While there have been inquiries into Arab cultural and intellectual productions as carriers for nationalist, pan-Arabist, or regime propagandas in anthropological, historical, and cultural studies, it is only lately that scholars have investigated the interconnectedness of culture with political projects, in particular, leftist movements (Abu-Lughod 2005, Khuri-Makdisi 2010, Litvin 2011, and Stone 2007). These recent studies have expanded our knowledge of culture's engagements with wider political discourses, while also yielding insights into theorizations of ideology, injustice, and the nation-state. Building upon these studies, this panel aims to further excavate how leftist intellectual and cultural productions become a political force that challenges normative politics in times of change. Therefore, we can see how leftists across the Arab Middle East have informed one another or drew upon preceding iterations, while not locking them into linear teleologies. Considering the fluidity of national boundaries within the region's cultural and intellectual movements, the panel examines works from the late nineteenth century up to the late twentieth century from multiple regions in the Arab Middle East, bringing together history, anthropology, and cultural studies.
Collectively, the papers in this panel investigate culture as simultaneously being informed and informing trajectories, conditions, and contexts of their time. First, they explore the role of culture in representing ideologies and circulating them in wider society as counter narratives to state and regional hegemonic discourses. Second, the papers do not isolate these works within the confines of the nation-state but rather situates them in a broader context by accounting for their transnational connections. In contrast to studies that treat culture and politics as discrete categories or one where the the former is subservient to the latter, our approaches argue that art and politics are interconnected and contingent upon one another. More specifically, the first paper analyzes the subversive theater of Ziad Rahbani from the Lebanese Civil War era as a way to translate leftist theorizations of injustice to counter narratives of sectarianism. The second paper focuses on revolutionary departures from hegemonic Nasserist socialism following the Naksa amongst Lebanon political and cultural leftist works. Finally, the third paper analyzes how early engagements with socialist thought and theory challenged status quo politics during the late colonial period in Egypt. Taken together, these papers seek to document and analyze the role of culture in questioning the conjuncture that Arab nation-states found themselves in during the colonial and post-colonial eras.
-
Ms. Samar Nour
Socialism and the Evolution of Socialist Thought in Colonial Egypt
The rise, and dominance, of socialism in Egypt in the 1950s and 1960s has been mostly attributed to Gamal Abdel Nasser, so much so that socialism is often conflated, and even erroneously used interchangeably, with “Nasserism.” While it is true that socialism, as an official state ideology reached its zenith under Nasserist Egypt, socialist thought was not a freshly–minted manifesto introduced by the Egyptian leader. This exposé, thus, attempts to trace the genealogy of socialism and the evolution of socialist thought in Egypt at the turn of the nineteenth-century and early twentieth century, through examining the works and ideas of a group of writers who consciously identified themselves as socialists. This group includes, but is not exclusive to, Farah Antun (1874- 1922), Niqula Haddad (1878-1954), Dr. Shibli Shumayyil (1875- 1914), Salama Musa (1887- 1958) and Mustafa Hasanayn al-Mansuri (1890- 1972). It should be clear, however, that this paper does not claim that Nasser’s version of socialism is a linear and natural extension of the socialist thought under discussion.
Whilst socialist thought was not a dominant trend in Egypt, at least on the intellectual level, during the period under study, the fact that some major newspapers and magazines as early as the 1890s, such as al-Muqtataf, al-Hilal and al-Jaridah, used the term ishtirakiyya (socialism) and maintained an anti-socialist stance, suggests that socialism must have had a resonance in the intellectual circles. This presentation, hence, attempts to contextualize the socialist thought of the above mentioned intellectuals and explore the content of their thought, perception of socialism and examine their theoretical and ideological sources and identify their “problem-space”, in the Scottian sense, to analyze the relevance of socialism, both “evolutionary” and “revolutionary,” in the Egyptian context.
-
Nour MJ Hodeib
Multiple factors nurtured a revolutionary leftist moment in Lebanon’s political-cultural spheres in the years preceding the civil war (1975-1990) that was part of a wider pan-Arab leftist scene. The rise of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and a general departure from the Nasserist Arab socialism towards the people’s Liberation war, occurred at the same time that Arab political leadership was moving from the Arab “progressive” front to the conservative oil-exporting Gulf countries. On the cultural level, a general shift towards politicized literature, theatre and film followed the Naksa in 1967. A radical leftist music scene also developed in Beirut, influencing the nation’s and the wider region’s political cultures and simultaneously being influenced by it.
Against this backdrop, my paper focuses on the emergence and development of leftist militant music in Lebanon during the 1960s and 1970s. Utilizing a Gramscian theoretical framework, I analyze how leftist organizations in Lebanon beginning in the 1960s nurtured a generation of militant artists and songwriters in the context of a counter-hegemonic war of position. Underlining the complex interrelationship between cultural producers and political organizations, I examine leftist militant music as both an organic product of radical leftist political culture and an agent of its reproduction in mass media. These leftist songs and music form part of a wider leftist subculture, accounting for the influences of ideology, intellectual trends, and political culture that influenced and continue to influence political consciousness and notions of leftism in Lebanon. Building upon Althusser’s and Williams’ approaches to art being the reflection of lived realities, expressing ideology that transcend the merely intellectual or artistic (Althusser, 1971; Williams 1977), my work locates Lebanese leftist militant music within a wider network of counter-hegemonic culture, which allowed for the experiences that made these cultural productions salient to the conditions of their time.
I trace the transformations of leftist militant music over the years to better locate the conjuncture that made possible the radical genre of music. Through a rigorous analysis of the lyrics, music, performance, and the network involved in production, I demonstrate its relationship to the leftist political project as both an expression and an application of it. Furthermore, I do not treat this music as an isolated phenomenon as I locate it within a larger interconnected network of leftist cultural production taking place in the wider Arab cultural sphere and international leftist movement from the 1960s onwards.
-
Mr. Jeremy Randall
The Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) is often understood as a fiercely sectarian war. This recurrent trope has appeared in academic, literary, intellectual, and artistic productions. It renders sectarianism as a hegemonic force that subsumes all other discussions and potential readings of history and being. Thus, the multifaceted Lebanese Civil War becomes a story of unending sectarianism. Yet, a subset of Lebanese leftists during the war sought to challenge the dominant discourse of sectarianism and in doing so confronted the linear narrative of Lebanese history. They argued that injustice, inequality, and inequity in various manifestations created and maintained the conflict. Through incisive analysis, poignant writings, and humor they would show how socioeconomic issues were reduced to sectarian logics that elided the complexities of the nation-state, communities, and peoples. To demonstrate that some Lebanese rejected facile sectarian framings of their subjectivities and histories, I examine the works of Lebanese playwright and musician Ziad Rahbani (b. 1956) as he challenged the centrality of sectarianism to the Lebanese national narrative. Rahbani relied upon sarcastic music and dialogue to transmit leftist understandings of socioeconomic injustices that could raise awareness of other potential interpretations of the self, community, and nation.
My paper explores how Rahbani’s sarcasm brought to the forefront the role of injustice in shaping Lebanese people and communities. Rahbani mocked communitarian analyses of injustice as reductionist. Rather, he located them within a wider network of inequalities. Rahbani allows for a reading of the Lebanese Civil War and sectarianism as contingencies resulting from the spatiotemporal experiences of the 1970s and 1980s. Therefore, there is no teleological trajectory for the war’s collapse into sectarian politics. Instead, I argue that Rahbani’s theater and music translate socioeconomic inequality into the experiential through humor, which thereby makes it possible to understand how experiences of injustice formulate subjectivities. Through incorporating themes of inequity into theater and music, Rahbani’s sarcasm makes accessible complicated leftist discourse on inequality to the masses. In doing so, this paper explores how Rahbani’s works allow for a reading of how subjectivities resist linear temporalization and sectarian modeling, while providing insight into historical contingencies of identity in a time of crisis.
