Overview

Intertwined with the histories of Arab migration to the Americas from the nineteenth century until now, the emergence of competing nationalist narratives within Arab communities in Latin America, and the birth of anti-imperialist and anticolonial struggles, the history of cultural entanglements between the Arab world and Latin America spans over a hundred years––and reveals the vital role of art in creating bridges between the two regions. This book, the first of its kind, gathers interventions that showcase the twentieth century as a period of intense redefinitions and cultural effervescence across the whole of Latin America and the Arab world. The result is a polished image of the twentieth century as a period whose shifting categories of affiliation were tied to events and movements that connected the two regions in ever deepening ways, and to forms of artful experimentation through which political ideologies, alternative collective identities, and aesthetic movements could be contested or embraced. Contributors are Diogo Bercito, Kevin Funk, Silvina Schammah Gesser, Laure Guirguis, Olivier Hadouchi, Julia Solana Jáuregui, John Tofik Karam, Edgardo Manero, Mariano Mestman, Gabriella Nugent, Maru Pabón, Laura Reali and Juan José Vagni.

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9789004680746

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Reviews

Art and Politics between the Arab World and Latin America in the Twentieth Century is a superb contribution to the expanding cross-regional field of Middle Eastern / Latin American studies. Tracing the cultural history of the multi-directional movements between the two regions, the book covers a wide array of intellectual debates and artistic practices generated within this transcontinental circulation while also themselves generating a hybrid in-between cultural space. Although the book focuses on the 20th-century, the discussion throughout is also profoundly grounded in an earlier historical conjuncture. As a kind of orienting topos for differing imperial and national narratives, Al-Andalus has also been invoked by artists and intellectuals, here studied as part of their search to give voice to an identity simultaneously Latin and Arab. The individual essays and the collective project as a whole illuminate intricate transnational connections afforded by the indispensable reframing of what is by now a newly constituted scholarly field-formation. Ella Habiba Shohat, Author of Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices.

Author Information

Laure Guirguis is a historian of the modern Middle East with a focus on the cultural history of Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine-Israel, and Syria. She is the author of Copts and the Security State: Violence, Coercion and Sectarianism in Contemporary Egypt (Stanford UP, 2016) and the editor of The Arab Left: Histories and Legacies, 1950s – 1970s (Edinburgh UP, 2020). Maru Pabón is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Brown University. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at Yale University in 2024. A scholar of literary modernity across the Arab world and Latin America, her first book project examines the Third-Worldist desire to construct the “voice of the people” in Palestinian, Cuban, and Algerian poetry.

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