Introduction

The introduction outlines the book’s central arguments in relation to a growing field of modern and contemporary Arab art. It identifies the paradigms and tropes that have come to characterize studies of modernism in the region, including an analytical dependence on the rubric of the nation-state (itself a product of the Cold War) and a view of artistic practice as reflective of the sociopolitical circumstances of post-colonialism and thus a belated derivative of Euro-American modernism, rather than an active, globally engaged site of political and aesthetic negotiation. The introduction concludes by situating this study in relation to recent theoretical models of intercultural encounters in Middle Eastern and Cold War studies and the emerging study of global modernism in the discipline of art history.