Review of: Representations of Palestine in Egyptian Cinema: Politics of (In)Visibility , Claire Begbie (2023) New York: Peter Lang, 120 pp., ISBN 978-1-43318-840-4, h/bk, EUR 81.75 ISBN 978-1-43318-852-7, e-book, EUR 81.75
Pro-Palestinian content dominated TikTok as Gen Z content creators engaged on this platform, challenging the dominant Pro-Israel narratives on Gaza genocide and Israel–Palestine issue. TikTokers, who grew up with digital technology and honed their skills as creators of fashion, lifestyle and social content, rose up when Israel began massacring Palestinians in Gaza. Their videos were powerful, personal and authentic and became the primary source of information and perspectives on Israel’s genocide and the resilience of Palestinians for millions of people throughout the world. In this auto-ethnographic essay, I discussed three themes emerging from select TikTok videos: political awakening, solidarity with Palestinians from the vantage points of Indigenous identities and humanizing Palestinians. Together, they merged in one overarching theme: a mass political awakening rejecting pro-Israel narratives propped up by western political and media elites and repositioning Israel as a settler colonial state that occupied Indigenous people’s lands and used routinized violence to sustain the occupation.
In this article, I return to Baghdad in search of a fabled city only to find an ungraspable multitude of mishappenings. A theatre for contesting images, the city streets are victim to haphazard renewal and out-of-sync monumentalization, the latter being a sacralised material manifestation of secular and religious ideologies whose maintenance, like the homogenous society they are intended to fabricate, necessitates appropriating or excising what is deemed as profane. Spatially and materially made abject, in its uncanny suspension the supposed profane is limbo-ed, obscured and threatened with erasure. My walks across town investigate this tension, as I meditate on alternative initiatives at memorialization and monumentalization undertaken by those left behind.
Iraqi sculptor Mohammed Ghani Hikmat is well known for his monumental interpretations of Iraq’s literary and historical traditions. His public sculptures are ubiquitous in Baghdad and have themselves become myth-making devices, rather than simply conduits for the past to speak. This article explores how Ghani’s Baghdadi monuments utilize the principles of istilham al-turath to transform Iraq’s past into a potent representation of the present. I argue that Ghani harnesses the visual strategies of ancient Mesopotamian cylinder seals, stelae, monumental orthostats, along with Islamic manuscript painting, to mythologize Iraqi modernity. This was in service to the sculptor’s desire to shape the city of Baghdad into a temporally diverse urban environment where the modern spaces of Iraq would coexist with a rich historical legacy. Ghani therefore sought to render modern narratives with the visual languages of historical periods thereby conflating legend, history and contemporaneity. To explicate this process, this article engages in a detailed analysis of three monumental relief murals created by Ghani in the latter half of the twentieth century for public buildings in Baghdad.
This editors’ introduction reflects on the current status of Baghdad’s monuments and public spaces, considering both the promising and problematic ways urban agents have sought to strengthen and refresh the city after years of deprivation. In particular, we discuss efforts to shift the restoration and construction of public artworks into the private sector, thus subjecting these urban developments to the forces of globalization. This introduction also outlines the diversity of perspectives provided by the individual articles in this issue. Each contribution seeks to understand the complexities of monumentality and public art in Baghdad often expressed through a series of contradictions and experienced through personal narrative, art historical and historical analyses, and artistic production.
