Call for contributions | Publication “Art and Politics between the Arab World and Latin America, 1920s–1970s ” — LIMITE: 30/06/2022

How have artistic networks taken shape between the Arab world and Latin America? To what extent, and how, have cultural institutions and individual agents such as literary translators, poets, novelists, painters, or editors related to key political issues both in the Arab world and in Latin America? How have Arab and Latin American states themselves mobilized art and culture in their foreign policy toward each other, and for what purposes?

During the last two decades, a growing number of researchers have been investigating the political and cultural connections between extra-European regions. The links between regions traditionally viewed as “peripheries” could be either direct or mediated by “global cities” such as Bandung or Algiers or “Anti-imperial Metropolis” (Goebel, 2015; Lee, 2010; Byrne, 2016). If the “South-South” circulation of political or cultural ideas, practices and agency have mostly been approached separately, recent studies have demonstrated how thought-provoking could be a cultural and, at the same time, political approach to transnational history (e.g. Alsultany and Shohat 2013; Balloffet, Stites Mor, Camacho Padilla, 2019; Stites Mor, 2021).

This volume will focus on art and politics between the Arab World and Latin America from the birth of Arab nationalist and Latin American anti-imperialist parties in the early 20th century to the Cold War and the Long Sixties’ era of revolt. The Global Cold War, and its turning points, such as the Cuban Revolution or the creation of the State of Israel, are moments when South-South connections are intensified; yet, the interwar years are also crucial, in that they allow us to identify the first steps in the process of convergence between Latin American anti- imperialist and Arab anticolonial and nationalist movements and activists. These connections often involved actors in the Arab World who, in solidarity with Latin America, adopted a radical critical stance against Latin American authoritarian regimes; or Latin American cultural actors who, through their art, took position on an array of questions ranging from the United Nations partition plan of Palestine to the United States-led cultural war during the long Sixties. But there were also artistic networks, institutions, and individuals who supported, or more or less passively consented to the establishment of authoritarian regimes in both regions. How? What narratives were told or reframed?

With these questions as a starting point, we would like to invite you to reflect upon the many ways artistic practices, networks and institutions have shaped political communities, be they consensual or marginal communities, leftist or rightist, part of statist body of ideas or involved in translocal or transnational practices and thinking.

From this perspective, we suggest addressing three issues:
1. Art and nationalist narratives between Latin America and the Arab World
2. Rethinking transnational solidarity between Latin America and the Arab World
3. Artistic practices and the formation of alternative political communities?

Schedule
30 June 2022: Let us know if this invitation interests you
1 October 2022: Abstract (500 words)
1 June 2023: Chapter (4500-5000 words)
Editors’ reviews and comments sent by July 30, 2023
30 November 2023: Chapter’s final draft
Publication in 2024

Abstracts to be sent at laureguirguis1205[at]gmail.com and eugenia.palieraki[at]cyu.fr

Call for contributions – Art and politics Arab World – Latin America