Abstract
Considering the seismic shift in current affairs since Covid-19, scholarship predating the global pandemic could be in danger of seeming redundant. Yet Culture & Crisis in the Arab World, published in 2019, explores Arab crisis culture at global scale and as an aspect of globalisation that is pertinent to a world in flux. Ten case studies ambitiously examine artistic, literary and media practices, enmeshed within authoritarian state control, prominent across Tunisia, Yemen, Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon and Syria through a ‘post-Bourdieusian’ lens (p. 4).
Middle Eastern cultural studies scholars, such as Marwan Kraidy (2013), have previously emphasised the impact of revenue and Islamic Wahhabism, from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, on the region. This book addresses the gap in Arab cultural sociology concerning the interface between political mobilisations of nation states as well as the deep cultural transformations of the Arab world in recent years and since the so-called Arab Spring in 2011. Central to the collection is the concept of ‘crisis’ as both a sociological phenomenon but also the result and product of global culture, political unrest, war, invasions and revolution peculiar to the Arab cultural condition since 1948. On the one hand, almost constant political upheaval produces visceral creativity that is subject to censorship through authoritarian governance, while on the other, the culture of crisis itself becomes a fetishised commodity and additional Orientalist trope. Simon Dubois writes about Syrian playwrights in exile, having fled President Bashar Al-Assad’s political regime, who are now dependent on European and American funding which produces a new set of conditions on cultural production. Marian Slitane describes the contemporary art scene in Gaza as increasingly driven by the international commercial funding, foreign cultural and public diplomacy sector placing prestige on the symbolic capital of Palestinian crisis art.
The contributors to Culture & Crisis in the Arab World are predominantly scholars located at French universities and/or Arab-French scholars adapting Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological approach. Cultural practices, from this angle, are understood in terms of habitus, which is Bourdieu’s term for the individual and collective perspectives and/or worldviews that are reaffirmed and expressed through practices, different forms of capital, and the field of action. In the spirit of Bourdieu, the editors establish that ‘there is no absolute border between scholarship and criticism’ (p. 2). They suggest that what becomes studied and defined as culture is always political. An important thread running throughout the case studies is the intense politicisation of all aspects of culture in the Arab context, including the act of research. Annabelle Boissier and Mariem Guellouz discuss the post-revolutionary Tunisian dance scene. Tunisian performing arts are fraught with anxiety and trauma resulting from a repressive authoritarian regime that simultaneously censors and undermines. Boissier and Guellouz reveal a pervasive sense of paranoia amongst the artists they interview, as well as their own reluctance to become liable for uncovering symbolic and physical violence that performers encounter.
Elena Chiti (p. 103) argues that cultural field is also a political and religious ‘battlefield’, in the Egyptian context, whereby the Egyptian government plays the dual role of controlling religious sectors while censoring the cultural field in terms of religious morality. Chiti suggests that what is required in the Arab context is not merely a parallel Bordieusian investigation of the artistic scene, in relation to questions of power, but a framework to consider religious control as an aspect of cultural capital. Contributors to Culture & Crisis in the Arab World establish that a secular view of habitus would be evasive in the Islamic context. In the Arab region, religion takes on the form of what Bourdieu (1972) would have called ‘doxa’, the term denoting a society’s taken-for-granted, unquestioned truths. Writing about the Yemini post-revolutionary moment, Laurent Damesin, is careful to not even reveal the gender of the artists she meets. She suggests Islamic doxa has become more entrenched, since the 2011–2012 cultural changes, and the rise of campaigns declaring a number of artists and writers ‘käfir’ or non-believers (p. 164).
The Arab region is diverse yet each chapter in the collection establishes the hybridity, collective vibrancy, tension and sheer force of Middle Eastern habitus. The post-Bourdieusian lens is useful in overcoming dichotomies of the Arab cultural context in terms of binaries of micro/macro, empirical/theoretical, public/private, objective/subjective, material/symbolic but also, importantly, secular/religious or national/international. Considering the recent tragedy of the Beirut port explosion in Lebanon (Chulov, 2020), readers wanting to know more about the overlapping fields of culture, power, religion and postcolonialism, plunging the Middle East into an ever-deeper pit of crisis, will be interested in this important study. It offers not only post-Bourdieusian voices but, also, post-orientalist perspectives concerning the global appetites and agendas for Middle Eastern crisis culture.