In January 1939 Egyptian poet Georges Henein founded Jama'at al-Fann wa-l-Hurriyah (Art et Libertr), a Cairo-based interdisciplinary Trotskyist movement with an interest in surrealism, whose first manifesto called for solidarity with artists in Europe against the rapid rise of fascism and the threat this posed to artistic production. The following year the group launched its journal al-Tatawwur (Evolution), a publication that despite being short-lived (January- September 1940), brought together many of the critical leftist thinkers in Egypt at the time. While contributors were eclectic in their various practices and interests, many shared a background as cultural producers; Ramsis Yunan, Fuad Kamil, and Kamil al-Tilmisani, all important painters of their generation, were active members of al-Fann wa-l-Hurriyah and their writings featured regularly on the pages al-Tatawwur. Using al-Tatawwur as a departure point, this paper attempts to understand the ways in which contributing artists imagined their simultaneous roles as writers, artists, and critics. By tracing the recurring concerns and preoccupations of the journal's articles, a number of interesting questions arise as to the ways in which these artists imagined their relationship to their audiences and readership. In other words, given the clearly political commitment voiced by members of al-Fann wa-l-Hurriyah, how did these artists/writers define the place of art within larger socio-economic debates of the time and who did they imagine to be their interlocutors, both on a local and global levell What do they consider the role of artist to be within such a historical contextn What are the links that are articulated between questions of aesthetics and ideological concernsc Ultimately such a reading is concerned with examining the ways in which the categories of the "artistic" and "political" were understood within the context of 1940s Egypt.

By 1951 economic and political relations between Iran and the Soviet Union were already established and a demarcation agreement was signed in Tehran by a Soviet-Iranian joint commission. The American struggle to keep Iran from Communism led to the 1953 CIA and MI-6 sponsored coup against Mosaddeq. In its efforts to prevent Iran from falling into Soviet hands, U.S. administration was not restricted to "political" means alone. In fact, the U.S. hoped that a "quiet diplomacy," instead of war and violence, would produce the desired results. This was the beginning of heavy United States support for the Pahlavi monarchy. As Iranians were struggling to come to terms with their identity on the brink of this widespread "American imperialism," the leftist groups in Iran generated fervent debates. While some desired a "return" to local norms, others propagated Soviet models. These views were often imaged and imagined in Iranian Leftist publications. The pro-Communist Tudeh Party's women's bi-monthly, Bidari-e Ma [Our Awakening], is a case in point. Captivated by the views of the Bolshevik activist Aleksandra Kollontai, every issue of Bidari-e Ma illustrated Iranian woman as a very simple and slim type. Throughout the 1950s and 60s, the Iranian government tried its best to suppress the Tudeh Party and other leftist groups. Farrukh Ghaffari's debut film, 'South of the City' (1958), one of the earliest motion pictures to take a critical look at impoverished life in downtown Tehran, was banned for three years. In the 1970s, leftist views were often verbalized (rather than illustrated) by art and literary critics. Addressing a new generation of artists, who following Andy Warhol initiated a new style by illustrating commodities, the Iranian Marxist art and literary critic Khosrow Golsorkhi lamented in his illegally distributed jeld Sefid (blank cover) manuscript, 'The Politics of Art and Poetry' (ca. 1973), only a few privileged upper-class patrons could relate to the mere "clichl art" [hunar-i qrlibq] of this kind. Once the revolution had taken place, the reality of Iran's "Westoxification"[Gharbzadegr]--to use a term popular at the time--continued to raise the ire of the post-revolutionary elite who created a new visual language that borrowed heavily from that of the Iranian Left. In this sense, the visual culture of the Iranian Left became a "vanishing mediator" (cf. Slavoj Zizek), silently contributing to the propaganda images of the newly established Islamic Republic of Iran.

In late 1972, a small circle of writers, artists, and students in Western Europe from Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Algeria launched the Arab Surrealist Movement in Exile. The surrealist group was based in Paris, and it was greatly influenced by the radical student and worker uprisings of 1968-70 in France, Germany, Italy, and elsewhere. They regarded themselves as inheritors of the more dissident Freudo-Marxist aspects of the surrealist project begun by poets Andr? Breton and Louis Aragon at the end of the First World War, but their contemporary approach was fueled by Situationist and Frankfurt School critiques of contemporary capitalist society, as well as various experiments in anarchism and post-Left autonomist Marxism. Whereas the first-generation surrealists of the 1920s attacked the liberal-bourgeois power structure in Europe, the Arab surrealists of the 1970s targeted the Middle East: "Our surrealism destroys that which they call 'the Arab fatherland.' We explode the mosques and the streets with the scandal of sex returning to its body, bursting into flames at each encounter. We liberate language from the prisons and stock markets of capitalist confusion," their founding manifesto proclaimed. Toward that end, the group produced what they called "agitational propaganda": tracts, pamphlets, and publications (in Arabic and French) that savaged nationalism, Islam, militarism, capitalism, and the State. One of their more notorious periodicals was *Al Raghba al-ibbhiyya* (1973-84), a self-proclaimed "non-Israeli anti-Arab publication" bristling with confrontational surrealist ideas and imagery that was quickly outlawed as blasphemous, pornographic, and politically subversive by governments throughout the Middle East and North Africa. In addition to surrealist illustrations, poems, letters, Arabic translations of older European-language Romantic and surrealist texts, and new polemics on current events, publications like *Al Raghba al-ibihiyya* reflected the Arab surrealists' intense interest in anti-authoritarian culture and politics in a Middle Eastern context. My paper examines a small but typical sample of images and texts from the Arab surrealists, ranging from the first issue of *Al Raghba al-ib-hiyya* in 1973 and continuing up to their September 1980 pamphlet denouncing the Iran-Iraq War. Of particular interest is how and why the group promoted a revolutionary dialectical integration of "art" and "politics" (in their words, "an osmotic continuity in the unique trajectory of an individual praxis of Inspired Revolution") as a means for undermining the oppressive and repressive regimes throughout the Middle East by liberating imagination, creativity, and expression from the everyday miseries of a fragmented, alienated life.

At the recent 11th Istanbul biennial over one third of all artists exhibited were from the Middle East region. While the biennial's location in Istanbul -rightly taken by its curators (WHW) to be the center of the world--clearly influenced this selection, one cannot help but notice the extent to which the Middle East has begun to circulate within the arts community as a densely saturated metonym for politics. In keeping with the recent theoretical re-valuation of the political in art criticism, the Biennial's theme, Brecht's 1928 query "what keeps mankind alive" was meant to engage "Brecht's Marxism and his belief in utopia, utopian potential and [the] open political engagement of art" in contemporary critical and curatorial practices. What better site from which to stage the meeting ground of politics and aesthetics than the Middle East? Indeed, as I will argue, and attempt to problematize, the Middle East has come to stand in simultaneously for the specter of the political and the promise of politics. Critically examining numerous works by Middle Eastern artists (such as Rabih Mroue, Jumana Abboud, and Larissa Sansour) exhibited at the Istanbul biennial, I engage the following questions: (1) How do we make sense of the ubiquitous way in which the Middle East has come to serve as a staging ground for the question of politics, while critically exploring the prevalence of binary understandings of the region as trapped between 'local' ethno-nationalisms and 'global' neo-liberalism? (2) How do we examine the ontological precarity of the region emerging simultaneously with its aesthetic overvaluation? If, as Nicolas Bourriaud wishes to argue, the revealment of precarity is a political act in itself; how can art on the Middle East help to visualize power and its obscene excess, yet also avoid what Milica Tomic has referred to as "the aestheticization of ... suffering - which would just be another form of exploitation in the generation of artistic value"? I end with a discussion of the significance of artistic works that harness not just form and content in their reconfiguration of the political in art, but that have also mobilized or displaced various affective structures.