Modern Art in the Arab World is an essential addition to the investigation of modernism and its global manifestations. A newly commissioned essay by historian and Arab-studies scholar Ussama Makdisi provides a historical overview of the region's intertwined political and cultural developments during the twentieth century. Interspersed throughout the volume are sixteen contemporary essays: writings by scholars on key terms and events as well as personal reflections by modern artists who were themselves active in the histories under consideration. The collection is framed chronologically, and includes contextualizing commentaries to assist readers in navigating its broad geographic and historical scope. Traversing empires and nation-states, diasporas and speculative cultural and political federations, these documents bring light to the formation of a global modernism, through debates on originality, public space, spiritualism and art, postcolonial exhibition politics, and Arab nationalism, among many other topics. The selection of texts-many of which appear here for the first time in English-includes manifestos, essays, transcripts of roundtable discussions, diary entries, exhibition guest-book comments, letters, and more. Shabout (Editor) Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents offers an unprecedented resource for the study of modernism: a compendium of critical art writings by twentieth-century Arab intellectuals and artists. Modern Art in the Arab World : Primary Documents (MoMA Primary Documents) by Anneka Lenssen (Editor) Sarah A. Headnotes, extended captions, sidebars, introductory essays, and a robust photo program (including a documentary picture essay devoted to women and gender) provide an essential context framing thedocuments. The authors demonstrate how the Middle East and North Africa haveparticipated in and shaped the grand currents of global history during the past two centuries. Compiled and edited by two prominent historians, Julia Clancy-Smith and Charles Smith, the book's approach offers a compromise between conventional political and diplomatic histories and those focusing on social and cultural history. This theme helps to offsetstudents' stereotypical image of the Middle East and North Africa as an undifferentiated, monolithic, and unchanging part of the world inhabited mainly by terrorists and religious fanatics. Utilizing a mix of documents - including photographs, posters, diaries, diplomatic records, archival sources, and literary works - The Modern Middle East and North Africa: A History in Documents is structured around an underlying theme of unity in diversity.
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