16: Entangled Territories: Imagining the Orient

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| Fall 1997 |

Editors: Deborah Root and Walid Ra’ad

Contents:

• ‘Order and Progress: Constructing the West in Contemporary Turkish Art’, Erdag Aksel
• ‘Vacation Cruises; or The Homoerotics of Orientalism’, Joseph Boone
• ‘Miraculous Beginnings’, Walid Ra’ad
• ‘Dead Air’, Jalal Toufic
• ‘Epistemography of the Modern Arab Subject al-Mu’allim Butrus Al-Bustani’s Khutbab Fi Adab-AlArab’, Stephen Sheehi
• ‘Authorizing Access/Sustaining Desire: Monagu’s Visible Harem’, Narin Hassan
• ‘This is not Beirut/Kan ya ma kan There was and there was not’, Jayce Salloum
• ‘The Twain Met: Paul Bowles’s Western and Arab Critics’, Ralph M Coury

Excerpt:

Erdag Aksel, “Order and Progress: Constructing the West in Contemporary Turkish Art”:

“In the final analysis, Western artists all are part of an ongoing tradition. Many certainly have misgivings about this tradition and contest it. Western art history of the last hundred years is overflowing with stories of rebellion, and any art student has to memorize all these stories in order to be taken seriously. Nevertheless, either by complying with or by rebelling against these stories, the Western artist is still part of this long lasting tradition of art. Even the most pioneering/marginal/avant-garde example of Western art is part of the “Western art tradition,” in terms of adopting or rejecting it. What about the artists who aren’t part of this ongoing tradition?” (15)

$15