Hanan Toukan is associate professor of politics and Middle East studies at Bard College in Berlin, a city that in recent years has become an important Arab artistic and cultural hub. The German capital hosts a growing number of artists and intellectuals from across the Middle East and North Africa who have found themselves there as exiles, refugees, or by choice. Toukan’s book ‘The Politics of Art: Dissent and Cultural Diplomacy in Lebanon, Palestine, and Jordan’ was published in June this year by Stanford University Press.
Tugrul Mende: What is the book about?
Hanan Toukan: The book is about an uncomfortable topic for those of us who love art and/or who work in the field of culture and knowledge production, because it grapples with the fundamental question of consensus and under what conditions the global economies of cultural production can shape this form of participation in public life. The book is about art and its relationship to society and so it is consumed with the nexus of culture and politics. It centers its analysis on the practices of contemporary art and culture in specific parts of the Arabic-speaking world at the turn of the millennium, to uncover how counter-hegemonies are constructed, reproduced and above all understood by the publics from which they emerge.
Specifically, it grapples with the site of contemporary art’s making and its circulation and reception, to understand how art and what I refer to as “neoliberal cultural funders”, as well as art critics and artists, feature in our thinking about the role of resistance and dissent in cultural production. In other words it not only analyses what statements artists make about their societies through what they produce in terms of form and content, but it also engages with the often-concealed powerful hegemonic processes that sometimes shape those very aesthetical formations and in turn how society relates to them.
