On December 22, 1938, Egyptian writer Georges Hanein published a manifesto in French and Arabic entitled “Long Live Degenerate Art.” The text marked the founding of the Art and Liberty group, a Cairo-based collective of male and female artists and writers who embraced Surrealism as a means to promote radical political and social reform. The group was enmeshed in a growing international Surrealist movement, founded by André Breton, whose aesthetic vision rebelled against rational artistic traditions to embrace emancipatory, spontaneous art. Most histories of interwar Egypt focus on its complex political dynamic, the rise of the efendiyya, and the strengthening of national identity. In this paper, I explore the artistic and intellectual production of a movement that broadens and challenges those narratives. The Art and Liberty group embraced surrealism as an experimental movement engaged in a project of social revolution. The group rejected fascism, nationalism, and colonialism and promoted globally engaged artistic production grounded in local idiom. I use a selection of the artists’ works and biographies to explore the tension between embracing a cosmopolitan art form while elevating vernacular forms to create more “authentic” art in interwar Egypt.

Caroline Seymour-Jorn Abstract MESA 2018 Art and the Institutions of the Egyptian State and the Region This paper explores the work of two Cairene artists whose recent multi-media art interrogates various governmental institutions—from medical establishments to the postal system—and raise questions about governmental aesthetics and their impact on citizens. While both artists deal with topics concerning Egyptian society, they are both internationally exhibited and think about social issues as they relate to global issues as well, including immigration, agribusiness, and regional social-political change. First, I discuss Salam Yousri’s installations entitled el-mu’assasa el-rasmiyya [The Official Institution] exhibited in Egypt in 2013, and Guideposts exhibited in Sharjah, UAE in 2016. I discuss the exhibits themselves, Yoursri’s stated motivations for the pieces, and his encounter with the Egyptian Ministry of Culture in 2013 during the installation of this highly critical exhibit. Second, I explore Yasmine elMeleegui’s installation Tamaatim [Tomatoes] which explores Egyptian and regional pesticide use and raises questions about the relationship between agribusiness, the physical wellness of citizens, and the authority of states to control food and health. This paper draws upon fieldwork in Cairo from 2012, 2015 and ongoing communications with the artists. Both of these works—as post-revolutionary pieces—represent important reflections on Egyptian and Arab society by sensitive cultural observers. I would also suggest that although the revolutionary process in Egypt may not have brought about what many people wanted, according to some young interlocutors with whom I spoke in the Cairo during January 2012 and July 2015, it has brought many new experiences, small changes, and the idea that people can bring change to their country, the region and the environment. I argue that it is important that we think carefully about the artistic production from each phase of the revolution and post-revolutionary period, as it reveals important things about Egyptian artists and cultural creators, and the history of how they intervene in cultural and political processes.

This paper revisits the 1950's discourse on iltizam or commitment in modern Arab literature and art in light of recent cultural productions in Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt and Syria. The concept of iltizam - which became cultural currency in the intellectual debates across the Arab world in the 1950's and centered on the relationship between content and form - transformed modern Arab art from an aesthetic imitation of European forms into a socially engaged project. The debates continued in multiple journals - especially al-'Adab in Beirut - and the socialist literary critic Husayn Mroueh (1920 - 1987) became the hinge figure in the transformation of Arab art's purpose. Recently in Egypt the debate has resurged: during the Arab spring, prominent writers of fiction such as Bahaa Taher (b. 1935) openly took the side of the government against the people, resurrecting the debate on the intellectual's role in political life. Colloquial poetry, however, resounded in Tahrir, recollecting the role poetry played in the birth of mass politics in Iraq in the 1960s. In Syria, the poet Adonis (b. 1930) famously declared his allegiance to the government and then retracted his statement soon after. In Lebanon, intellectuals of the older generation have condemned such positions, but the younger generation of visual artists has returned to a vehement championing of aesthetic experimentation over and against political representation. In Palestine, films such Ajami (a collaboration between Palestinian director Scandar Copti and Israeli director Yaron Shani, 2009) and theatrical productions like Theater of Freedom's play The Siege (2017) directed by Nabil Al-Raee have brought to the fore the thorny question of commitment in art produced under occupation. In Syria, the anonymous collective Abou Naddara publishes videos on YouTube that merge the urgent political with aesthetic experimentation. This paper investigates specifically the commitment to aesthetics and politics in these different art forms to think through the problem of audience. The high illiteracy rates that plague the Arab world condemn many such experimental gestures to an international audience. How does contemporary Arab art negotiate the urgency of its moment with its desire for universal recognition? To what extent are these various artistic forms serving local communities? Through a collection of examples and analysis, this paper contextualizes the debate on committed art in the Arab world from the 1950s until today in relation to the problem of audience to rethink the potential for effecting change through artistic production.

An attempt in history of emotions, this paper offers a new explanation for the emergence of modern Persian satire in Iran. A frequently noted aspect of the Persian "constitutional literature" is an unprecedented proliferation of nationally self-conscious, sociopolitical satire, dissimilar to any classical Persian humor. Scholars often explain this phenomenon as one of Iranians' many "new beginnings" in their move towards tajaddud (modernity) during the late 19th-century; however, it remains unclear as to why and how such extraordinary welcoming of sociopolitical satire by Iranians occurred. To answer these questions, I turn to the formative role of self-conscious affects in the 19th-cenruty Iran. Extant historiographical accounts of Iranian modernity hint the existence of something akin to an "emotional regime" in the mid- and late 19th-century intellectual milieu of Iran, caused by many modernist thinkers' "self-colonizing" attitudes towards farangestan (the West), which they perceived as Iran's most significant Other. Accordingly, such thinkers vigorously disseminated frustrated feelings of embarrassment, humiliation, and shame towards Iran and Iranians. Focusing on two influential modernist thinkers, Mirza Fath-Ali Akhundzadeh (1812-1878) and Mirza Malkam Khan (1833-1908), I will show how they were preoccupied with ridiculing laughter within the said affective framework, viewing derision as a necessary, self-disciplinary tool to provoke social and intellectual reforms. While the Tbilisi-based Akhundzadeh encouraged and oversaw the Persian translation of his comedies (1871) and produced a satire manifesto of sorts during his writing career, Malkam Khan's work reveals his constant anxiety over Iranians' being asbab-e tamaskhor-e ghuraba, i.e., the object of foreigners' ridicule, a fear manifested also in his own frequent, sardonic criticisms of Iranians, not least in his influential, London-based, Persian periodical, Qanun (Law, 1890). Unsurprisingly, Malkam Khan was for long also mistakenly credited for the first Persian comedies, where had been written by Mirza Aqa Tabrizi (1871; first published in 1908) under the influence of Akhundzadeh.