14
Negar Azimi
The uprisings of 2011 and onward in the Arab world might be understood as a war of images. Each faction – revolutionaries, regimes, exiles, and assorted others – has offered up its own series of visual totems to the world: protesters’ fists raised in Tahrir Square as they called for the removal of President for Life Hosni Mubarak; bulldozers demolishing Bahrain’s iconic Pearl Monument after it had become the focal point of anti-government protests; the limp bodies of Syrian children who lost their lives to chemical weapons allegedly used by their own president in a civil war that seems to have no end. Tracing the manufacture and circulation of these images since the onset of the Arab Spring, a period that ostensibly began with the self-immolation of a fruit-seller named Mohamed Bouazizi in Tunisia in December of 2010 and most dramatically climaxed with Mubarak’s ouster in February of 2011, what is perhaps most striking is the speed with which such images have been sourced, packaged, and co-opted to suit multiple ideological, commercial, and aesthetic agendas. In this chapter, I reflect on the production and dissemination of visual culture in and around the period popularly referred to as the Arab Spring. My primary focus is contemporary art and its relationship to modern Arab intellectual culture, though I will also address other cultural forms and formats from television to advertising. For the most part, Egypt in the year following the ouster of Hosni Mubarak will serve as my reference – with acknowledgement that given an ever-shifting Egyptian political landscape, terms like “revolution” and “revolutionary” have assumed multiple resonances and lives.
* * *
In the period following the collapse of western-backed governments in Tunisia and Egypt, along with uprisings in such countries as Bahrain, Syria, and Yemen, there has been a bounty of exhibitions, commemorative coffee table books, think tank retreats, documentaries, and panel discussions devoted to thinking about the culture that is being produced and imbibed in these revolutionary times. Given the preponderance of interest, one might think that cultural expression had assumed a unique aura that distinguished it from culture in milder, less restive times. In my own work, I very often encounter such interest. Over the span of the past three years, my colleagues and I at the arts and culture magazine Bidoun, along with other art enthusiasts and cultural critics of the Middle East and its diasporas, have received hundreds of queries from interested curators, NGO managers, researchers, and assorted others eager to learn more about cultural activity in the midst of these countries in transition. I include one here as Figure 1.
Figure 1
Letter from a curator, email received by Negar Azimi, May 2, 2011.
* * *
Just six months after Hosni Mubarak was forced to step down from his position as Egypt’s President, a position he held for three decades, the Egyptian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale showcased the work of an artist named Ahmed Bassiouny who died from gunshot wounds sustained while taking part in protests on January 28, 2011, a day which came to be known as the first “Friday of Rage” during that country’s eighteen-day uprising. The elaborate installation at Venice featured a performance work that the artist had staged previously at Cairo’s Palace of Fine Arts in which he wore a specialized plastic suit that measured his energy consumption levels and, in turn, reflected these visually on a screen. Video shot during that original installation was juxtaposed with raw footage taken from clashes during the uprising. Here, the artist-activist had become a martyr, and the reification of his status as a martyr at the Egyptian Pavilion at Venice, itself a high-profile event, along with endless commemorative articles and video clips about him, only served to emphasize the special status or aura of the artist in revolutionary times.1
The instinct to memorialize strife and, in turn, to think about how historical events intersect with cultural production is, of course, not a new one. The horrors of World War I, after all, spawned a host of modern art movements, from Dada to surrealism. More recently, in the post–9/11 period, there have been an overwhelming number of exhibitions devoted to the arts of the Middle East. The rise in interest in the Middle East region in general as well as certain contemporary “art scenes” – the expression itself seems to imply some sort of staging – in cities such as Beirut, Cairo, and Dubai is arguably the result of a number of factors, among them: institutionalized multiculturalism among Western liberal elites; the birth of global art hubs in places such as Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, thanks to ample state coffers in those countries and a wish to broadcast their modernity care of a commitment to cultural life; and the simultaneous rise of an Arab and Iranian collector class that not only has an interest in such visibility for artists from their countries, but also has the means to support that visibility.
And yet, exhibitions built around artists from the Middle East – and there have been dozens in venues ranging from the Museum of Modern Art in New York to the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo – have tended to fetishize artistic activity as somehow miraculous (emphasis on the word miracle, in Latin an “object of wonder”) given dominant media narratives of terrorism and strife and all manner of things that would presumably make the task of making art difficult, if not entirely impossible, in this part of the world.2 These initiatives, in turn, have often operated in a historical vacuum, erasing decades if not centuries of cultural activity throughout the region in question. Rarely is there acknowledgment of a formidable modern art history in these countries in the form of, for example, the Egyptian surrealist movement of the late 1930s and 1940s, or the Saqqakhaneh school, sometimes referred to as “spiritual pop art” in lay terms, of Iran in the 1960s, just to name two significant albeit quite different movements. In other words, these exhibitions have been characterized by a distinct dearth of social and historical context, with little mention of the circumstances and infrastructure that gave rise to the art in question, to say nothing of compelling and noteworthy historical antecedents.
Post–9/11 “Middle East” shows very often enjoy generous budgets, and yet the market they have inspired also reveals a remarkable uniformity in approach. Somewhat ironically, work that emphasizes difference – whether ethnic, religious, or cultural – has been especially rewarded: the Egyptian artist Wael Shawky, for example, has made a video featuring a spinning Al Aqsa mosque (Al Aqsa Park, 2006), on one hand, or another presenting him reading the Koran in a western-style supermarket (The Cave, 2005), on the other. While both works deftly address different aspects of religion as spectacle, they do, at the end of the day, trade in iconic, highly determined symbols of foreignness. Meanwhile, the Lebanese artist Walid Raad’s ongoing conceptual project, The Atlas Group (1989–2004), addresses and showcases archival traces of the Lebanese Civil Wars. The work itself, in spite of being a sophisticated exploration of the diverse lives of archives and the very partial nature of history-writing itself, is very often experienced as work “about war” or “about the Middle East” given the abundance of images of bombed out cars, bullet-ridden buildings, and other palpable traces of conflict among its various manifestations.
These are, of course, only two artists and while these artists’ works also hold up on multiple aesthetic and conceptual levels beyond existing as exotic spectacle, they have inspired dozens of dull copies.3 A random sampling of recent exhibitions and programs tethered to the Arab Spring in particular might include:
After the Spring
The Arab Spring Art Festival
The Arab Spring Platform
From Facebook to Nassbook
A Night in Tahrir Square
Our Revolution, Our Pictures
The Art of Revolution
And so on.
New cultural publications have been launched as well. The mission statement of one such venture reads as follows:
An ancient culture has become passive, missing from the mass media and societal discourse. The creative directors, editors and designers of this region are not given a chance to express themselves. Instead, these roles are given to people of the more modern culture, increasing an adherence to the status quo. BLANK Magazine is committed to rejuvenating Arabic culture by providing an outlet for political, cultural and social expression within the Arab region and its Diaspora. At the same time, it is a visual communication tool that serves to change Western perception of Arabs. The purpose is to be an open outlet for expression and to increase participation within the cultural/creative scene, therefore, the content is created by Arab people, the writers are Arab, the editor is Arab, the people featured are Arab.4
In 2011 a new US State Department-funded program called “smART Power” was launched by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, which subsidizes the travel of American artists to the Middle East along with other parts of the world with the goal of engaging in “people to people diplomacy through the visual arts.”5 Here is a contemporary variation of the sort of cultural diplomacy America practiced during the Cold War, when abstract expressionism and jazz served as stand-ins for pre-fab narratives about America and American culture. Relatedly, the Beirut-based critic Kaelen Wilson-Goldie has written about the advent of the so-called “Revolution Grant” in recent years.6 Not entirely unlike how AIDS was rendered a seductive topic in grant circles in the 1990s and 2000s in the sub-Saharan African context – making a play or film or sculpture about AIDS was the swiftest way to raise money for one’s project – today making a film, theatrical production, or art work about revolution can be equally lucrative in the Arab world care of the agendas and interests of international grant-making agencies in particular.
Still, it is important to acknowledge that the instinct to take stock of and very often to aestheticize the events of the so-called Arab Spring is coming from within and from without. In other words, one can’t reduce this tendency to a facile narrative about how the West essentializes the Arabs and their revolutions; rather, it cuts both ways: for as many shows that have taken place in New York or in London about the Arab Spring, there have been probably ten more in Cairo or Amman thanks to local commercial galleries that have also recognized that the logic of aestheticizing the revolution represents a winning formula; easy-to-digest art can be both popular and commercially successful.
The art historian Jessica Winegar has written about the challenge to national sovereignty represented by heightened international interest in the arts in 1990s Egypt, in terms of what she calls “state-centric fields of cultural production.” Winegar’s primary interest is in the foreign-dominated privatization of markets born of the intensified global circulation of art and money. She argues that this privatization, manifest in the figure of the western curator and his attendant tastes, has created tensions vis-à-vis Egypt’s existing culture industry (as manifest by the Ministry of Culture primarily).7 These tastes, in turn, were often the ones dictating the lavish ethnic, national, or religious-themed shows that started appearing some two decades later, during the post–9/11 period.
In the case of the more recent past, I’d like to go further than Winegar in order to suggest that while, ten or twenty years ago, the state and the private sector may have had opposing instincts, they have since moved closer to sharing a logic and a sensibility. In fact, both international and locally owned galleries have appropriated a market-driven logic, one that emphasizes the narratives of difference alluded to above. In the case of local market forces such as those of private galleries, it is often broader commercial instincts that guide curatorial decisions. In the case of a Ministry of Culture that was tightly bound to the Mubarak administration, on the other hand, programming decisions are more likely to have served a legitimizing or face-saving function.
A closer look at exhibitions held at Cairo’s private galleries in the immediate post-revolutionary period is revealing. Witness, for example, images of determined children thrusting the Egyptian flag in the air, heroic broad-shouldered soldiers beaming patriotically and, of course, the famously witty protest signage of Tahrir Square (a favorite remains “La Vache Qui Rit: Muuuh Barak” starring a bovine-looking former president). A series of works by the artist Nermine Hammam, “Codes of Ny Kin” (2012), features a treatment of what has become one of the most enduring icons of abuse in the post-revolutionary period: a female protestor trampled upon by soldiers to the point that her blue bra is exposed. In this case, the “blue bra woman” was included in a set of photographs that appeared to be variations on stylized Japanese landscapes (Figure 2).
Figure 2
Nermine Hammam, Codes of My Kin, 2012 (detail), from Cairo Year One: Unfolding series.
Courtesy of the artist and Rose Issa Projects.
The revolution and its narratives, in a sense, have offered themselves up as Duchampian ready-mades; the events, as ongoing and nebulous as they have been, have become an engine for producing artistic flotsam that, at best, looks like lobby art for the United Nations, mining the familiar language of consensus. After all, how can one possibly argue against art that represents such a hopeful historic moment? A brief survey of titles of works from recent exhibitions in Cairo reveals the following: “Freedom,” “Drink Freedom,” “Shadow of Freedom,” “People Demand,” “Man Crying,” and so on. This, it turns out, is precisely the sort of revolution-kitsch the market seeks. Mona Said, the owner of the Safar Khan Gallery in Cairo, told Reuters that she had held a show of revolutionary art in March 2011 that was so successful that she sold four times the amount she expected and ended up shipping works to clients all around the world.8 To be blandly political is in vogue and to be apolitical risks flirting with philistinism. This may not seem all that surprising in a country where the faces of revolutionary martyrs have been mass-produced on Kleenex boxes and t-shirts.
* * *
Arts in the Arab world have a long and complicated history with the state. From the founding of the College of Fine Arts in Cairo in 1908 by Prince Yusuf Kamal to the emergence of state-sponsored cinema and literature as well as associated official prizes, the arts have long been a domain in which the state could cultivate and exert control over the expression of specific ideas about nation and self. In the case of Egypt, images of healthy, happy, and prodigious workers, the Aswan Dam, and Nasser-inflected glory were especially ubiquitous following the revolution of 1952 and the fall of the Western-backed monarchy.
In the last three decades, the Egyptian Ministry of Culture launched a Cairo Biennial (1984) and, a few years later, the Salon de Shabab (Salon of Youth), which has featured what is ostensibly the best of youth artistic talent. More often than not, these exhibitions have been festooned with bloated political themes, ranging from the Palestinian intifada and world poverty to the sad legacies of American imperialism. For the most part, this embrace of political content has been conveniently outward-oriented (officially there is no poverty in Egypt, of course), serving up a safe, neutered version of principled engagement with the world. Very often literal in their representation (envisage images of keffiyehs, hungry children, or American-made bombs), such artworks have tended to be emotionally charged, shallowly existential, neatly cropped one-liners that had more to do with paying lip service to mantras and slogans than engaging our senses.
And so, in the period following the uprising of 2011, the Egyptian Ministry of Culture, once dedicated to anodyne nationalism that legitimized the status quo, swiftly adapted to the times and offered itself up as platform for so-called “revolutionary art.” Its dominant narrative was concentrated squarely on a singular dramatic mode: the heroism of the revolution. A state that was scrambling to hold on to power had co-opted the very narrative that once threatened to dismantle it. There are precedents to this sort of manufacturing of myth through the deployment of official visual culture. Take, for example, a widely reported incident in 2010 in which the state-run al-Ahram newspaper Photoshopped Hosni Mubarak into the lead of a group of world leaders walking down a red carpet. In reality, he had been trailing behind US President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu, among others.
Mainstream and corporate commercial culture, too, have caught on to the logic of the revolution as ready-made. There is no question that the Arab uprisings, Egypt’s in particular, were themselves intensely telegenic. While Egyptian state television offered up facile, fear-mongering agitprop accusing foreigners, Islamists, and even Kentucky Fried Chicken of sowing unrest in the country, Al Jazeera’s livestream revealed an entirely different narrative arc, one whose more persistent theme was the powerful pitted against the powerless. For example, the sight of demonstrators praying on the Qasr al-Nil Bridge in spite of state security-manned tanks and water cannons threatening to knock them over was as unforgettable as any image from Tiananmen Square. The screens of the world framed Egyptians – the US-Backed Dictator, the Artist-Martyr, the Google Guy – in a passion play starring the aging Pharaoh and his defiant slave-subjects. Media treatment of the events reduced the complexities of Egypt – Islamists, secularists, Christians, the rich, the poor – into a neat storybook narrative. And Tahrir Square itself became a kind of metonym for a utopian fable, a ground zero portrayed as miraculously clean, orderly, syncretic, and devoid of the violence, sexual harassment, or sectarianism one could vividly imagine taking place in a time of dramatic upheaval.9
It is therefore not all that surprising that the commercial realm, itself the architect of Egyptian cinema for decades, could also seamlessly adopt the revolution as a melodrama about good guys and bad guys and art under dictatorship and what happens when the floodgates of freedom are thrust open. Consider, for example, advertising campaigns by Pepsi, Coca-Cola, Jeep, Persil, Gold’s Gym, and Egyptian mega-developer SODIC, each of which portrayed their respective products as embodying the ethos of the revolution. A television spot for Coca-Cola, for example, with its “Make Tomorrow Better” slogan, featured young purposeful Egyptians armed with ladders and ropes that they use to literally pull away a gloomy and ominous grey sky – set to the tune of a pop jingle, no less – in order to reveal the glittering sunshine beyond. Pepsi, in the meantime, produced an ad featuring young Egyptian hipsters willing the drab grey buildings of downtown Cairo to be spontaneously painted with bright shades of pink and yellow and green. “Express Yourself” was the slogan. Here, in the aftermath of the Egyptian uprising, lies Adorno, the ruthless critic of culture’s worst nightmare: mass culture, the agent of mind-numbing homogenization, has appropriated wholesale the language of opposition and individuality – as if all one has to do to qualify as a counter-cultural revolutionary is … drink Pepsi (Figures 3–8).10
Figure 3
Egyptian ads for Mobinil, Savoy Sharm El Sheikh, Gold’s Gym, Jeep, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Oriental Weavers.
All published in Bidoun #25, 2011 (www.bidoun.org).
Figure 4
Egyptian ads for Mobinil, Savoy Sharm El Sheikh, Gold’s Gym, Jeep, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Oriental Weavers.
All published in Bidoun #25, 2011 (www.bidoun.org).
Figure 5
Egyptian ads for Mobinil, Savoy Sharm El Sheikh, Gold’s Gym, Jeep, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Oriental Weavers.
All published in Bidoun #25, 2011 (www.bidoun.org).
Figure 6
Egyptian ads for Mobinil, Savoy Sharm El Sheikh, Gold’s Gym, Jeep, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Oriental Weavers.
All published in Bidoun #25, 2011 (www.bidoun.org).
Figure 7
Egyptian ads for Mobinil, Savoy Sharm El Sheikh, Gold’s Gym, Jeep, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Oriental Weavers.
All published in Bidoun #25, 2011 (www.bidoun.org).
Figure 8
Egyptian ads for Mobinil, Savoy Sharm El Sheikh, Gold’s Gym, Jeep, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Oriental Weavers.
All published in Bidoun #25, 2011 (www.bidoun.org).
* * *
Where does all of this leave us? The revolution as ready-made might teach art critics, curators and collectors, and casual observers alike to be wary of the swift appropriation of “good politics” in the service of both commercial and dubious political agendas. In the sphere of politics, too, so-called revolutionary or dissident art has been invoked and instrumentalized to pursue multiple ends. In the case of Libya, for example, CNN segments about the “art of the opposition” seemed to be signs of an imminent invasion – in other words, proof of a budding, and yet stifled, civil society, and a population that needs saving. In order to realize the fullest potential of their art, these artists must be liberated. This is not entirely unlike the strategic use of culture in the specific case of foreign policy vis-à-vis Iran; every time there is an upsurge in discussion of a possible Israeli strike or concurrent US pressure, there is a concomitant bounty of segments about brooding underground Iranian rock bands.
At the same time, as Egypt – however briefly – opened itself up to multiple political currents in the post-revolutionary period, a new narrative emerged that was not one with the old nationalist mode on one hand or that of the newly liberated revolutionary youth on the other. Rather, it was an Islamic one. I will not dive too deeply into the swiftly evolving Islamic cultural current, mostly because other scholars have done important work on this area, from Samia Mehrez’s work as captured in Egypt’s Culture Wars to Yasmine Moll and others’ work on the birth of what is increasingly referred to as “Islamic entertainment.”11 The 2012 trial of Egyptian comedian Adel Imam for defaming Islam, the appearance of a new Islamic-themed music video channel called 4Shabaab, and the terrific popularity of Islamic televangelists such as Amr Khaled are just some manifestations of the Islamic realm’s claims to serving as the guardian of public morality and culture. Anthropologist Walter Armbrust has written about the fate of the photogenic revolutionary martyr Sally Zahran, whose status as veiled or unveiled inspired heated debate, with various Islamic-oriented camps literally and metaphorically Photoshopping in her Islamic credentials, turning her into a martyr who died, above all, in the name of Islam.12
While some of these initiatives, like 4Shabaab, predate the Arab Spring, the ascendance of the Muslim Brotherhood into the official political sphere in the post-Mubarak era – even if momentary – both validated this trend and left it vulnerable to attack. In June 2013, with Mohamed Morsi of the Brotherhood serving as Egypt’s first freely elected president, artists and intellectuals staged a weeks-long sit-in at the Ministry of Culture against what they perceived as the creeping Islamization of the cultural realm. Each night artists, poets, filmmakers, and diverse others gathered in a more or less festive atmosphere, playing live music or reciting poetry. Their target was the Brotherhood’s Minister of Culture, a man by the name of Alaa Abdel Aziz, who in a short time had fired the heads of the General Egyptian Book Organization, the Fine Arts Sector, the Cairo Opera House, and the National Library and Archives. According to historian Khaled Fahmy, the Brotherhood’s attempts to exercise control over the cultural sphere stemmed from the belief that Egypt’s identity had “been hijacked by a handful of Westernized intellectuals, and that the time has come for Egypt to regain its original, pristine Islamic identity.”13
* * *
Returning to the revolution as ready-made, I would like to propose that there are risks attached to the sudden interest in and market for so-called Revolution Art. Artists are increasingly asked and expected to swiftly respond to the changes in their midst, but this demand is often out of touch with the tenor, spirit, and temporality of art production. Instead, it might be time to look to other forms of culture that are more pliant, and that may respond to the current moment in more organic ways. Theatre, for example, has been a prime space for improvisation and experimentation, as has music. Graffiti, too – though it has admittedly been written about to death – reflects a form that is more faithful to the texture of daily life in a city such as Cairo today in which graffiti has been a central aspect of the visual strategy and culture of protest over years of revolution and counter-revolution.
There is another risk. By insisting on the finished art work, catalogue, or film, one risks communicating that the revolution has come and gone and is a static, finite topic suitable for dispassionate reflection. On the contrary, these uprisings are far from over – ongoing military trials, mass protests, at least one coup as of July 2013, and a shambolic election one year later in Egypt testify to that. How can one possibly reflect on, much less make a sculpture or film about, a moment that remains in progress and, ultimately, in flux?
In the realm of theater, there have been a number of extraordinary productions that have taken the events of the “revolution” as a point of departure, either explicitly or subtly, and in turn, evolved a texture and dramaturgy of their own. Tahrir Monologues as well as director Ahmed El Attar’s The Importance of Being Arab are but two manifestations of monologue-driven personal accounts of the times in and around the uprising – both put documentary accounts drawn from recent history at the center of their work – that do not endeavor to monumentalize or reflect conclusively on these events, but rather, offer a glimpse at the angst, ambiguity, and glory they evoked.
Mosireen, too, is an initiative of note – a genre-bending project at once involved in the straightforward politics of witness and documentation, an artist collective, and, for some time, until they were prevented from doing so, an engine for screenings in downtown Cairo’s Tahrir Square. In the aftermath of every iconic event in Egypt for the last three years, Mosireen has been at the forefront of capturing footage, editing, and uploading video onto the Internet for rapid viewing. In the case of human rights abuses, Mosireen has provided invaluable testimony for legal purposes. In one case, Mosireen distributed cameras to the mothers of individuals awaiting military trial, so that the proceedings in the courtroom might be rendered transparent.14
There have also been contemporary art works that are of this moment, but not specifically tethered to it. The artist Hassan Khan’s 2010 video work, Jewel, for example, features two men of distinctly Cairene sensibility – one looks like a taxi driver of significant girth in a leather jacket and jeans, and the other a familiar bureaucrat wearing a cheap polyester suit – dancing to a hypnotic shaabi beat around a black box in an otherwise empty room (Figures 9 and 10). There are multiple levels of signification at play here – from the sartorial coding of the men to the aggressiveness of the music, which seems to indicate a lurking, powerful, explosion to come. Khan raises more questions than he answers in this piece, whose mystery might be one of its greatest attributes.
Figure 9
Hassan Khan, Jewel (2010). 35 mm film transferred to Blu-ray, color, sound, paint, speakers, light fixture; 6:30 minutes (loop).
Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris.
Figure 10
Hassan Khan, Jewel (2010). 35 mm film transferred to Blu-ray, color, sound, paint, speakers, light fixture; 6:30 minutes (loop).
Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris.
A final question: What if the proliferation of articles, books, and exhibitions depicting a happy emerging art market in a happy emerging democratic state serves to mask more trenchant realities? The use of culture as a facile façade for more grim truths and, equally, as a marker of freedoms (of expression, for starters) is, again, a tactic at least as old as the Cold War. After all, Louis Armstrong was paraded around Europe, on the State Department’s dime, in order to deflect attention from the realities of Jim Crow racial segregation laws in the United States.15 Today, however, with international interest at its peak, such initiatives may serve to mask the infrastructural problems and violence embedded in authoritarian regimes that may take generations to bring down. Nearly three years after the fall of the House of Mubarak, it may be time to stop zealously memorializing the Arab Spring and its various legacies through cultural platforms. The revolutions in the region, at best having toppled a handful of dictators, will have wrought many things – not least among them a lot of timely mediocrities and, in the final account, some bad art.
1Among the many articles about Bassiouny’s work at the Venice Biennial: www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle-east/egyptian-artists-unite-to-preserve-new-freedoms/2011/04/29/AGXCIQEH_story.html, http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2011/1051/cu32.htm, http://swedenburg.blogspot.com/2011/04/egyptian-pavilion-at-venice-biennale.html.
2For a discussion of the rise of the “group show,” see Farzin (2014).
3For a discussion of ethnic marketing tendencies in the art world, see the introduction to Zolghadr, Bydler, and Kehrer (2007); Ghouse (2010).
4www.kalimatmagazine.com/about.
5www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2011/10/175676.htm.
6Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, “On Bandwagons,” Frieze, October 2011.
7Winegar (2006b). For an in-depth discussion of cultural politics in Egypt and the Arab world at large, see Winegar (2006a).
8Shaimaa Fayed, “Egypt uprising art brightens Cairo, tempts buyers,” Reuters, August 17, 2011.
9For further discussion of these dynamics, see Azimi (2011).
10For his extended treatment of mass culture, see Adorno (2001).
11Mehrez (2010). For a look at Moll’s work, see Moll (2010).
12Walter Armbrust, “The Ambivalence of Martyrs and the Counter-revolution,” abridged version from the AAA panel, “Revolution in the Middle East and North Africa: Anthropological Perspectives,” November 2011.
13Khaled Fahmy, “Ministry of Culture or Ministry of Intellectuals?,” Ahram Online, June 8, 2013, http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContentPrint/4/0/73416/Opinion/0/Ministry-of-culture-or-ministry-of-intellectuals.aspx.
14http://mosireen.org/.
15Saunders (2001).