structure. The second one is vocalized by someone who is employed by and working for a state’s representative cultural institution with its own logics of representation and discursive apparatus. Both together point out what mainly influences the power dynamic between these two as generic constructed poles: receiver, donor and the notion of the gift on the structural basis of an historically grown and continuously perpetuated asymmetrical power dynamic. The idea of the gift carries with it the promise of genuine, pure generosity, without self-interest or expectation (Kapoor 2008). However, the structure of the funding situation in which white donors give to non-white receivers combined with umbrella topics that frame funding lines and grants alongside developmental politics do attach ‘the gift’ to a clear function (without judging the outcome of the funding or projects, but concentrating on the social

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structure). The primacy of function regarding art and cultural work when funded by European cultural institutions deconstructs the notion of monetary support as a gift or an intention-free support. ‘Government policies, especially in Europe, tie culture to development processes. Targeted aid thus comes under the provision of “cultural development”, meaning that institutions have to utilize the forms of art they support to “serve a developmental purpose”’(Naji 2014). It is open for discussion whether or not an intention-free gift exists after all. Therefore cultural funding as such should not be judged just because it is cultural funding – with or without a political agenda (which might as well be very much in the interest of the receiver). However, the concept of the gift does not exclusively indicate something material only but entails other symbolic functions. Sociologist Aafke Komter discusses this topic by relating approaches to the theory of the gift, such as Arjun Appadurai, Pierre Bourdieu, Marcel Mauss or Georg Simmel, with sociological theories on solidarity and social order, such as the works of Émile Durkheim, Max Weber and Talcott Parsons (Komter 2005). For this chapter, the notion of solidarity is important for two reasons: first, in relation to the idea of development aid and giving, and second, in relation to neoliberalism and structures of competition which hinder the possible growth, development and maintenance of structures of solidarity. In her chapter ‘The Social Meaning of Things’, Aafke Komter states that the notion whether a gift is a gift or a commodity depends on the nature of the social relationship within which a gift is exchanged (Komter 2005: 21). This makes sense when we think of a friendly exchange between two people – the pen could be a commodity, but it could be a gift as well in case there is a friendly relationship established between the social actors which would add symbolic meaning to the pen. The value and meaning of the gift itself, its spirit, changes depending on how meaningful its symbolic and/or monetary value is considered to be, and how the social actors relate to each other. It is problematic if cultural support in the shape of northern European funding is given as a gift and received or discussed as a commodity, a dialectical conflict which reveals the asymmetry of the relationship. Ilan Kapoor translates this dichotomy to the specific foreign aid situation. In its extremes, the performed non-reciprocity is tied to a moral and ethical imaginary ascribed by and to the donor/giver:

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The donor country – Western, of course – is rich and enlightened. Its privileged status makes it incumbent upon it to act with kindness and generosity, while its superior wealth and knowhow situate it as exclusive agent of development. […] In contrast, the recipient country/community is stigmatized as poor and archaic. […] It is dependent on the benevolence and altruism of the Western donor (to which gratitude is owned). (Kapoor 2008: 96)

Even though Ilan Kapoor illustrates extreme opposite poles, it remains almost impossible to escape the inner logic of the asymmetrical relationship that comes with the Western funding situation, specifically if aid is constructed as a gift. Statements from interlocutors of the institutional, financially supporting side mirror this situation: ‘We cannot go anywhere, we are always seen and talked to as representatives of the institutions, even if it’s a private event’, ‘I cannot believe that I never heard again from so many of my friends after I stopped working for the institute, they just used me!’, ‘I am personally disappointed, she did not deliver the project as we had discussed over dinner a few weeks ago’, ‘We are not a funding institute, so I don’t know why people refer to us as that all the time’, ‘He could have at least thanked me for making this possible’, to just give a few examples (conversations and interviews between 2014 and 2016). These statements are linked to what Aafke Komter refers to as ‘communal sharing’, conceived as a ‘relationship of equivalence’, where exchange is happening on the basis of feelings of connectedness and in order to maintain the quality of human relationships (Komter 2005: 22). This feeling though is not always reciprocated: ‘I feel sometimes that they as an institute create a very orientalist situation in the city. They want to be involved in a certain way, and stay involved in a certain way, but stay on the pavement instead of in the street’, says an artist (Interview 2013). ‘They are like the privileged foreigner who enjoys life here and the money but who doesn’t want trouble and stays distant. They don’t want to get their fingers too dirty; they don’t want to eat chicken with their hands. We can socialize and be friends and talk but not talk about certain things.’ Another artist mentions that she is never really comfortable in my work with them. In their interaction with other artists. I always found myself silent. I always feel that there is something wrong with this interest. I am interested in you, I have the money to get to you. They ask the questions, I provide an answer to them. My work is an answer to one of your questions. They have the money to bring me wherever.

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Somehow we want to be paid to travel, to experience, to do that. But why, who wants to do that? I want to travel, and sometimes I think, fine, if I get an opportunity to travel, to go to Europe, to stay for a while, but then at the end of the day I am doing something that could be questioned, why am I doing this, this is the art that I want to do, or is that the interest of them at the moment? (Interview, 2013)

Going back to the introductory quotes of this chapter, we can see how aid and the notion of the gift are connected with what is being referred to as ‘good intention’, as in ‘meaning well’, which relates to the rhetorics of empathy in international development. Carolyn Pedwell who takes a closer look at empathy and the international aid apparatus, makes a similar point when describing how empathy can also ‘reproduce dominant social and geo-political hierarchies and exclusions’ (Pedwell 2012: 175). Empathy has an uneven nature and effect and can create and stabilize unequal relations of power. In the ideal situation, gift and receiver are in a position that is balanced within its asymmetry, ‘each party properly reciprocating the gift received, thereby preserving the equilibrium’ (Komter 2005: 54). One can speak of a balanced exchange only when both sides involved have rights and duties towards each other, and the exchanged goods are of similar value – be it material or immaterial. But gift giving in the form of aid depends on a debt balance between giver and recipient that cannot be turned around. In this case it is impossible for donor and receiver to sustain a cycle of gift and counter-gift. This hinders the creation of social cohesion and community (Komter 2005: 57) and leaves the often called ‘cross-cultural exchanges’ an empty signifier. Habiba Effat writes in her critical account of a British-Councilsupported Festival which took place in London and Cairo: Generally, I’ve developed growing resentment for multidisciplinary cultural festival-symposia hybrids held in Egypt, particularly those bearing hallmarks of the funding channels that have a cultural bridge-building narrative closely in tow – which, more often than not, fails to result in any long-term impact – or those that rely on corporate sponsorship and the watered-down audience-friendly mediocrity that comes with it. (Effat 2016)

The asymmetry of the often somewhat educative layered North–South exchanges which forms the basis of EU projects (see the paragraph on creative industries) leaves little space for building alliances.

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I don’t think it [foreign cultural funding, IE] is specifically an interest of the culture in these countries of transition, but an interest in these countries in transition. [...] I never actually had a conversation with anybody, you know what, we would like your support in this […] It is not a conversation we are part of, ever. It’s a monologue, it’s not even a dialogue […] we are recipients. As always. (Interview, 2014)

The aforementioned quotes can be interpreted as frustrated reactions to unfulfilled expectations on both sides linked to the notion of the twisted relationship that the social actors have with each other due to the skewed social structure of the cultural field in Cairo. It exceeds the aid/grant-awarding position that structures the imbalance, and frames the produced content. This point of departure leaves us with two (and possibly more) interlinked lines of thought: one is the influence of neoliberal (or hyper-capitalist) labour that, together with the creative industries, tiptoes its way into the cultural field; the other one is the social order that derives with and from it, the structure that structures the societal texture.

Economy of presence, labour and the cultural field The neoliberal practices of creative industries have different geopolitical investments and precarities. Precarity here is understood as an acknowledgement of dependencies and a ‘category of order that denotes social positionings of insecurity and hierarchisations, which accompanies processes of Othering’ (Puar: 165). The precarious lifestyle of cultural producers and knowledge workers is normalized: ‘Currently everybody has to become “creative” and to design her/himself to sell her/his whole personality on the market of affective labor’ (Puar 2012: 164). Flexible exploitation, long-term temporary employment, subcontracting and freelancing are just some of the modes of the so-called self-employment status. The precariousness effects the intersection of working conditions, living conditions and subjectivities, as already mentioned by one local artist in paragraph 2. In many cases you don’t even have an identity, an identity to start with, you just create to fill these holes, you get together to create a proposal, to write a proposal […] And I am not completely devaluating this kind of system. This

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is also an economic system that provides a lot of jobs […] I am someone who has been a beneficiary of these programs because I have been employed by multiple institutions, the EU probably paid my salary throughout four different institutions in my career. Always short term contracts, of course. Project-bound. (Interview, 2014)

The creative industry sector is a field with, as any other field, a Spiel (game, performance) that some may play better than others. Some may know that they have to ‘position oneself not where the ball is but where it will be; one invests oneself and one invests not where the profit is, but where it will be’ (Bourdieu 1998: 79). Paired with and part of the knowledge of the game are the social means of being able to play. The pressure of neoliberal labour turns networking into an investment, and connections to different social actors into precious symbolic capital – even more so when poorly paid short-term contracts do not allow for the necessary idle moments in which relationships can grow, and in which collaborations are not a ‘waste of money and time’, but alternatives to a system that emphasizes the fast production of spectator-tailored events. Even presence in the sense of actual physical presence, of attendance, can contain symbolic capital. As Hito Steyerl describes the situation in her essay ‘The Terror of Total Dasein. Economies of Presence in the Art Field’, it can be ‘easily quantified and monetised. It’s a thing that few people get paid for and a lot of people pay for, and is thus rather profitable’ (Steyerl 2016). The economy of presence is most relevant to those who must work and coordinate multiple jobs in order to make a living. According to Hito Steyerl, presence means ‘permanent availability without any promise of compensation’: Those who cannot afford being present miss out on opportunities that might enable them to be present the next time. Insufficient salaries create not only logistical challenges, but also competing schedules and negotiating priorities – and missing out on events and talks where strategic networking happens. ‘I’d rather go and have coffee with you and talk about your project than reading an email with your proposed idea’, said a representative from one of the northern European cultural institutions at an informative public event that was scheduled for a Sunday afternoon (Sunday being a working day in Cairo, hence only those who did not need to be at a job on a Sunday afternoon were able to be present). The informal and friendly advice here is limited, though, to those who were able to attend the meeting (or who have friends who,

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despite the competition, tell them about it). At the end of the event which had an informal touch due to its low number of participants, email addresses were collected and exchanged. Many gifts are given during these informal meetings, and the exchange of private contacts can be read as a gift (inasmuch as the presence can be interpreted as an investment of time). An important precondition to participation in gift exchange is taking part in social networks, circles of friends or family members who meet each other on a more or less regular basis. There are varieties of presence and of its opposite, the absence. Another presence that is inherently connected with monetary value is that of the audience. The guest count is one of the main points of evaluation that is linked to the supposed success of the project, and those numbers have to appear in the local or international institution’s report back to the funding entity. These numbers can be justifications for the possible next round of funding. The wording of the creative economy that demands this kind of evaluation is resembled in the economic terms of the descriptions: audience development, audience empowerment and sales figures. A different kind of presence and worth to be discussed without falling into the trap of parsed categories which perpetuate a binary metadiscourse is the one of white Europeans in high positions of art and culture organizations in Cairo. Despite the meaning of the inherent privilege that comes with being white, this presence can be problematic for at least three reasons, one being that it re-enforces the idea that a local person cannot be in one of these positions (local salaries are often so low that local actors choose other, better paid opportunities), or that Western education is more aspirational then others: ‘Even if you don’t care about the North, the installing system is the North’, writes a local artist on his Facebook page (February 2016). Third, the institution might be centred on the basis of ‘white programming’, which also intersects with class and the educational system in most societies in the Arab world which, for most of the middle and upper-middle class, is Western oriented in regards to its canon (educational programming, curating, learned canon and choice of texts, libraries, invitees, project ideas, foci etc.). ‘Can we critique a history of colonialist violence whilst having to reside within a EuroAmerican aesthetic and philosophical canon?’ asks performer Adham Hafez in an interview (Halajian 2016). Furthermore, the symbolic capital of such a presence might differ depending on the person’s geopolitical position:

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I think being an ‘art educator in the Arab world’ is a huge $$$$ on one’s CV nowadays because it is a growing market where the art world wants to extend its hold, and considering the current political world we live in seems highly relevant and curious to everyone, plus anyone involved in it who is white who ‘dares to take it on’ is seen as a bad ass and risk taker so people find it very alluring. (Interview, 2016)

This quote illustrates the specific geopolitical precariousness of the creative economies in Cairo’s art and culture scene. Even if general labour within the field of creative economies is largely immaterial (meaning precarious labour that might contain symbolic capital in the hope of a later transformation of such to monetary capital and social security), it is the transcultural cartography of it that structures the Spiel. In the end, it is the market of the global transnational cultural field that dominates the local field, no matter the funding, and the neoliberal structure of the field is based on and perpetuates exclusion and social inequality. The question remains whether the creative industry sector leaves much choice for the ones who operate in the cultural field. We think that we are more empowered, more aware, more globalized. But at the end of the day, this isn‘t true. You think that with more technology and more globalization you would be more aware, and less stereotypes, but it’s the opposite. And these stereotypes are the basis also of the political power of the West. […] With funding, you have to make an ethical choice. Am I going to do this, or not. I can take it and make what I can with it. It is a matter of choice at the end of the day. (Interview, 2013)

The competition which accompanies the short-term self-employment does not only reproduce inequalities of access and outcome. The reinforcement of a structure in which many cultural practitioners compete with each other for few opportunities creates sameness – a system of what one artist referred to as ‘cookie cutter’, kind of a mould in order to become an institution ‘with a capital I’. These are your financial models, this is how your fund-raising proposal is written, you have to have objectives, a mission statement, and planning, … eventually, what you are trying to create is an ecosystem of homogeneous existence. Everybody is the same, everybody looks the same and talks the same language, which is different from the language they are using right now. (Interview 2014)

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Those social agents who have ‘a feel for the game’ then function as ‘instruments of reality constructions’, also insofar as consensus is being reproduced (Bourdieu 1998: 80). Furthermore, it prevents the practitioners from collaborating with each other and from creating alternatives. There is not a community, but an economy around us that we are finding ourselves as part of it. And it seems to be the only economy we’re able to be part of, and this is one of the major crises of the non-profit culture scene of this region. That we are not able to find an alternative to the economic model we are living within. (Interview, Cairo 2013)

Conclusion Taking a closer look at labour practices and modes of Cairo’s cultural field will give us a better understanding of dynamics, conflicts and transitions of the contemporary cultural field. This chapter shed light on part of a structural change introduced through the form of creative industries which triggers structural inequality within Cairo’s cultural field. However, this is just a small part of a wider and complex scene. It remains open whether the creative entrepreneurship is able to create more sustainable structures in the field then was the case before the revolution in 2011. Yet the logics of the creative labour market with its intrinsic short-term, project-based working conditions and the domination of northern European funding perpetuates an axial globalization geared towards a tightening small social circle. Art historian Joaquín Rodríguez describes this ‘axial globalization’ as a field in which ‘connections only happen inside a radial and hegemonic pattern around the centers of power, where the peripheral countries […] remain disconnected from one other, or are only connected indirectly via the centres’ (Rodríguez 2015: 359). Also in Cairo, the cultural representations and transnational structures of productions and exhibitions are based on this ‘axis of globalization’ which promises ‘the illusion of a trans-territorial world of multicultural dialogue’ (Rodríguez 2011). An artist criticizes thus in relation to a semi-public art event that took place in Cairo in 2016: The rest of the ‘art world’ feel that the happening is a group of acquaintances or buddies that are celebrating each other in an arguably ‘liberalized’ atmosphere … this only makes the art scene look very very basic, where

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80 per cent of its non-drinking Arabic mother tongue and non bi cultural individuals *who may be artists or valuable thinkers* became ignored and alienated from such happenings and made feel differentiated or ignored.

The critique was picked up and the discussion continues. The rather small contemporary cultural field in Cairo and its social actors remain in conversation albeit the aforementioned tightened economic structures and the repressive regime that leaves little possibilities to act – and maybe collaborations and alternatives are not as impossible as they seem to be at the moment.

Bibliography Baoumi, Hussein. 27 June 2016. ‘Local Funding Is Not Always the Answer’. Opendemocracy. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1998 [1994]. Practical Reason. On the Theory of Action. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bruell, Cornelia. 2012. ‘EU-Kulturpolitik reloaded’ Kulturrisse. Zeitschrift fuer radikaldemokratische Kulturpolitik, October 12, 2012. http://igkultur.at/artikel/ eu-kulturpolitik-reloaded (accessed 15 January 2019). Effat, Habiba. September 2016. ‘Masafat Cairo: Within Striking Distance of Larger Musical Aspirations?’. Madamasr. https://madamasr.com/en/2016/09/18/feature/ culture/masafat-cairo-within-striking-distance-of-larger-musical-aspirations/. Eickhof, Ilka. April 2015. ‘Graffiti, Capital and Deciding What‘s Inappropriate’. Madamasr. https://madamasr.com/en/2015/04/07/feature/culture/graffiti-capitaland-deciding-whats-inappropriate/. E-International Relations. 2016. ‘Interview with Ciarán Devane’. 15 March 2016. Interview conducted by Tom Cassauwers. http://www.e-ir.info/2016/03/15/ interview-ciaran-devane/ (accessed 5 January 2019). European Commission on Growth. http://ec.europa.eu/growth/tools-databases/ newsroom/cf/itemdetail.cfm?item_id=8900&lang=en&title=Boosting-thecompetitiveness-of-cultural-and-creative-industries-for-growth-and-jobs. EU Strategy Paper IR. Joint Communication to the European Parliament and the Council. Towards an EU strategy for international cultural relations. ‘European Commission, High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy’. Brussels. 8 June 2016. http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PD F/?uri=CELEX:52016JC0029&from=EN (accessed 5 January 2019).

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Evans, Jenifer. June 2013. ‘Do It Yourself ’. Madamasr. https://madamasr.com/ en/2013/06/28/feature/culture/do-it-yourself/. EY. 2015. Cultural Times: The First Global Map of Cultural and Creative Industries. Published by EY. Building a better working world. http://www.worldcreative.org/ wp-content/uploads/2015/12/EYCulturalTimes2015_Download.pdf. EY. December 2014. Creating Growth. Measuring Cultural and Creative Markets in the EU. Published by EY. http://www.ey.com/Publication/vwLUAssets/Measuring_ cultural_and_creative_markets_in_the_EU/$FILE/Creating-Growth.pdf (accessed 22 February 2017). Fayed, Ismail. October 2014. ‘Next to Here: Or Rather over There’. Madamasr. https://madamasr.com/en/2014/10/19/feature/culture/next-to-here-or-ratherover-there/. Fayed, Ismail. 2016. ‘Roznama 5: The Return of Politics, Including Some Empty Gestures’. Madamasr. 14 September 2016. https://madamasr.com/en/2016/09/14/ feature/culture/roznama-5-the-return-of-politics-including-some-emptygestures/ (accessed 5 January 2019). Gad, Daniel, and Wolfgang Schneider, eds. 2014. Good Governance for Cultural Policy. An African-European Research about Arts and Development. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Halajian, Suzy. 2016. ‘The Personal and the Political All at Once. Adham Hafez in Conversation with Suzy Halajian’. Ibraaz. 25 February 2016. https://www.ibraaz. org/interviews/182 (accessed 25 June 2018). Hesmondhalgh, David. 2008. ‘Cultural and Creative Industries’. In The SAGE Handbook of Cultural Analysis. Tony Bennett, and John Frow, eds., pp. 552–69. London: Sage. Kapoor, Ilan. 2008. The Postcolonial Politics of Development. London: Routledge. Komter, Aafke. 2005. Social Solidarity and the Gift. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Naji, Ahmed. August 2014. ‘Learning to Walk after Crawling’. Madamasr. https:// madamasr.com/en/2014/08/28/feature/culture/learning-to-walk-after-crawling/. Pedwell, Carolyn. 2012. ‘Affective (Self-)Transformations: Empathy, Neoliberalism and International Development’. Feminist Theory 13(163): 163–79. Puar, Jasbir, et al. Winter 2012. (T216) (Vol. 56, Nr 4). Precarity Talk: A Virtual Roundtable with Lauren Berlant, Judith Butler, Bojana Cvejić, Isabell Lorey, Jasbir Puar, and Ana Vujanović. TDR: The Drama Review, pp. 163–77. Rodríguez, Joaquín Barriendos. 2015. ‘Global Art and Politics of Mobility: (Trans) Cultural Shifts in the International Contemporary Art-System’. In Art and Visibility in Migratory Culture. Conflict, Resistance, and Agency. Mieke Bal, and Miguel Á. Hernández-Navarro, eds., pp. 341–81. Leiden: Brill | Rodopi.

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Schemmel, Annette. 2014. Review of: al-Samarai, Nicola Lauré, Creating Spaces. Non-formal Art/s Education and Vocational Training for Artists in Africa between Cultural Policies Cultural Funding. In H-ArtHist. Steyerl, Hito. 2016. The Terror of Total Dasein. Economies of Presence in the Art Field. dismagazine.com. http://dismagazine.com/discussion/78352/the-terror-of-totaldasein-hito-steyerl/. Türkmen, Ceren. 2010. ‘Subalternität, Differenz und Ethnisierung – Problematiken Postkolonialer Theorie im Kontext politischer Transformation’. In Postkoloniale Soziologie. Empirische Befunde, theoretische Anschlüsse, politische Intervention. Julia Reuter, and Paula-Irene Villa, eds., pp. 281–301. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag. Winegar, Jessica. 2006a. ‘Cultural Sovereignty in a Global Art Economy: Egyptian Cultural Policy and the New Western Interest in Art from the Middle East’. Cultural Anthropology 21(2): 173–204. Winegar, Jessica. 2006b. Creative Reckonings: The Politics of Art and Culture in Contemporary Egypt. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press.

10

Contemporary Art in Extremis: Gaza between Imprisonment and Globalization Marion Slitine

As the Israeli attack on Gaza was beginning on 12 July 2014, an image, Visit Gaza (Figure 10.1), was circulating on social media and soon went viral.1 It revisited a classic tourism poster, Visit Palestine, designed in 1936 by the graphic designer Franz Kraus (1905–98). However, in the new design instead of there being an image of the Dome of the Rock there was now an image of a bombardment. In producing this satirical invitation to visit Gaza when it was being bombed, the young artists Arab and Tarzan Nasser sought to draw the world’s attention to the catastrophic situation in their native land.2 As soon as a ceasefire had been declared on 29 August 2014, another Gaza artist, Raed Issa (Rā’id ‘Isā), exhibited what remained of his mangled canvases in the ruins of his house that had been destroyed by Israeli bombs.3 Working in the heart of the Al-Breij Refugee Camp, by this act the artist wanted to ‘show the world that there is life and art in Gaza’.4 He was transforming a crisis situation into a resilient expression of performance art. Far from the impersonal representations of destruction so often given out of Gaza, these images bore witness to forms of artistic dynamism in a context that might initially be thought of as unpropitious to all forms of artistic expression. However, there are many artists in Gaza producing images on a daily basis that provide a visual counter-discourse to the usual stereotypes. Through their works they are able to send their messages across borders, using only fragile cultural infrastructure in order to do so and under extremely difficult conditions of creation and circulation. In 2014, Gaza only possessed a handful

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Figure 10.1  Poster ‘Visit Gaza’ by Tarzan Nasser and Arab Nasser, 2014.

of art galleries and a single foreign cultural centre. It did not have a single functioning museum of modern or contemporary art, and its cinemas had been closed by Salafist groups in the 1980s (Al Ghoul 2013). With nearly 2 million inhabitants concentrated onto a tiny strip of land 10 km wide and 40 km long, the ‘misnamed area’ of the Gaza Strip has faced

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a ‘triple impasse’ (Filiu 2015). First, there has been an Israeli impasse that as a result of the military and economic embargo working in tandem with the closure of the borders by Egypt has meant that no Gazan has been able to leave the Strip without permission.5 Second, there has been a Palestinian impasse, incarnated since the 2006 legislative elections by the division between Fatah, controlling the West Bank, and Hamas, controlling Gaza. Third, there has been a humanitarian impasse linked to international actors and solidarity groups that have only dealt with Gaza in terms of emergency aid and have been unable to halt a drastic decline in living standards.6 The Gaza Strip has one of the highest population densities in the world, and since 2006 it has suffered from four Israeli military offensives.7 Since 2007, it has been cut off from the Palestinian Territories of the West Bank and Jerusalem, as well as from the rest of the world, by an Israeli blockade.8 The progressive marginalization of Gaza and its population has contributed to a widespread misunderstanding of its history. It makes it almost impossible to carry out work in the field yielding knowledge of the contemporary situation. The Israeli authorities only issue entry and exit permits to Gaza to those with press cards, diplomats or aid workers. Having worked at the Institut français de Jérusalem and then receiving a grant to work at the Institut français du Proche-Orient in the Palestinian Territories, both institutions benefitting from French diplomatic protection, I was able to carry out eight research missions and more than fifty interviews with artists in Arabic between 2012 and 2014.9 This fieldwork was added to by informal interviews carried out via Skype between 2014 and 2016, as well as by a detailed questionnaire sent out by email in January 2017 to forty artists. Work in the archives of the Institut français de Gaza (IFG) allowed me to find out more about French cultural policy in Gaza since the 1980s.10 In order to understand the interaction between contemporary art practices and globalization in the context of Gaza’s extreme isolation, I selected artists ‘connected’ to contemporary art circuits and benefitting from international recognition that included residency periods and exhibitions abroad. These artists all claimed to practice forms of ‘contemporary art’ (fann mu’āṣir) that distanced them from a figurative art that they described as ‘academic’. The seven artists making up the sample had all been trained in Gaza, where they were living at the time of the research. Born between 1947 and 1988 in Palestinian

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refugee camps, all of them come from modest backgrounds. They are often self-taught, even if the youngest of them had benefitted from the training in the plastic arts given by Al-Aqsa University since 2003. The increased funding for culture that followed the Oslo Accords and the emergence of an ‘Arab contemporary art market’ after 2010 (Gonzalez-Quijano 2011; Choron-Baix and Mermier 2012; Belmenouar 2012; Moghadam 2012) both encouraged local artistic production. Most of the artists work on their art full-time, and most have more than average incomes.11 Despite the keen recent interest in art from Palestine in the media and among art curators, there has thus far been little work done on the Palestinian visual arts considered as a field in its own right.12 Early studies were done by journalists or non-academic writers, most of them Palestinians, and by the artists themselves, and these analysed the emergence of modern Palestinian art, mostly from an aesthetic perspective, by exploring its connections to the nationalist movement (Halaby 2001; Maasri 2009; Abu Daya 2012; El Herfi 2015) or to the places where the works were produced or questions of identity construction (Ankori 2006; Laidi-Hanieh 2008; Boullata 2009; Nastas Mitwassi 2015). There is little sociological or anthropological analysis in these works, and they tend to give more importance to artists from the Palestinian diaspora, the West Bank, Jerusalem and Israel than to artists from Gaza, despite recent re-evaluations of the latter’s work (Nashif 2012; Lionis 2016; Makhoul 2013).13 The conditions under which the works were produced have rarely been taken into account. The anthropological perspective employed here should be seen as being in line with this re-evaluation. Through an analysis of the contemporary artistic field – ‘an autonomous microcosm inside the social macrocosm’ (Bourdieu 2000) – it allows a better understanding to be had of the Palestinians in Gaza.14 Despite circumstances in which the blockade limits access to materials, as well as to the circulation of works and artists, Gaza is nevertheless a veritable ‘artistic breeding ground’ (Sanbar 1997) that has been able to thrive within the framework of cultural globalization thanks to the use of the new technologies.15 How can one make sense of the conditions that have given rise to Gaza becoming an especially fertile place for artistic creation and experiment in the Palestinian Territories? What kind of dynamics has the crisis, a permanent feature of life in Gaza, produced in acting on the local artistic production, and

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what forms has creativity taken in a context that is materially so lacking in terms of the development of the arts? Has their introduction into the international contemporary art world allowed Gazan artists to escape their geographical confinement thanks to the artistic capital they have been able to accumulate? In the light of this contradiction between confinement and opening to the outside world, in what ways has it been possible to move from a form of nationalist political commitment expressed within an academic artistic framework to a contemporary art that is based on experimentation, individualism and daily life? In what ways have new forms of commitment redefining the connections between art and politics at the local level been developed, while at the same time attracting the broader interest of the contemporary art market? The hypothesis put forward here is that the growth in Gazan contemporary art from 2005 onwards can be seen as a response to an imprisonment that has not ceased to grow since the marginalization of Gaza after Hamas came to power, and that the growing interest on the part of Gazan artists in such artistic practices can be seen as a form of escape, a ‘means of migration’, even if only a symbolic one, from the embargo. However, in the case of Gaza, unlike for other ‘emergent artistic scenes’, it seems that ‘the international circulation of contemporary art’ has not had a ‘genuinely planetary dimension’ (Nercam 2015; 64). This chapter will first of all discuss the circumstances in which contemporary art in Gaza emerged and the artistic practices associated with it. It will then examine the new forms of commitment that have emerged among Gazan contemporary artists that have redefined the links between art and politics.

From an art of revolution to the ‘revolution’ of contemporary art According to Becker, art is the product of collective work and a form of cooperation between diverse agents guided by conventions and actors who negotiate the production of original works of art by interacting with each other (Becker 1988). The structures of Palestinian contemporary art have appeared since the 1960s,16 and from its creation in 1969 to the 1990s the Department of Visual Arts of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was its major actor,

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promoting art as a form of national resistance to the Israeli occupation.17 The visual arts were controlled by the central authorities through the creation of artists’ unions such as the Association of Palestinian Plastic Artists (Jamʿiyyat al-fannānīn al-tashkīliyyīn al-filasṭīniyyīn) in Gaza, founded in 1984 by a group of artists that included ‘Alī Al-Ashhab, Fatḥī Ghabn, Aḥmad Abū al-Kās, Zaydān Al-Nu`ayzī and Kamāl Al-Mughannī. These groups have regularly organized collective exhibitions across Palestine and in the Arab cultural centres where the PLO has a presence, such as Tunis and Beirut. The plastic arts at this time were dominated by figurative, symbolic and history painting, at a time when the political poster was also reaffirming itself as a major form of art practice.18 Works produced by Palestinian artists at this time mainly dealt with the Nakba, exile and the right of return. Resistance through art was often connected to a commitment to armed resistance, with most artists being linked to the various PLO factions, among them Fatḥī Ghabn (born 1947),19 Kamāl Al-Mughannī (1943–2008)20 (Figure 10.2), Bashīr Sinwār (born 1942) and Shafīq Raḍwān (born 1940). After the Oslo Accords and the creation of the Palestinian Authority in 1994, the world of art was transformed in Gaza with the emergence of contemporary art: The 1993 Oslo Accords led to the return of the Palestinian Authority accompanied by the arrival in Gaza of numerous Palestinians from Algeria and Tunisia (and Kuwait as a result of the Gulf War), giving a real impetus to cultural development by opening up the Gaza Strip to the outside world as a whole.21

Between 1998 and 2011, the number of foreign cultural centres in Gaza went up from twenty-four to sixty-six, making it the Palestinian city with the highest number.22 Since 2003, the Department of Fine Arts at Al-Aqsa University has trained dozens of students in the plastic arts, and Gaza is one of the only places in Palestine today where artists’ collectives working on the promotion of contemporary art can be found. The most active are the Eltiqa Group for Contemporary Art, founded in 2002, and Shababik (Windows to Contemporary Art), founded in 2009.23 Together with Ramallah, Gaza today is one of the most active cultural centres in the whole of the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The world of contemporary art in Gaza is organized around a network of individual and institutional actors.24 While the Palestinian Ministry of

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Figure 10.2  Poster ‘Continuity’ by Kamal Al-Mughanni Source: Palestine Poster Project Archives.

Culture has withdrawn from the administration of culture,25 this has been made up for since 2010 by international organizations, civil society and, to a lesser extent, the private sector. These offer new exhibition possibilities for contemporary art, thereby responding to international agendas and at a distance from the nationalist political framework of the PLO. In the mission statement drawn up by the directors of the French Cultural Centre (FCC) in

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Gaza in 2003 and 2004,26 one can clearly see this policy of wanting to promote contemporary art: [The FFC] should act without delay as it is the only exhibition space adapted to the needs of contemporary art. The FCC should be a facilitator and a means of liberating contemporary creation in Gaza [and] breaking the taboo on access to contemporary art […]. The first way in which this can be done is by promoting the visual arts and contemporary art, and work should continue to emphasize as much innovation in terms of media as in terms of themes. The FCC should therefore promote new media such as video art […] enabling installations and not only traditional exhibitions.27

The Cactus exhibition that opened at the FCC in 2005 can perhaps be considered as one of the first large-scale exhibitions of contemporary art to be held in Gaza. The artists whose work was displayed took over the entire centre, showing 3D multimedia works that brought together installations, video art and digital art on the theme of the cactus, the symbol of ṣumūd, or the idea of perseverance and resilience associated with peaceful resistance. In line with its policy of promoting art in public spaces and the ‘democratization of culture’ that goes back to the 1980s (Poirrier 2012), the FCC has contributed to the legitimation of new art practices, installations and video art in particular, and it ‘actively participates in defining, promoting, and putting into words what art is – as opposed to what it is not – by defining the criteria for exact judgement [and] establishing a more or less controversial hierarchy of works (and artists)’ (Buscatto 2008). In the wake of this movement towards greater cultural openness, new artist collectives began to emerge after 2000 that worked on the local promotion of contemporary art. The young artists who made up the Eltiqa Group for Contemporary Art, the first collective of this kind and still one of the most important, wanted to ‘create a modern and contemporary art movement in Palestine’.28 One of them, Raed Issa, remembers of the birth of this collective: Having benefited from artist residencies in Jordan and London, we began to have new ideas and to want to do real art [sic]. Our first exhibition was held at the FCC and was the first time that the new media were exhibited in Gaza. For us, it was a form of experimentation, but people were shocked as it was too

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contemporary and too direct. The public here likes realism, and the academics [from the Department of Fine Arts at Al-Aqsa University] hated us. We were doing installations, land art, video art, multimedia art, and abstraction … For them, all this was too modern and too new. But this made us want to form ourselves into a group. We wanted to show international art in Gaza.

Two years after the establishment of the collective, according to the FCC ‘these young artists who go abroad regularly have brought a breath of fresh air to Gaza by working in synergy together and transforming their common studio into a place where individual practices are coupled with a collective impulse’.29 All of them were born in the 1970s in Gaza, most of them were self-taught, and they have all emphasized their distance from the training given at AlAqsa University, describing it as ‘too academic’. Thanks to the periods they have been able to spend in Europe, they are fully aware of the conventions of international contemporary art. They are also recognized by the local institutional milieu, itself also connected to transnational organizations. These artists are more focused on the art market than their elders. They take part in the still rare auctions taking place in Gaza or on the West Bank,30 and the website they have set up together has a gallery section including works for sale. They often behave like ‘entrepreneurs’, with the value of their work coming from the responses they receive when it is put up for auction, from offers of ad hoc exhibitions, from the work of private institutions or from the sale of their work (Moureau and Sagot-Duvauroux 2011). They know the venues in which their work should be exhibited if it is to receive legitimation, the key people in the world of art (curators) and the international contemporary art events. Anyone wishing to enter the field of contemporary art needs to understand its codes and internal rules, in the absence of which he or she will quickly be ignored. Some of the Gazan artists understand the strings that need to be pulled, and some do not. Their art practices, going from video art to installations and including performance and digital art, are very different. While they continue to produce paintings, allowing them to live comfortably from their work, they also carry out research in various media that is at a distance from the official state networks. Other contemporary artists’ collectives, such as Iftirāḍ (translatable as ‘Hypothesis’), Roots Art or the Paletta Group for Palestine Art, have been

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formed in Gaza in recent years. These groups, initially set up on the basis of personal friendships, have promoted contemporary art, found answers to the lack of exhibition spaces and distribution networks in Gaza and interacted with the public. Setting up a collective seems to be a good way of obtaining the support of international organizations and financing the production of contemporary art by acquiring the materials and the tools necessary to create it. The collectives have also been behind various exhibitions, both collective and individual, and in 2016 they set up spaces in which contemporary art could be discussed both in Gaza and in Palestine as a whole.31 Men and women are able to mix freely in these collectives to a certain extent, in contrast to what occurs in other milieu in Gaza and giving the impression that the visual arts are not gendered (Fadda 2008).32 However, without denying the importance of these groups in the development of contemporary art in Gaza, it should be remembered that some of them are linked to international cultural policy agendas, even if they emphasize their independence. These initiatives, depending on unreliable international funding, are also somewhat vulnerable and are under constant threat of disappearance.

Adaptation and reinvention of artistic practices and commitments Such developments have gone hand-in-hand with the renewal of artistic forms, among them being the primacy the artists accord to installations. ‘Contemporary art installations are today one of the most widely practised (and fertile) forms of artistic expression’,33 says the IFG, and they allow artists to transgress the aesthetic and disciplinary codes of academic art. The multimedia work Un métro à Gaza [Gaza Metro] by Mohamed Abusal is typical in this regard (Figure 10.3)34. Carrying material related to the Paris metro system – the large ‘M’ used to signal metro entrances and the metro map and tickets – the artist is presented in the installation walking through the city recording the responses of passers-by. He then uses these to design a metro network like the RER that links the city of Paris to the surrounding suburbs that could link up the fragmented territories of contemporary Palestine. Playing with ideas taken from fact and fiction, Abusal’s work suggests ways

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Figure 10.3  ‘A Metro in Gaza’ by Mohamed Abusal, 2011.

of going beyond the present fragmentation and reconnecting a Palestine that today is fragmented and disconnected through art and utopian thinking. The internet has also played a considerable role in the development of contemporary art in Gaza through its capacity to revolutionize forms of expression and interaction with the public. The Visit Gaza poster produced by Arab and Tarzan Nasser in 2014 is one example, this work being immediately widely shared on social media and reproduced in the traditional media as a sign of urgency in the face of war. What the media now habitually calls ‘war-postering’, being the design of war posters, is part of a well-established tradition of political posters in Palestine (Maasri 2009; Radwan 1992).35 By using social media, the artists are able effectively and rapidly to denounce the

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disasters of war without having first to pass their work through the filter of the political elites. The choice of the internet as a medium allows them not only to circumvent the constraints that come from their imprisonment in Gaza, but also to get round the lack of materials due to the blockade: It is no longer necessary to make a work of art for a gallery. Now it can be sent out worldwide. Thanks to the development of the Internet, it is now possible to show life in Gaza and not just pictures of dead bodies.36

Like the Net Art that has emerged in France over the last decade or so, these works are made both with the internet and with the internet in mind. They are therefore not like works that are simply put on gallery or virtual museum sites (Fourmentreaux 2008). The young artists also express the difficulties of living under an embargo and an authoritarian regime by using forms of social criticism that break with the nationalist rhetoric of the previous generation. The performative photographic work of Mohammed Hawajri, for example, poses the question of living conditions ‘hic et nunc’ (Puig 2006). In his work Red Carpet (2014), Hawajri is shown standing on a piece of red carpet placed in various isolated areas of Gaza, thereby ironically evoking the electricity cuts, the shortages of petrol and the tunnels leading under the border that characterize the Strip, satirizing them without descending into pessimism: Red Carpet is a criticism of domestic problems in Gaza, of Gazan society, and of the reality of Palestinian society. We live in a place where there is no petrol and no electricity … Every work of art is also a work of resistance. My work comes out of the daily reality of life in Gaza and demands the basic freedom of movement and human rights.37

By parodying living conditions in Gaza and the powerlessness of the political leadership to provide the basic necessities of life, while at the same time occupying public space, the artist is able to find a way out of the victimization of the activist. This kind of social criticism often goes hand-in-hand with selfcriticism. The example of Arab and Tarzan Nasser might be given here, who through their multimedia installation Gazawood (2010), made up of twenty posters and a video, revisit classic Hollywood film posters while using the names of the different Israeli military campaigns carried out in Gaza as titles:

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These posters are a way of bearing witness, but they also aim to denounce the economic blockade. The protagonists always behave as themselves – good guys and bad guys, twin brothers in a civil war in which no one ever cries ‘Enough!’38

The film accompanying the installation, Colourful Journey, openly criticizes Palestinian internal divisions, as does the artists’ longer film Dégradé (2016). ‘We are living under the occupation of an external enemy, Israel. But we are also under the occupation of Hamas, which is our internal enemy. Israel is the foreign occupier. But when one of us, when men from within, also make us suffer from an occupation, that is something else again’, one of the brothers has said.39 As was the case for the demands made by the youth movements that took part in the lukewarm ‘Palestinian Spring’ of February 201140 in the wake of the Arab revolutions, it is the ‘triple occupation’ by Israel, Hamas and UNRWA that is being questioned here. Such criticisms are not only directed against the occupier, but are also addressed in a subversive way against a Palestinian society that is caught between neoliberalism and political sclerosis. Such criticisms of the nationalist project are expressed by reusing the symbolic codes of the collective Palestinian imagination for subversive ends. Artists revisit the received iconography with a view to suggesting alternative ways of seeing Palestine. In his installation The Magic Box (2004) (Figure 10.4), for example, Mohamed Abusal reduces the symbols of Palestinian identity to rubbishy cast-offs wedged into cubes of barbed wire. Some artists take part in forms of citizen engagement through art, like Khalil Mozaien (Khalīl alMuzayyin)41 who set up the Red Carpet Festival in 2015.42 In the middle of the ruins of the Shuja’iyya neighbourhood, an area entirely destroyed by the Israeli army in the summer of 2014, Mozaien decided to set up a festival at the same time as the Cannes Film Festival in France in a gesture loaded with black humour. ‘Through this festival, I want to send out a message to the world that the people of Gaza deserve to live, that they love life, and that they only want to live in peace’, Mozaien said.43 The initiative by Raed Issa was of the same type: As a citizen of Gaza today, I can do nothing other than paint. I am against the military struggle. Art is itself a form of resistance. Exhibiting my wrecked paintings to the world is a way of saying that there is culture, art, and life in Gaza.44’

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Figure 10.4  Installation ‘Magic Box’ by Mohamed Abusal, 2004

Even the act of creation under these conditions becomes a form of citizen engagement that echoes the formula of Gilles Deleuze that ‘not all acts of resistance are works of art, even if in a way they should be. Not all works of art are acts of resistance, and yet in a certain way they are.45’ In a painting entitled The Resistant Musician (2010), Issa gives his hero a vulnerable and disenchanted human face: The mulattham [the one who wears a kūfiyya] is the one who resists, an ordinary human being who stays at home, who lives, who plays music, and who dances the dabka while his wife looks after the children. I have not painted a member of the resistance carrying a weapon, as when one hears the word resistance [muqāwama], one immediately thinks of that. I wanted to change the way one thinks about the resistance.46

These artists are redefining the resistance by giving the individual a central place in a post-nationalist struggle that demands the possibility of a decent life based on a minimum of basic rights, freedom (ḥurriyya), dignity (karāma) and justice (ʿadāla), in this way echoing the slogans of the post-2011 Arab

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protest movements (Slitine 2016). Such diverse citizen-artistic initiatives bear witness to a form of cultural resilience that is lived out on a day-to-day basis (El-Naggar 2007). Through images that the artists exhibit as much on social networks as at festivals or contemporary art galleries outside Gaza, more often than not these young Gazan artists want to free themselves from a collective discourse emanating from the Palestinian nationalist movement. They want to make their individual voices heard, to express their own subjectivities and to make criticisms that are often intended to subvert the oppressive world in which they have come to maturity, being against the Israeli authorities as much as they are against the evils of Palestinian society.

New cultural movements and identity claims Some Gazan artists have been able to benefit from globalization since 2000 despite the reinforcement of restrictions on circulation in the wake of the emergence of art markets in the Middle East and the development of Arab cultural institutions in Beirut, Dubai, Paris and London. Artists such as Mohammed Hawajri, Hani Zurob (Hānī Zu‘rub), Hazem Harb (Ḥāzim Ḥarb), Shadi Zaqzouq (Shādī Zaqzūq), Taysir Batniji, Nidaa Badwan (Nidā’ Badwān) and Mohammed Joha (Muḥammad Juḥā) have thus been able to attain international recognition. Helped by the introduction of the new technologies into Gaza, their works are now exhibited in contemporary art museums and fairs. Their standing has increased, and they now have access to grants and international residencies.47 However, these artists are the exceptions, and while artworks can circulate outside Gaza today, if with difficulty, most Gazan artists are obliged to remain at home. Moreover, the increased interest of the international art market, itself an effect of the wider context, in Palestinian art has often obliged the artists to yield to the pressures of the international art world, which wants to see a form of ‘ethnicization’ of cultural products for commercial reasons, presenting them as ‘made in Palestine’ or even ‘made in Gaza’. In these circumstances, the symbolic capital of Palestine is a particular selling point, as Mohammed Hawajri has noted: ‘I am often asked to put on exhibitions locally and internationally, but I know that this is not because I am a great artist. It is

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because I come from Gaza.’48 In the absence of a Palestinian state, and with the national label of ‘Palestinian’ artist being a highly evocative one in the Middle East as well as in the West, young Palestinian artists may find themselves in a paradoxical situation, one in which they are caught between the necessity of presenting themselves as artists free of any a priori labelling and of a ‘subjection to politics49’, since they come from a local context that is politically very highly charged. While the study of cultural networks and movements as essential factors in globalization (Appadurai 1996; Belting 2009) has indicated the existence of heterogeneous and diverse spaces, an analysis of the case of Gaza reveals more complex movements of cultural exchange (Crane, Kawashima and Kawasaki 2012; 1–25). It brings out the polarization of the artistic field and the to-andfro movements that take place between openness and imprisonment. In short, while art produced in Gaza has gained greater visibility in the globalized art world and investment in international contemporary art has played an important role in encouraging its potential spread, that art has nevertheless in most cases remained in the virtual sphere. Artists thus often exhibit their work on Facebook sites. Nidaa Badwan,50 for example, having made One Hundred Days of Solitude, a set of intimate photographs in which she staged herself in her bedroom which she had not left for more than a year, published the photographs on Facebook. They were quickly bought up by international art collectors even before the artist herself had been able to leave Gaza. Having held her first individual show in Jerusalem still without ever having left Gaza some months later, and appearing on the front page of the New York Times,51 she was finally able to leave for Italy. As can be seen from this and other examples, the manipulation of the language of international contemporary art can operate as an instrument of power, whether economic (through migration, which is of particular help to artistic practice) or ‘symbolic’ in the sense used by Bourdieu. Artists are often forced to adopt strategies that are not directed at the local public, but are designed to ensure that their productions conform to the expectations of a Western public in terms of choice of language and cultural references, all in the hope of obtaining a ‘passport to the outside’. But such examples of the ‘outside’ remain rare. More often, the new forms of cultural globalization are more likely to affect the symbolic sphere than the material one, with artists being constrained by the imprisonment to which

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they are subjected by the geopolitical sphere, and globalization of this sort being for the most part halted by the extreme isolation of this tiny strip of land. Gazan contemporary art is located in the ‘interstitial space’ described by Homi Bhabha (2004: 2): ‘It is in the emergence of the interstices – the overlap and displacement of domains of difference – that the intersubjective and collective experience […] community interest, or cultural value are negotiated […] in the moment of transit where space and time cross to produce complex figures of difference and identity, past and present, inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion.’ In the final analysis, the fragility of contemporary art in Gaza, lacking stable public or private support networks or a well-established local art market, also gives it a flexibility, a fragmented character and an openness to the outside world that are entirely appropriate to the internationalism and nomadic character of contemporary art. This is the case because while the artists of the Palestinian diaspora work in continuous interaction with their environments, those left behind in Palestine, and in Gaza in particular, have developed self-sufficient practices that are linked to their living conditions and that are marked by the absence of freedom, economic insecurity and dramatic political changes. Under such conditions, artistic development takes place through breaks with the past and reinvention rather than through accumulation and imitation as a way of expressing freedom and resistance. As Edgar Morin has reminded us, ‘A crisis both reveals and brings about – it has an aspect of awakening about it, one that in theory instructs us about possibilities both for surviving and for transforming a situation of crisis.’ The case of contemporary art in Gaza is a striking example of a crisis situation that does not necessarily lead to a break or a disturbance, but that reveals the creativity of a society as a whole. It is precisely this situation of crisis that explains the artistic dynamism of this ‘prison breeding ground’ of Gaza. Yet, whatever the case may be, with the failure of the Oslo Accords, the weakness of the Palestinian state and the general political stagnation in Palestine, while an examination of contemporary art practices in Gaza in the context of their present effervescence may give us reasons for hope, it cannot for all that disguise the general situation of ‘de-development’ (Roy 1987) that with every passing day is undermining the foundations of sustainable development and, a fortiori, its cultural expressions.

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Notes An earlier version of this chapter was published in French as ‘Pratiques de l’art contemporain à Gaza: entre blocus et mondialisation’, Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Mediterranée no 142 (December 2017). 1 Appearing on Facebook on 15 July 2014, three days after the beginning of the war, the poster subsequently spread on social networks and was taken up by the local and international media. 2 Coming from a modest background, Aḥmad and Muḥammad Abū Nāṣir were born in Gaza in 1988 in the Jabalia Refugee Camp. After graduating from the Al-Aqsa University Faculty of Fine Arts, they were forced to leave Gaza in 2011 because of threats against them from the Hamas government, going first to Jordan and then to France where they have lived since 2014. 3 Raed Issa was born in Gaza in 1975 in the Al-Breij Refugee Camp. Though having no artistic training (he studied information technology at the Islamic University in Gaza), he won First Prize in the Young Artist of the Year Award created by the Qattan Foundation. In 2011, he was awarded a residency at the Cité des Arts in Paris. 4 Interview with Raed Issa in Gaza (22 September 2014). 5 The population of Gaza has been regularly prevented from moving since the beginning of the Israeli occupation in 1967. However, it was only in June 1989 during the First Intifada that exit permits were restricted, with Israel only allowing humanitarian aid and commercial dealings with the Strip. In January 1991, the Israeli authorities suspended all exit permits during the Gulf War, these then being revoked altogether after 2000 and the Second Intifada, meaning that the entire territory was hemmed in (www.ochaopt.org). 6 Gaza residents, 70 per cent of them refugees, only have six to sixteen hours of electricity a day, and according to the UN only 10 per cent of residents have access to water for between six and sixteen hours a day. Seventy per cent of the population was living beneath the poverty line in 2015. 7 These were ‘Summer Rains’ (28 June 2006), ‘Cast Lead’ (27 December 2008–18 January 2009), ‘Pillar of Defence’ (14–21 November 2012) and ‘Protective Edge’ (8 July–26 August 2014). The last operation caused the deaths of more than 2,000 Palestinians. 8 Hamas won the January 2006 elections, defeating Fatah which had run the country for the previous ten years. Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas was obliged to cede control of the government in Gaza to Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh. However,

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the conflict between the two camps continued. In June 2007, Hamas controlled the government in Gaza, and Fatah controlled that of the West Bank. Since then, the two territories have been controlled by rival administrations. 9 All quotations from the interviews in this chapter were translated by the author. 10 The IFG is attached to the French consulate in Jerusalem and since the beginning of the present decade has taken on the role previously played by the FCC set up in 1982 in premises belonging to the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) in Gaza. It is the only foreign cultural centre in Gaza today after the British Council was forced to close in 2006. 11 According to responses to my January 2017 questionnaire, the monthly income of artists reaches US$750, while the average income in Gaza was estimated at between US$174 and US$380 per month, the figure varying according to different sources. 12 Unlike for other artistic fields, such as cinema, for example (Ball 2008; Helga Tawil 2011), or music (Puig 2006; Karkabi 2013). 13 This lack of balance can be seen in all the history writing on Palestine (Filiu 2015; Matar and Tawil-Souri 2016). 14 I thus include myself in practising the methods set out by Matar and Tawil-Souri (2016). 15 Artworks are often taken out of Gaza in diplomatic vehicles, limiting the size of works that can be transported. According to the director of the French Institute in Gaza, ‘some artists even deliberately make works that can fit into the boot of a car’ (Rouveyrolles 2016). 16 For accounts of the visual arts before the 1960s, see Boullata (2009) and Ankori (2006). 17 The Department of Visual Arts, part of the PLO’s Arts and Heritage Section, is based in Lebanon and headed by artist Tamām Al-Akḥal (born 1935), wife of painter Ismail Shammout (Ismā’īl Shammūṭ, 1930–2006). The latter was formerly president of the Union of Palestinian Plastic Arts (Ittiḥād al-fannānīn al-tashkīliyyīn al-filasṭīniyyīn) founded in 1969. 18 Many artists of this time produced political posters. See www.palestineposterproject.org. 19 A self-taught artist, Fatḥī Ghabn has always lived in Gaza, where his family became refugees in 1948. He was close to Yasser Arafat, and he paid for his commitment by being sentenced to periods in Israeli prisons in 1975 and 1984, a 1980 Israeli decree having prohibited the production of works of art using the four colours of the Palestinian flag. With colleagues from Fatah, Ghabn founded the Association of Palestinian Plastic Artists in 1984, becoming a tutelary figure for a whole generation of artists.

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20 Born in the Al-Shujā’iyya Refugee Camp, Kamāl Al-Mughannī set up the Association of Gaza Artists in 1984 and the Fine Arts Department of the AlNajāḥ University in Nablus in 1985. 21 Diplomatic telegram (IFG archives), 2004. 22 According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS), a ‘cultural centre’ is ‘an institution that includes items (tools and equipment) used for arts, crafts, and recreational and sport activities that facilitate the practice of cultural activities in a broad sense’, while oddly distinguishing them from theatres, museums, local radio stations, television stations, public libraries and publishers and book distributors. In 2012, there were sixty-nine cultural centres in Gaza, as against fifty-nine in Ramallah and fifty-six in Jerusalem, according to the PCBS. The number of exhibitions held in the Gaza centres is higher than that held elsewhere (sixty-nine exhibitions a year in Gaza in 2012, as opposed to twenty-nine in Ramallah and three in Jerusalem) (www.pcbs.gov.ps). 23 The Eltiqa Collective (translatable as ‘Meeting’) was set up in Gaza in 2002 by Raed Issa, Mohamed Abusal (Muḥammad Abūsal), Mohammed Hawajri (Muḥammad al-ḥawājirī), Dena Matar (Dīnā Maṭar), Mohammed Dabous (Muḥammad al-ḍābūs), Suheil Salem (Suhayl Sālim) and Abdel Rauf Ajouri (‘Abd al-Ra’ūf al-‘Ajūrī). Shababik (Windows) was founded in 2009 by Shareef Sarhan (Sharīf Sarḥān), Basel Maqosi (Bāsil al-Maqūsī) and Majed Shala (Mājid Shalā). See www.eltiqa.com and www.artwfg.ps. 24 Public institutions are represented by the Gaza municipality, which was very active in the field until 2006, and to a lesser extent by the Ministry of Culture, which does not have its own budget. The most active private institutions are the Red Cross and the YMCA. Fathi Arafat, a long-term president of the Palestinian Red Cross, was interested in art, and as a result an art gallery showing the work of young Gazan artists was housed in a building belonging to the organization in Gaza (destroyed in the bombardments of 2009). Working in the Gaza Strip since 1952, the YMCA organizes art courses that have allowed a whole generation of artists to be trained, with Taysīr Baṭnījī working as one of the teachers. Among international organizations, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) can be mentioned, along with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). 25 Funding for the PLO from the international community fell with the First Intifada. The budget of the ministry responsible for culture represented 0.003 per cent of the total budget in 2014 (Culture in the EU’s External Relations, Palestine Country Report, November 2013).

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26 Draft mission statement, IFG archives, 2003. 27 Draft mission statement, IFG archives, 2004. 28 Collective interview with the Eltiqa Group in Gaza (20 February 2013). 29 Draft mission statement, IFG archives, 2004. 30 The first major auctions were held in 2002 and organized by UNDP (http:// www.undp.ps/en/newsroom/pressreleasespdf/2005/8eb.pdf). The Jerusalem gallery Palestinian Art Court –Al Hoash has since held auctions on an annual basis (http://english.pnn.ps/2016/05/27/al-hoash-opens-up-its-arms-for-a-newgeneration-of-palestinian-artists/). 31 See, in particular, Ḥiwārāt al-fann al-khāṣṣa [Individual Dialogues on Art]

https://www.facebook.com/-‫حوارات‬1888078748089908-‫الفن‬/.

32 Of the forty Gazan artists who answered my questionnaire, a third were women. 33 Draft mission statement, IFG archives, 2004. 34 Born in 1976 in the Breij Refugee Camp where he still lives today, Mohamed Abusal graduated from the Islamic University of Gaza in accounting and from the Macromedia Digital University in graphic design. He works full-time as an artist, sometimes also working as a freelance designer for private companies. He has been awarded various residencies outside Gaza (Dārat Al-Funūn in Amman in 2000; the Cité des Arts in Paris in 2011; and the Foundation Camargo in Cassis in 2016), and his work has been exhibited in various European museums, including the Institut du monde arabe in Paris and the Imperial War Museum in London. He is one of the few artists in Gaza represented by a gallery (the Zawiyeh Gallery in Ramallah). In 2000, he was among the founders of the Eltiqa Gallery, one of two dedicated to contemporary art in Gaza. Un métro à Gaza went on tour across the Palestinian Territories and received significant media coverage. 35 Many Palestinian and international artists have worked in the medium, among them Ismail Shammout, Tamam al-Akhal, Sliman Mansour (Sulaymān Manṣūr), Naji Al-Ali and others, and the political poster as a ‘site of symbolic struggle’ (Maasri 2009) saw spectacular growth in the 1960s. See Davis and Walsh (2015). 36 Interview with Mohammed Hawajri in Gaza (20 September 2014). Born in Gaza in 1976, Hawajri is a self-taught artist who co-founded the fine arts programme of the Red Cross and the Eltiqa Gallery in Gaza. His works have been exhibited abroad at the Institut du monde arabe (Paris), the Dārat Al-Funūn (Amman), the Ecole cantonale d’Art du Valais in Switzerland, and the Casoria Contemporary Art Museum in Naples. He has been awarded residencies in Amman (Dārat AlFunūn) and Paris (Cité des Arts). 37 Interview with Mohammed Hawajri in Gaza (20 September 2014).

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38 Films du Tambour press kit. Personal archives of the artist, 2015. 39 Interview with Tarzan Nasser in Paris (15 February 2015). The artistic activities of the two brothers have led them to be arrested by Hamas on several occasions. 40 On 11 February 2011, young members of the group Gaza Youth Breaks Out made an appeal for demonstrations on social media, saying that they had ‘had enough of all the Israeli, Palestinian and international representatives. Enough of shitty Hamas, Fatah, and the international community.’ 41 Born in Gaza, Khalil Mozaien is a Palestinian documentary and feature film-maker. After completing a doctorate in cinema studies in St Petersburg, he made numerous films, among them Mashoo Matook, seen at the Cannes Festival in 2010. He has lived in Canada since 2016. 42 www.karamafestival.org/en/pages/82/Karama-Gaza-Human-Rights-Film-Festi. 43 Interview with Khalil Mozaien in Paris (20 March 2016). 44 Interview with Raed Issa in Gaza (22 September 2014). 45 ‘Qu’est-ce que l’acte de création?’ [What Is the Creative Act?], lecture given in 1987 in the Tuesday lecture series at the Femis Foundation in Paris. 46 Interview with Raed Issa in Gaza (22 September 2014). 47 Institutions supporting their work include the Arab Fund for Culture (AFAC), Mawred, the Qattan Foundation and the Palest’In & Out Festival. 48 Interview with Mohammed Hawajri in Gaza (20 September 2014). 49 Formula used by art historian Nada Shabout in an interview in London (20 June 2013). 50 Born in Abu Dhabi in 1987, Nidaa Badwan moved to Gaza in 1998. After graduating from the Fine Arts Department at Al-Aqsa University, she worked as a teacher of the plastic arts, artistic expression and photography at the Tamer Institute for Community Education in Gaza between 2009 and 2012. She has lived in San Marino since 2015. 51 https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/28/world/middleeast/finding-gazaunbearable-artist-creates-her-own-world-in-one-room.html.

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Index Abaza, Mona 105, 106, 108, 114 Abbas, Hassan (Syrian writer) 63 Abbas, Mahmoud (Palestinian president) 230 n.8 ʿAbd al-Bāqī, Yasir (Yemeni writer) 154 Trāwdīl 154 ‘Abd al-Fattāḥ, Nabīl (Egyptian writer) 106, 107 ‘Abd al-Rāziq, Alī (Egyptian theologian) 113 Al-Islām wa-uṣūl al-ḥukm 113 Abdelke, Youssef (Syrian artist) 57 Abd El-Sayed, Daoud (Egyptian director) 17 Abou Naddara (Syrian film collective) 65, 178 Abū al-Kās, Aḥmad (Palestinian artist) 218 Abū al-Naṣr, Fatḥī (Yemeni writer) 163 Abu-Assad, Hany (Palestinian director) 29 Paradise Now 29 Abu Daya, Bahaa 216 Abu Hashim, Samer (Syrian writer) 55, 56 Abusal, Mohamed (Palestinian artist) 222, 223, 225, 226, 232 n.23, 233 n.34 The Magic Box 225 Un métro à Gaza 222–3, 233 n.34 al-Ādāb (Lebanese magazine) 19 al-Ahdal, Wajdī (writer) 145, 146, 154, 158–9 Qawārib jabaliyya 158 Aḥmad, Aḥmad Shawqī (Yemeni writer) 155, 157 Al-Ahram Weekly (Egyptian newspaper) 106, 118 Ait-Aoudia, Myriam 129 Akhbār al-adab (Egyptian magazine) 6, 108, 116 al-Akhal, Tamam (Palestinian artist) 231 n.17, 233 n.35

Algerian literary field 3, 7, 47, 129–43, 189 bibliographical database 130–1 crisis 3, 130, 131–4, 137 depolarization 7, 130, 141–2 ‘Djazair, Year of Algeria in France’ event 139–40 reduced polarization 138–42 reinforced bipolarization 135–8 statistical survey 142–3 Algerian Writers Union (AWU) 141 Al Ghoul, Asma (Palestinian journalist) 214 Almaiman, Salwa 160 Alsanea, Rajaa (Saudi writer) 160 Girls of Riyadh 160 Amelina, A. 15 American University of Beirut (AUB) 69 n.27, 77 Amiralay, Omar 55 ʿAmrān, Muḥammad al-Gharbī (Yemeni writer) 154, 158 Muṣḥaf aḥmar 158 Ankori, Gannit 216, 231 n.16 Appadurai, Arjun 202, 228 Arab-Israeli conflict 23, 26–7, 29, 79 Arab Spring 1, 3, 25, 27, 28, 58, 76, 105, 169, 180 field of cultural production 27–8 post-revolutionary, Cairo 8, 201 revolutionary narrative 25 Arab Strategic Thought (Lebanese journal) 92 Arafat, Fathi (Palestinian politician) 232 n.24 Arafat, Yasser (Palestinian president) 87, 231 n.19 Armée Islamique du Salut (AIS) 129, 134 Armes, R. 31 n.5, 31 n.6, 32 n.11 artistic practices 33 n.16, 42, 189, 217, 222–7, 228 Arab protest movements, post-2011 226–7 ‘artistic breeding ground’ 216–17

Index Becker’s art world 146–7, 217 Palestinian contemporary art 217–18 revolutionary moment 2, 28, 33 n.24, 56–8 Syrian revolution art 54, 56–7, 62–3 Al-Ashhab, ‘Alī (Palestinian artist) 218 al-Assad, Bashar (Syrian president) 23, 25, 169–70, 177 al-Assad, Hafez (Syrian president) 54, 59, 169, 176 consolidation of power 54–5 post-Hafez al-Assad regime 176–7 Atassi, Ali (Syrian director) 53 Our Terrible Country 53, 63, 68 n.20 Attar, Mohammad (Syrian playwright) 28 Audibert, Pierre 82 Auer, C. 22 Awrāq (Syrian journal) 55, 63–5, 69 n.21 al-Azm, Sadiq Jalal (Syrian writer) 63, 69 n.23 Bādī, Ibrāhīm (Saudi writer) 160 Ḥubb fī al-Sa ʿūdiyya 160 Badwan, Nidaa (Palestinian artist) 227, 228, 234 n.50 Baghdad 15 Bagtache, Merzak (Algerian writer) 138 Baladi, Lara (Egyptian-Lebanese artist) 34 n.32 Vox populi 34 n.32 Ball, Anna 231 n.12 Banipal (British magazine) 67 n.8 Baoumi, Hussein 197 Barakāt, Hudā (Lebanese writer) 163 Barnett, Michael 163 Batniji, Taysir (Palestinian artist) 227, 232 n.24 Bayat, Asef 1 Becker, Howard S. 146, 147, 217 Beirut 15, 18, 73, 76–7, 79–85, 90, 93, 95, 99 n.25, 99 n.26, 100 n.32, 112, 130, 147, 159, 181–3, 185–6, 227 Belmenouar, Safia 216 Belting, Hans 228 Ben Ali regime (Tunisia) 5, 28, 43–4, 45, 48–50 Beydoun, Ahmad (Lebanese social scientist) 86, 87, 88, 97 n.9, 98 n.14, 98 n.19, 98 n.22 confessional ideologies 88

239

‘Lebanese Crises’ 83, 87, 89–91 yawmiyyāt 88 Black Decade 7, 47, 129–43, 189 civil war, Algeria 7–8, 47 ‘depolarization,’ Algeria 130, 141–2 Boëx, Cécile 169, 173, 178, 179 Boissier, Annabelle 5, 28, 39, 42–3, 44, 49, 51 n.1 Boltanski, Luc 43, 44 Bonnefoy, Laurent 148, 156, 162, 165 n.10 Boudjedra, Rachid (Algerian writer) 138 Boullata, Kamal 216, 231 n.16 Bourdieu, Pierre 3–5, 14, 17, 20, 23, 28–30, 41, 53–5, 59, 62, 67 n.2, 68 n.15, 75, 103–4, 122, 130, 143 n.1, 146–7, 157, 158, 194, 202, 206, 209, 216, 228 ‘The Author’s Point of View’ 68 n.15 autonomy 5, 122, 130 adapting the theoretical framework 4, 23 capital (symbolic capital, cultural capital, economic capital) 20–1, 25, 194–5, 206, 208 cultural production (See cultural production, field of) habitus 67 n.2 hegemony 194 illusio and doxa 194 legitimacy, cultural production 103–4 literary field 130, 146–7 political mobilization 74–6, 77, 79 space of possibles 6 symbolic capital 20–1, 194–5, 206, 209 ‘synchronization,’ political/intellectual 143 n.1 theoretical framework 4, 23 The Rules of Art 4 Bouteflika, Abdelaziz (Algerian president) 129, 139, 142 Bruell, Cornelia 199 al-Buḥayrī, Islām (Egyptian theologian) 114, 115 Burkhalter, T. 31 n.5, 32 n.12, 32 n.15 Buscatto, Marie 220 Cactus exhibition (Palestine) 220–21 Cairo cultural field 8, 15, 18–19, 106–7, 111–12, 147, 180, 193–210 contextualizing, contemporary 193–5

240

Index

creative economies and development policies 197–201 economy of presence, labour 205–9 funding and friendship 201–5 market and revolution 195–7 post-1989 state cultural policy, Egypt 196 Canut, Cécile 39 Carapico, Sheila 160–1 Casanova, Pascale 130, 146, 159, 160 censorship 5, 6, 9, 15, 17, 25, 29, 34 n.28, 41–2, 44, 46, 49, 65, 75, 112, 119, 133, 151, 155, 169, 175, 178 Centre for Studies, Documentation and Research (CEDRE) 79, 100 n.33 Change Square (Yemen) 8, 146, 148–50, 156, 161, 164 ‘civil state’ (al-dawla al-madaniyya) 148 Jumʿat al-Karāma (Friday of Dignity) 148 negative impact on cultural field 150 as new source of cultural legitimacy 149–50 youth and NGO culture 148–9 Chaplin, Charlie 163 Divergent 163 Modern Times 163 Charara, Waddah (Lebanese social scientist) 86–9, 97 n.9, 98 n.14, 98 n.15, 98 n.20 Cheurfi, Achour 131 Ecrivains algériens: Dictionnaire biographique 131 Chèvre, Mathilde 15 Chiti, Elena 5, 6–7, 103, 118, 181 Choron-Baix, Catherine 216 Choukri, Mohamed (Moroccan writer) 159–60 For Bread Alone 160 Cooke, Miriam 1, 34 n.27 Crane, Diana 228 Crisis 2–7, 13–14, 21–31, 33 n.20, 33 n.24, 39, 41, 42, 50, 53–4, 62, 66, 73, 77–8, 80, 82, 85, 86, 88–90, 95, 96 n.3, 103–22, 129–34, 136–9, 142, 145, 151, 161, 170, 184, 213, 217, 229 azma (use in Egypt) 106 concept and definition 2–7, 14, 21–3, 103–5

‘crisis art’ 26–9 cultural fields 3–7, 25–6, 30 as institutional tool 6–7, 104–7 Marxist tradition 22, 88 networks and resources 23–6 reduced polarization 138–42 as structural factor 14, 23, 26, 29, 31 symbolic power, Syria 53–4 and symbolic revolutions 14, 29–31 temporality of 103, 104 Cristofolini, Stella (German artist) 186 ‘cross-cultural exchanges’ 204–5 cultural production, field of 1–2, 4–9, 13–31, 54, 104, 146–7, 169, 174, 181, 193 audience-driven programming 194–5 Bourdieu 4, 14, 16–17, 20, 23, 29–30, 54, 104 Cairo (See Cairo cultural field) consecratory power 19, 23–4 constraints 7, 29–31 cultural field as networked space 17–21 Egypt (See Egyptian cultural field) emigration, cultural producers 24–5, 29–30 and globalization, Gaza) geographical space 16–19, 25–6 integrated national spaces 19, 26 national fields 8, 15, 17 as social space 14, 16–17, 21–2, 24, 26, 31 structure 14–15, 19, 23–6, 28, 29–31 symbolic products 5, 14, 20, 26, 30, 31 n.2 symbolic revolution 14, 29–31 transnational dimension (See transnationalism) Culture Resource (See Mawred) Dabous, Mohammed (Palestinian artist) 232 n.23 Damascus Spring 25, 170 Damesin, Laurent 7–8, 145, 151, 180 Daoud, Kamel 140–1 Meursault, contre-enquête 140 Davis, Rochelle 233 n.35 Ḍayf Allāh, Asmāʾ (Yemeni writer) 163 Deheuvels, Luc-Willy 158

Index Déjeux, Jean 143 n.2 Deleuze, Gilles 62–3, 226 Derki, Talal (Syrian director) 60 Al-‘awda ilā Ḥumṣ 60 desectorisation 5 de-territorialization 7, 63, 68 n.17, 170 Diab, Mohamed (Egyptian director) 6, 116–21, 123 n.14 Eshtebak (Clash) 6, 116–19, 121 Dickinson, K. 15, 27 Dobry, Michel 5 dominant speech 41, 43, 47 Donati, Caroline 169, 177 Downey, A. 27 Dubois, Simon 3, 5, 8, 24, 31, 67 n.7, 169 Dücker, B. 32 n.14 Durkheim, Émile 202 Ed‘am ḥaqqak ennak teshūf Eshtebāk (Facebook campaign) 119 Effat, Habiba 196, 204 Egyptian cultural field 6, 103–22 ‘crisis,’ institutional tool 6–7, 105–7 cultural conflicts 121–2 fiction or non-fiction 108–10, 121 state as guardian of secular law 111–13 institutional and non-institutional actors 103–4, 119–20, 121 and political crisis 23–4, 103–5 secular state, guardian of religious morality 114–16, 121 Egyptian revolution (See Egyptian cultural field) Eḥnā asfīn yā ḥayā (Facebook campaign) 110 Eickhof, Ilka 5, 8, 28, 34 n.31, 193, 196 Elias, Marie (Syrian academic) 171, 182, 187 Ellyas, Akram 129 El Sawy, Mohamed (Egyptian politician) 123 n.14 Eltiqa Group for Contemporary Art (Palestine) 218, 220–1 Erll, Astrid 60, 68 n.13 Erskine-Loftus, P. 15 Ettijahat 180–9 in Beirut 181–3 culture 180–1 donation 183–4 as second exile 184–7

241

European Cultural Foundation (ECF) 186, 199 Another Europe 186 Evans, Jenifer 196 Fadda, Reem 222 Faraj, Sāmiḥ 120, 121 Farzat, Ali (Syrian artist) 57–8, 67 n.6 Favier, Agnès 83, 86 Fayed, Ismail 193, 196 Al-Fikr al-ʿarabī (Lebanese journal) 92, 97 n.7, 97 n.9, 97–8 n.12, 99 n.23, 99 n.25 Filiu, Jean-Pierre 215, 231 n.13 Fioroni, Claudie 177, 178 Firat, Alexa 3, 5, 6, 24, 53, 69 n.21, 181 Fourmentreaux, Jean-Paul 224 French Cultural Centre (FCC) 173–4, 190 n.3, 220–1, 231 n.10 Frishkopf, Michael 2, 3, 31 n.6, 34 n.34 Froissart, Pascal 40 Front Islamique du Salut (FIS) 129 Gad, Daniel 198 Gaza 3, 9, 29, 149, 213–29, 230 n.6, 230 n.8, 231 n.10, 231 n.15, 231 n.19, 232 n.22, 232 n.23, 232 n.24, 233 n.34, 233 n.36, 234 n.41, 234 n.50 emergent artistic scenes 217 marginalization 215, 217 migration 217 Ghabn, Fatḥī (Palestinian artist) 218, 231 n.19 Gonzalez-Quijano, Yves 3, 179, 216 Granovetter, M. S. 18 Greig, David 174 The Guardian 161 Guellouz, Mariem 5, 28, 39, 43, 45, 46, 48 Gugler, J. 29, 31 n.6, 32 n.11, 32 n.15 Haddad, Emmanuel 183 Hadi, Abdrabbuh Mansur (Yemeni president) 155, 160–1 Hadjithomas, Joanna (Lebanese director) 29 Hadj, Miliani 143 n.2 Hafez, Adham (Egyptian artist) 207 Hajj Ali, Hanane 182 al-Hajj Saleh, Yassin (Syrian writer) 53, 63

242

Index

al-Ḥajjī, Muḍar (Syrian playwright) 170, 172, 175, 176, 178, 180, 185–6 Al-Ān hunāk 186 Brūnz 176 ʿIndamā tabkī Faraḥ 186 Halaby, Samia 216 Halajian, Suzy 207 Halasa, Malu 2, 53, 61, 68 n.18 Syria Speaks 58, 59, 61, 63, 65, 68 n.18 Hamdy, Basma 2 Hamish (Syrian cultural centre) 63 Hanafy, Rasha 112 Haniyeh, Ismail (Palestinian politician) 230 n.8 Harb, Hazem (Palestinian artist) 227 Harel, Simon 41 Harrāsh, Mujīb al-Raḥmān (Yemeni poet) 163 Hasan, Rosa Yasin (Syrian writer) 57 Hassan, Hanane Qassab (Syrian academic) 171–2, 187 Ḥaṭab, Zuhayr 81, 97 n.12 Hawajri, Mohammed (Palestinian artist) 29, 224, 227–8, 232 n.23, 233 n.36, 233 n.37, 234 n.48 Red Carpet 224–5 el-Hawary, Youssra (Egyptian singer/ songwriter) 28 Ḥaydar, Ḥaydar (Syrian writer) 158 Heinich, Nathalie 158 El-Herfi, Lina 216 Hesmondhalgh, David 198 Higher Institute of Dramatic Arts (HIDA, Damascus) 171–7, 179 Hosni, Farouk (Egyptian politician) 106 Hout, S. 33 n.22 Humsi, Ziyad (Syrian director) 53 Ḥusayn, Ṭaha (Egyptian writer) 113 Fī l-shi‘r al-jāhilī 113 Iaccino, Ludovica 114 Ibrahim, Sonallah (Egyptian writer) 109, 158 Iftirāḍ (Palestinian artists’ collective) 221–2 iltizām literature 27 imprisonment and globalization, Gaza 213–29 adaptation and reinvention 222–7 marginalization 215

new cultural movements and identity claims 227–9 ‘revolution’, contemporary art 217–22 Institute for Arab Development (IAD) 6, 75, 79, 81–94, 96 n.2, 97 n.10, 98 n.14, 99 n.24, 99 n.25, 100 n.32 Institut Français de Gaza (IFG) 215, 222, 231 n.10 Institut Français du Proche-Orient (IFPO, Beirut) 186, 215 Institut Supérieur des Beaux-Arts (Tunis) 43 International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) 15, 19, 32 n.9, 67 n.8 al-Iryānī, Maysūn (Yemeni writer) 154 Issa, Raed (Palestinian artist) 213, 220, 225–6, 230 n.3, 230 n.4, 232 n.23, 234 n.44, 234 n.46 The Resistant Musician 226–7 Jacquemond, Richard 1, 3, 4, 103, 104, 122, 143 n.5, 155, 160, 170 Jenvrin, Géraldine 151, 159 Joha, Mohammed 227 Joreige, Khalil 29 Joubert, Sophie 146 Joubin, Rebecca 173 al-Jumhuriya (Syrian online journal) 24, 63, 68 n.19 Kabbanji, Jacques 74 al-Kafrī, Abdullāh (Syrian playwright) 170, 172, 175, 176, 178, 179, 180, 183, 186–7, 190 n.6 ʿAtabat al-alam ladā al-sayyida Ghāda 187 Dimashq Ḥalab 176 I Hate Theatre, I Love Pornography 183 Kapferer, Jean-Noël 41, 49 Kapoor, Ilan 194, 197, 201, 202–3 Karkabi, Nadeem 231 n.12 Karl, Don Stone 2 Karman, Tawakkol 156 Kawasaki, Ken’ichi 228 Kawashima, Nobuko 228 Kerbaj, Mazen (musician) 27 Khalifa, Khalid 55, 59, 67 n.8 In Praise of Hatred 55, 59, 67 n.8 al-Kharrât, Edouard (Egyptian writer) 158

Index Khatib, Hakim 114 al-Khayat, Amany (Egyptian journalist) 118 Anā Maṣrī (Egyptian TV show) 118–19 Al-Kitāb (Egyptian magazine) 107, 108 Kiwan, Nadia 190 n.4 Komter, Aafke 194, 197, 202, 203, 204 ‘The Social Meaning of Things’ 202 Koselleck, Reinhart 21, 22, 103 Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe 21 Kraus, Franz (graphic designer) 213 Visit Palestine 213 Labaki, Butros 77 Lahire, Bernard 146, 154 Laidi-Hanieh, Adila 216 Lakhdar-Hamina, Mohammad (Algerian director) 29 Chronicle of the Year of Embers 29 Lang, Felix 1, 3, 4–5, 13, 32 n.15, 34 n.33, 42 Laredj, Waciny (writer) 138, 163 Lebanese University (LU) 77, 78, 82, 94, 96–8 Lebanon 6–8, 19, 22, 24, 31 n.5, 34 n.28, 73–96, 97 n.10, 99 n.28, 100 n.33, 111, 131, 138, 159, 181–9, 190 n.11, 231 n.17 autonomy and politicization of cultural field 73–96 employment opportunities in research 73–5 framework, academic research 76–80 Institute for Arab Development 81–5 ‘Lebanese Crises’ 83, 87, 89–91 professionalization of research 94–6 research agendas and practices 85–94 ‘Two Year War’ 87 legitimate speech 39–41, 47 (See also rumour, Tunisian artistic field) Lefebvre, Henri 88 Critique de la vie quotidienne 88 Leguy, Cécile 39 Le Monde (French daily) 117 Lens Young Collective (Syrian photographers collective) 64, 69 n.24 Leperlier, Tristan 3, 5, 7, 129, 130, 189 Libération (French daily) 150 Lionis, Chrisoula 216

243

literary field 3, 7, 29, 30, 47, 75, 129–43, 146–7, 164 Algerian 3, 7, 47, 129–43, 189 Bourdieu 29, 146–7 extreme, Yemen 159–60 publishing, Yemeni system 151–4 Yemeni 7–8 literature 30–1, 32 n.14, 32 n.15, 33 n.23, 57, 67 n.10, 75, 98 n.13, 104, 135–6, 140, 153, 158–9 (See also literary field) Algeria 130, 132, 137–8, 145–64 Egypt 108–16 of emergency 142–3 of extremes 158–9 prison 55 promotion 112 Yemen 129–44, 147, 150–1 Lubkeman, S. C. 14 Lynx Qualey, Marcia 112 Maasri, Zeina 216, 223, 233 n.35 MadaMasr (Egyptian online journal) 24 Makhoul, Bashir 216 Malas, Mohammad 21, 67 n.10 ‘Manifesto of the 99’ 170 Māniʿ, Walīd 157 Mansour, Sliman 233 n.35 Maqosi, Basel (Palestinian artist) 232 n.23 al-Maqṭarī, Bushrā (Yemeni writer) 156, 157, 163 Marchetti, D. 15 Martinez, Luis 133–4 Masoud, Moez (Egyptian preacher) 118, 119 It-Tarīq is-saḥḥ (The Right Path) (Egyptian TV show) 118 Massasit Mati (Syrian artistic collective) 57 Matar, Dina 231 n.13, 231 n.14, 232 n.23 Mauss, Marcel 202 Mawred (Egyptian-Lebanese NGO) 176, 180, 181, 182, 186, 190, 234 n.47 al-Mawrid al-thaqafī (See Mawred) Mehrez, Samia 104, 105 Meinhof, Ulrike Hanna 190 n.4 Mermier, Franck 15, 33 n.19, 76, 130, 216 Midḥat, Aḥmad 120 Mimouni, Rachid (Algerian writer) 138 al-Misrī al-Yawm (Egyptian newspaper) 114

244

Index

Moghadam, Amin 216 Morin, Edgar 229 Morsi, Mohamed (Egyptian president) 104, 107, 113, 116 Moureau, Nathalie 221 Mozaien, Khalil 225, 234 n.41, 234 n.43 Red Carpet Festival 225–6 al-Mughannī, Kamāl (Palestinian artist) 218, 219, 232 n.20 al-Muqri, Ali (Yemeni novelist) 146, 150, 155–60, 163 Alcohol and Wine in Islam 156, 157 Hurma 155–6, 157–9, 163 New York Times 146, 150, 228 Al-Yahūdī al-ḥālī 160

Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) 79, 90, 91, 218–20, 231 n.17, 232 n.25 Palestinian Spring 225 Parsons, Talcott 202 Pedwell, Carolyn 197, 204 Pepe, Teresa 123 n.3 Peyroulou, Jean-Pierre 129 Picard, Elizabeth 170 Poirier, Marine 148 Poirrier, Philippe 220 political crises 2, 3, 5–7, 13–14, 16–17, 21, 22, 23–31 (See also crisis) Pries, L. 16, 17 Puar, Jasbir 205

Nadeem, Aida (Iraqi musician) 17, 27 Naepels, Michel 47 al-Nahār (Lebanese newspaper) 18 Naji, Ahmed (Egyptian writer) 6, 108–17, 121, 202 Using Life 108–9, 111–12, 116 Nashif, Esmail 216 Nasser, Tarzan and Arab (Palestinian artists) 82, 213, 214, 223, 224, 234 n.39 Colourful Journey 225 Dégradé 225 Gazawood 224 Visit Gaza 213, 214, 223 Nastas Mitwassi, Faten 216 Nā‘ūt, Fāṭima (Egyptian poet) 114, 115 neo-liberal discourses/practices 195, 198–202, 205–6 Nercam, Nicolas 217 networks 5, 14, 17–21, 23–6, 28, 32 n.7, 32 n.9, 43, 50, 78, 80, 85, 92, 94, 159, 173–4, 176–8, 183–4, 189, 200, 207, 219, 221–2, 227–9, 230 n.1 cultural field 17–21 international 18–19, 176–8 and political crises 23–6 post-Hafez al-Assad regime 176–7 social networks, institutions and 14, 18, 20, 43, 207, 227, 230 n.1 Nora, Pierre 60, 61, 62 al-Nu‘ayzī, Zaydān (Palestinian artist) 218

Qaddūr, Wāʾil (playwright) 170, 172, 174–6, 178–80, 182, 185, 187, 189 n.1, 190 n.5 Al-Fayrūs 176 Al-ghuraf al-ṣaghīra 185 Khārij al-sayṭara 176 L’aveu 182 Qadhafi, Muammar (Libyan president) 81, 82, 84, 91, 93, 97 n.11, 99 n.25 The Green Book 84, 97 n.11, 99 n.25 al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQPA) 161 Al-Qāhira (Egyptian magazine) 110, 111 al-Qashush, Ibrahim (Syrian musician) 56 Qāsim, Fikrī 156

Offe, Claus 22 Olsson, Susanne 114

Raad, Walid (artist) 17 Rābiṭat al-kuttāb al-suriyyīn. (See Syrian Writers’ Association (SWA)) Raḍwān, Shafīq (artist) 218, 223 Raymond, Candice 3, 6, 73, 76, 78, 91 Rābiṭat al-kuttāb al-suriyyīn. See Syrian Writers’ Association (SWA) Rebello, Lara 114 revolution 2–3, 6, 21, 29, 33 n.26, 40–5, 48–50, 54–7, 59–66, 66 n.1, 90, 106, 112–13, 118, 119, 148, 150, 153, 156–7, 178–9, 181–3, 188, 193, 194, 195–7, 217–22 artistic practices 2, 24–5, 28–9, 33 n.16, 33 n.24, 42–3, 63, 109, 112, 123 n.9, 158, 169–74, 177–8, 180–3, 188–9, 222–7

Index Cairo market and 195–7 of contemporary art 43, 49, 196, 217–22 market and 9, 28–9, 63, 195–7 movement 147–8, 150–2, 155, 157, 161–4 post-revolutionary, Cairo 8, 201 reaction and ‘owning’ 156–7 revolutionary moment, 2011–12 2, 164 struggle 53–4, 56–7 symbolic revolutions 14, 29–31 Syrian revolution art 54, 56–7, 62–3 Yemeni cultural field 2011–16 (See Yemeni cultural field 2011–16) Ricoeur, Paul 98 n.14, 103 Rodríguez, Joaquín Barriendos 209 Roitman, Janet 3 Roussel, Violaine 80 Rouveyrolles, Chloé 231 n.15 Roy, Sara 229 Ruiz de Elvira Carrascal, Laura 177 rumour, Tunisian artistic field 39–51 before and after revolution 41–7 as collective speech 41, 49, 50–1 definition 41, 43–4 as illegitimate speech 40–2 intertextuality and transitional justice 48–50 moralizing aspect 51 between visual arts and performing arts 42–5 Saab, Jocelyne (film-maker) 26 Ṣābir, Karam (Egyptian writer) 114–15 Ayna Allāh? 114 Sadek, Hakim 138 Ṣafadī, Muṭā‘ (Syrian writer) 85–6, 90, 91, 98 n.13, 99 n.24, 99 n.25 Al-Safīr (Lebanese newspaper) 92, 98 n.16, 100 n.29, 100 n.30 Sagot-Duvauroux, Dominique 221 Said, Omar 115, 116 Salamé, Ghassan (Lebanese academic and politician) 84, 97 n.9 Saleh, Ali Abdallah (Yemeni president) 148, 151, 152, 155, 158, 161 Salem, Suheil 232 n.23 Salhi, MohandAkli 131 La Littérature amazighe 131 Salmāwī, Muḥammad (Egyptian writer) 109–10

245

Sanbar, Elias 216 Santoro, Marco 3 Sapiro, Gisèle 9 n.3, 15, 34 n.36, 75, 96 n.1, 134, 146 Sarhan, Shareef (Palestinian artist) 232 n.23 Sari, Mohamed (Algerian writer) 138 al-Sarut, Abd al-Basit (Syrian musician) 56, 60, 66 Schemmel, Annette 200 Schielke, Samuli 105 Schiller, Glick 16 Schneider, Wolfgang 198 Seeliger, M. 16, 17 Semujanga, Josias 41 Shababik (Windows to Contemporary Art) (Palestine) 218 Shabout, Nada 234 n.49 Shala, Majed (Palestinian artist) 232 n.23 Shammout, Ismail (Palestinian artist) 231 n.17, 233 n.35 al-Shughdurī, Samāḥ (Yemeni poet) 163 Shuqayr, Samih (Syrian artist) 57 Simmel, Georg 202 Sinwār, Bashīr (Palestinian artist) 218 Skovgaard-Petersen, Jakob 123 n.11 Slitine, Marion 9, 14, 29, 213, 227 Sotinel, Thomas 117 speech 39–51 Bourdieu 41 illegitimate 40–2 legitimate 39–40, 47, 48–9 Steyerl, Hito 206 Strauss, Anselm 146 structure 7, 14, 20, 22, 24, 30, 39, 47, 64, 79, 96, 137, 170, 177, 180–1, 188–9, 193–5, 201–2, 205, 208–10, 217–18 ‘Ettijahat: independent culture’ 180–1 reinforcement 193, 208 Syria 1–3, 5–8, 13–14, 15, 18, 22–5, 28, 30–1, 53–60, 62–6, 81, 90, 158–9, 161, 169–72, 174–6, 177, 180–5, 188 (See also Syrian cultural field) 2011 uprising, the 178–9 ‘Citizens Artists’ 182 dictatorship in 169–70, 188 oral history (Pearlman) 59–60 ‘revolution’ 3, 6, 54–55, 61–6, 66 n.1 Syrian art 56, 174, 176, 181–8 (See also Syrian cultural field)

246 Syrian cultural field 8, 64 2011 uprising 178–9 artistic field 170–1, 173–6, 178, 182, 187–9 in Beirut 181–3 ‘Citizens Artists’ 182–3 ‘cultural’ activism 170 Cultural Battles 54–5 cultural memory, 2011 6, 58–62 cultural practices 24–5, 54–7 foreign cultural centres 173–4 international networks 176–8 revolutionary art 2, 56, 57–8, 60 Syrian art 56 Syrian Spring 170–1, 178, 181, 185, 186, 188–9 Syrian Writers’ Association (SWA) 55, 63–4, 69 n.21, 69 n.23, 181 Syria Trust for Development (STD) 177–80, 188 Ṭāhā, Sumayya (Yemeni novelist) 163 Tamer, Zakariya (Syrian writer) 58 Tawil-Souri, Helga 231 n.13, 231 n.14 Tayyib, Mohammad (Syrian artist) 61 Zaytūn 61 Theatre 169–89 Théâtre du Tournesol (Beirut) 181–2 Toukan, Hanan 32 n.13, 32 n.15, 182–3 transnationalism 4–5, 8, 13–21, 25–6, 28, 130, 137, 142–3, 208–9, 221 Troupe nationale des arts populaires (Tunisia) 48 Tuchscherer, Michel 145 Tunisia 1–2, 5, 13, 15, 22, 28, 39–51 rumour (See rumour, Tunisian artistic field) ‘Truth and Justice Commission’ 46 Türkmen, Ceren 197, 198 Université Saint-Joseph (USJ, Beirut) 77

Index Variety (American magazine) 117 visual arts 5, 13, 20, 27, 29, 31 n.1, 32 n.13, 32 n.15, 33 n.16, 40, 42–5, 50, 216, 218, 220, 222 Vivarelli, Nick 117 Wakefield, S. 15 Walsh, Dan 233 n.35 Wannous, Saadallah (Syrian playwright) 175 Weber, Max 202 Weissberg, Liliana 62, 65 Wimmer, A. 16 Winegar, Jessica 105, 108, 196 Yazbek, Samar 28, 33 n.23 Year of Algeria in France (YAF) 134, 139, 140 Yemeni cultural field 2011–16 145–64 2012–13: reaction and Takfîr 155 2016 160–1 Change Square 8, 146–7, 148–50 contemporary literature 147, 151, 153, 155, 159–60 Hurma (novel) 155–6 intellectual, the 162–3 periphery and audience 157–60 polarization 161–2 political crises 145–6, 151–2 reaction and ‘owning’ revolution 156–7 symbolic competition 146–7 system for literary publishing 147, 151–4 Yemeni Writers’ Union, the 150–1 Zaoui, Amin (Algerian writer) 138 Zaqzouq, Shadi (Palestinian artist) 227 Zéroual, Liamine (Algerian president) 129 al-Zubayr, Nabīla (Yemeni writer) 158 Zawj ḥidhāʾ li-ʿĀʾisha 158 Zurob, Hani (Palestinian artist) 227