“A Country and a Continent”: Fatimah Tuggar and the Politics of Montage

January 17, 2012 By tasnim

Fatimah Tuggar is one of the artists Jiwa has discussed, in his article on Imaging, imagining and representation: Muslim visual artists in NYC. As  Munir Jiwa has pointed out, the past couple of decades have seen “the larger tropes of Islam/Muslims—terrorism, violence, veiling, patriarchy, the Middle East—become the normative frames and images within and against which Muslim artists do their work”.

Fatimah Tuggar, Daydream

In her own work, however, Nigerian-born Tuggar has had little engagement with either the contemporary theopolitical maelstrom of “Islam and the West” or with the earlier Orientalism.

Her interest lies rather in exploring the economic and technological impact of “the developed world” and how it interacts with local cultures in postcolonial African societies. She explores this subject through interactive media installations and images, which combine modern and traditional objects. Tuggar uses her own photographs as well as advertising and other found images from magazines and archival footage. The resulting hybrid objects and collages are eye-popping, witty and unexpected.

Often, her works are described as clever, amusing, or light-hearted, in the positive sense of not being “ideologically loaded,” and the constant tropes in her collages leads many to see her work as ”the American dream meets the African village.”

Although it is true that Tuggar uses vintage and modern ads, popular culture, and other forms of Western excess consumerism from magazines, and contrasts this with archive or contemporary photography from Africa, the artist points out that she brings together images from many different cultures, including Asia. She also remarks on the fallacy of equating “a country and a continent,” a jarring juxtaposition in itself, which underscores the  problems she explores in her work. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Art/Theater Tagged With: ,

Revisiting Miriam Cooke’s “Muslimwoman”

January 11, 2012 By tasnim

Shirin Neshat, Women of Allah.

Miriam Cooke has described her use of “Muslimwoman” in one word as a reference to embracing and performing a singular gendered and religious identity, a way of reflecting the intertwining of gender and religion and describing this erasure of diversity. In 2008, in her essay on deploying this term, Cooke explained:

The neologism Muslimwoman draws attention to the emergence of a new singular religious and gendered identification that overlays national, ethnic, cultural, historical, and even philosophical diversity. A recent phenomenon tied to growing Islamophobia, this identification is created for Muslim women by outside forces, whether non-Muslims or Islamist men. Muslimwoman locates a boundary between “us” and “them.” As women, Muslim women are outsider/insiders within Muslim communities where, to belong, their identity increasingly is tied to the idea of the veil. As Muslims, they are negotiating cultural outsider/insider roles in Muslim-minority societies.

As the drama around the rediscovered visibility of the Muslim woman in the modern world takes another manifestation post-2011, Cooke’s use of the ”Muslimwoman” is worth revisiting, particularly her argument about its deployment as a tool of political consciousness. As she points out:

Some women reject The Muslimwoman identification and others embrace it. Its uniformity across gulfs of difference intensifies an awareness of the global community in which they participate, a cosmopolitan consciousness that connects strangers who recognize an unprecedented commonality in terms of religion and gender. Their political consciousness qua Muslimwoman affirms the inextricable bond between gender and religion.

In combining these two words used to evoke a singular identity, Cooke follows Islamicist Sherman Jackson’s use of the term Blackamerican and Joan Martin’s term blackwoman. In Cooke’s case, however, there’s the danger of slippage between Arab and Muslim, which relates to Cooke’s own background in Arabic literature, including her co-edited anthology of Arab feminist writing, Opening the Gates, and War’s Other Stories: Women Writers on the Lebanese Civil War. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Art/Theater, Culture/Society, Web Tagged With: ,

Had You Been A Muslim: Joumana Haddad and the Liberated Arab Woman

January 2, 2012 By tasnim

When Lebanese writer and poet Joumana Haddad’s I Killed Scheherazade: Confessions of An Angry Arab Woman was published in 2010, it was described as a bold treatise, intentionally designed to be revolutionary, written in manifesto style. Recently, a revived interest has situated it in more superficial terms as “a provocative new book which “lifts the veil” on what the “Arab Spring” really means for women,” with Haddad as the liberated Arab woman telling all about her unliberated sisters. In fact, this theme is so familiar some have made the mistake of describing Haddad as the brave provocateur Muslim woman, along the lines of Irshad Manji, despite the fact that Haddad is an agnostic who who grew up in a conservative Catholic family.

Cover of I Killed Scheherazade

It is fitting however that her book, I Killed Scheherazade, is described as provocative, since in the book’s Foreword, Haddad explains that it was provoked by the words of a journalist interviewing her, who noted, “Most of us in the west are not familiar with the possibility of liberated Arab women like you existing.” In response, Haddad retorted “There are many “liberated Arab women” like me. And if you are not aware that we exist, as you claim, then it is your problem not ours.”

Later regretting her “defensive reaction,” she attempts to explain it in writing I Killed Scheherazade, which takes on prejudice, hypocrisy and religious bigotry in rapid-fire blunt prose. In the opening, Haddad promises to deprive the Western reader of “chimeras and ready to wear opinions” but writes that her book is primarily addressed to “fellow Arab citizens.” She situates the book as first and foremost an effort of self-criticism, illustrating the real dilemmas in the Arab world, because “no effort of self-defence deserves to be taken seriously if it is not accompanied and sustained by an effort of self-critism.”

And so, Haddad attempts to break western stereotypes about the Arab world at the same time as her book brims with anger and resentment at Arab failures, attacking the lack of critical thinking and the herd instincts of populations afraid to ask questions: ”The Arab mind cannot handle questions, because questions can hurt and upset the murky calm of the swamp.” As M. Lynx Qualey points out, Haddad could be seen as disqualifying her own project:  ”So, if Haddad is an Arab, then I assume she cannot handle questions that upset the murky calm of her swamp? Right?”

Haddad is celebrated more in the West than in Lebanon, yet as Qualey argues, she is far from being Lebanon’s Nawal al-Saadawi, and the generalizing politics of her self-criticism have been described as problematic by many who see it as taking on a mantle of the taboo-breaking revolutionary, hating and hated by her own country, with an accompanying replication of stereotypes about Arab culture. See for example, “An Open Letter to Joumana Haddad” which points out “the huge problematic with statements like “The Arab mind is in crisis.””  (Joumana Haddad responded directly the post in the comments section.)

In one chapter of her book, however, Haddad does become more specific about her anger and resentment, taking on the comments that suggest that she was fortunate to be born into a Christian family: “Had you been a Muslim woman you’d never have been able to write what you write.” Haddad responds to this declaration of “skeptical, judgemental, predjudiced Western minds” by quoting St Paul, “Let the woman learn in silence, with all subjection.”

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Books/Magazines Tagged With: , , , ,
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