I will start by saying that Schwedler’s thoughtful query about whether the funders were wrong in assuming that art may have indirect implications for how politics is conducted gets at the heart of the book’s main concern. It relevantly asks us to think about whether and how artistic production can at all influence the atmosphere and rhetoric in which politics plays out. I do not think that the funders I studied in the book were entirely wrong in thinking that support for cultural production might foster democratic values and desires for broader political or cultural change. To some extent their investment in what they deemed “progressive” art revolved around questions of memory, trauma, and gender and sexuality that were being expressed in new art forms and exhibited in new sites like urban public spaces and community art spaces located outside museums and galleries. These productions that posed as a counterculture to national art cultures played an important role in exposing more locally attuned audiences to the global, as opposed to national, conversation around art practices.
But at the same time funders and their associated local art and culture organizations propagated the idea that, for art to be critical in the “right way,” it could not engage with traditional aesthetic forms, such as painting and sculpture, and that it had to be highly conceptual and even theoretical, plugged into a global network of artists, and able to converse in a certain contemporary art language, aesthetic form, and vocabulary (mostly in English) that could reach a more global audience. One very good example is how funders in this period directed their support to video art because it could be packaged more easily and it was deemed a more fathomable art form for many Western audiences. The funders that I included in my study had a clear-cut way of thinking about how democratic values and specifically liberal democratic ones are to be instilled in people. This was a far cry from how the movements for revolutionary social and political change in the region in late 2010 pan out today, just as Schwedler affirms in her work on protests in Jordan. Change, as we are witnessing it, is messy, uncomfortable, and volatile. In these contexts, new meaning and significations are produced that funders could not and arguably did not want to predict. Cultural funders sought a slow transformation of social and cultural values in Jordan, Lebanon, and especially Palestine that reflected their larger political agendas of supporting regimes that were diplomatically tied to Western and especially US economically extractive and security-laden policies in the region. And art reflected that politics, to the extent that much of the works that I discuss in the book circulated and promoted discourses about change that reflected critical attitudes toward domestic social values deemed regressive and a product of authoritarian nationalism—and yet were not a simultaneous radical critique of the structures of neoliberal capital that promulgated many of these values through the uneven distribution of resources that it entailed.
Today, however, there is a rising body of younger, artists, thinkers, revolutionaries, and indeed prisoners of conscience who are actively working together to cut across the class lines that, during the 1960s to 1980s, divided activists’ and artists’ ways of thinking and relating to cultural production. As implied in Schwedler’s second question, this generation of postrevolutionary artists has yet to be studied. What we do know is that artists today—not just in the visual arts but also in music, literature, and dance—are insisting on locating their works and their politics in a place that distances itself both from Arab nationalist discourse in the arts on Palestine Arabism and from imperialism, by way of a more robust and relevant critique of the materiality that governs their lives through the inequitable and indeed violent liberal capitalism in which most Arab regimes are invested. In that sense, because these political discourses are more inclusive and very much aimed at toppling the neoliberal capitalist economy, older female activists and artists may find common ground with their compatriots who are younger members of the post-2011 generation, even if they do not use the same language and tools to express their dissent. I am grateful for Schwedler’s close reading of my text and the engaging questions she poses.
