The Arab Avant-Garde

The Arab Avant-Garde PDF

Author: Thomas Burkhalter

Publisher: Wesleyan University Press

Published: 2013-11-13

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 0819573876

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The first in-depth study of diverse and radical innovation in Arab music From jazz trumpeters drawing on the noises of warfare in Beirut to female heavy metallers in Alexandria, the Arab culture offers a wealth of exciting, challenging, and diverse musics. The essays in this collection investigate the plethora of compositional and improvisational techniques, performance styles, political motivations, professional trainings, and inter-continental collaborations that claim the mantle of "innovation" within Arab and Arab diaspora music. While most books on Middle Eastern music-making focus on notions of tradition and regionally specific genres, The Arab Avant Garde presents a radically hybrid and globally dialectic set of practices. Engaging the "avant-garde"—a term with Eurocentric resonances—this anthology disturbs that presumed exclusivity, drawing on and challenging a growing body of literature about alternative modernities. Chapters delve into genres and modes as diverse as jazz, musical theatre, improvisation, hip hop, and heavy metal as performed in countries like Iraq, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, and the United States. Focusing on multiple ways in which the "Arab avant-garde" becomes manifest, this anthology brings together international writers with eclectic disciplinary trainings—practicing musicians, area studies specialists, ethnomusicologists, and scholars of popular culture and media. Contributors include Sami W. Asmar, Michael Khoury, Saed Muhssin, Marina Peterson, Kamran Rastegar, Caroline Rooney, and Shayna Silverstein, as well as the editors.

The Arab Avant-garde

The Arab Avant-garde PDF

Author: Andrea Flores Khalil

Publisher: Heinemann Educational Books

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13:

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A look at how North African artists use essentially "foreign" means to express an "authentic" vision of their own cultural inheritances and imperatives.

Not the Other Avant-Garde

Not the Other Avant-Garde PDF

Author: James M. Harding

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 2010-03-10

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 0472025090

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Almost without exception, studies of the avant-garde take for granted the premise that the influential experimental practices associated with the avant-garde began primarily as a European phenomenon that in turn spread around the world. These ten original essays, especially commissioned for Not the Other Avant-Garde, forge a radically new conception of the avant-garde by demonstrating the many ways in which the first- and second-wave avant-gardes were always already a transnational phenomenon, an amalgam of often contradictory performance traditions and practices developed in various cultural locations around the world, including Africa, the Middle East, Mexico, Argentina, India, and Japan. Essays from leading scholars and critics-including Marvin Carlson, Sudipto Chatterjee, John Conteh-Morgan, Peter Eckersall, Harry J. Elam Jr., Joachim Fiebach, David G. Goodman, Jean Graham-Jones, Hannah Higgins, and Adam Versényi-suggest collectively that the very concept of the avant-garde is possible only if conceptualized beyond the limitations of Eurocentric paradigms. Not the Other Avant-Garde is groundbreaking in both avant-garde studies and performance studies and will be a valuable contribution to the fields of theater studies, modernist studies, art history, literature, and music history. "Joins the growing field of critical and transnational theories on the arts. . . its grounding in live performance and its foregrounding of the performative human body presents a new theoretical paradigm that is pathbreaking." --Haiping Yan, University of California, Los Angeles James M. Harding is Associate Professor of English at Mary Washington University. He is author of Adorno and "A Writing of the Ruins": Essays on Modern Aesthetics and Anglo-American Literature and Culture and editor of Contours of the Theatrical Avant-Garde: Performance and Textuality. John Rouse is Associate Professor of Theater at the University of California, San Diego. He is author of Brecht and the West German Theatre.

Modern Arabic Literature

Modern Arabic Literature PDF

Author: Muḥammad Muṣṭafá Badawī

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 586

ISBN-13: 9780521331975

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This volume provides an authoritative survey of creative writing in Arabic from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day.

Feminism and Avant-Garde Aesthetics in the Levantine Novel

Feminism and Avant-Garde Aesthetics in the Levantine Novel PDF

Author: K. Hanna

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-04-08

Total Pages: 198

ISBN-13: 1137545917

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Writing in response to war and national crisis, al-Samm?n, Khal?feh, Barak?t, and others introduced into the Arabic literary canon aesthetic forms capable of carrying Levantine women's experiences. By assessing their feminism in such a way, this book aims to revive a critical emphasis on aesthetics in Arab women's writing.

Local Music Scenes and Globalization

Local Music Scenes and Globalization PDF

Author: Thomas Burkhalter

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-04-16

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 1135073708

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This book offers the first in-depth study of experimental and popular music scenes in Beirut, looking at musicians working towards a new understanding of musical creativity and music culture in a country that is dominated by mass-mediated pop music, and propaganda. Burkhalter studies the generation of musicians born at the beginning of the Civil War in the Lebanese capital, an urban and cosmopolitan center with a long tradition of cultural activities and exchanges with the Arab world, Europe, the US, and the former Soviet Union. These Lebanese rappers, rockers, death-metal, jazz, and electro-acoustic musicians and free improvisers choose local and transnational forms to express their connection to the broader musical, cultural, social, and political environment. Burkhalter explores how these musicians organize their own small concerts for ‘insider’ audiences, set up music labels, and network with like-minded musicians in Europe, the US, and the Arab world. Several key tracks are analyzed with methods from ethnomusicology, and popular music studies, and contextualized through interviews with the musicians. Discussing key references from belly dance culture (1960s), psychedelic rock in Beirut (1970s), the noises of the Lebanese Civil war (1975-1990), and transnational Pop-Avant-Gardes and World Music 2.0 networks, this book contributes to the study of localization and globalization processes in music in an increasingly digitalized and transnational world. At the core, this music from Beirut challenges "ethnocentric" perceptions of "locality" in music. It attacks both "Orientalist" readings of the Arab world, the Middle East, and Lebanon, and the focus on musical "difference" in Euro-American music and culture markets. On theoretical grounds, this music is a small, but passionate attempt to re-shape the world into a place where "modernity" is not "euro-modernity" or "euro-american modernity," but where possible new configurations of modernity exist next to each other.

The Ethnic Avant-Garde

The Ethnic Avant-Garde PDF

Author: Steven S. Lee

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2015-10-06

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 0231540116

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During the 1920s and 1930s, American minority artists and writers collaborated extensively with the Soviet avant-garde, seeking to build a revolutionary society that would end racial discrimination and advance progressive art. Making what Claude McKay called "the magic pilgrimage" to the Soviet Union, these intellectuals placed themselves at the forefront of modernism, using radical cultural and political experiments to reimagine identity and decenter the West. Shining rare light on these efforts, The Ethnic Avant-Garde makes a unique contribution to interwar literary, political, and art history, drawing extensively on Russian archives, travel narratives, and artistic exchanges to establish the parameters of an undervalued "ethnic avant-garde." These writers and artists cohered around distinct forms that mirrored Soviet techniques of montage, fragment, and interruption. They orbited interwar Moscow, where the international avant-garde converged with the Communist International. The book explores Vladimir Mayakovsky's 1925 visit to New York City via Cuba and Mexico, during which he wrote Russian-language poetry in an "Afro-Cuban" voice; Langston Hughes's translations of these poems while in Moscow, which he visited to assist on a Soviet film about African American life; a futurist play condemning Western imperialism in China, which became Broadway's first major production to feature a predominantly Asian American cast; and efforts to imagine the Bolshevik Revolution as Jewish messianic arrest, followed by the slow political disenchantment of the New York Intellectuals. Through an absorbing collage of cross-ethnic encounters that also include Herbert Biberman, Sergei Eisenstein, Paul Robeson, and Vladimir Tatlin, this work remaps global modernism along minority and Soviet-centered lines, further advancing the avant-garde project of seeing the world anew.

Literature, Journalism and the Avant-Garde

Literature, Journalism and the Avant-Garde PDF

Author: Elisabeth Kendall

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2006-09-27

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 1134171757

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The author explores the role of journalism in Egypt in effecting and promoting the development of modern Arabic literature from its inception in the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. Remapping the literary scene in Egypt over recent decades, Kendall focuses on the independent, frequently dissident, journals that were the real hotbed of innovative literary activity and which made a lasting impact by propelling Arabic literature into the post-modern era.

Feminism and Avant-Garde Aesthetics in the Levantine Novel

Feminism and Avant-Garde Aesthetics in the Levantine Novel PDF

Author: K. Hanna

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Published: 2016-02-23

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781137548702

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Writing in response to war and national crisis, al-Samm?n, Khal?feh, Barak?t, and others introduced into the Arabic literary canon aesthetic forms capable of carrying Levantine women's experiences. By assessing their feminism in such a way, this book aims to revive a critical emphasis on aesthetics in Arab women's writing.

Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde

Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde PDF

Author: John Roberts

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2015-08-18

Total Pages: 404

ISBN-13: 1781689156

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Since the decidedly bleak beginning of the twenty-first century, art practice has become increasingly politicized. Yet few have put forward a sustained defence of this development. Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde is the first book to look at the legacy of the avant-garde in relation to the deepening crisis of contemporary capitalism. An invigorating revitalization of the Frankfurt School legacy, Roberts's book defines and validates the avant-garde idea with an erudite acuity, providing a refined conceptual set of tools to engage critically with the most advanced art theorists of our day, such as Hal Foster, Andrew Benjamin, Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancire, Paolo Virno, Claire Bishop, Michael Hardt, and Toni Negri.