Displacement & difference
de Fran Lloyd
The book offers the first survey of its kind of the work of women artists of Arab descent based in the Middle East, Europe and North America. This ground-breaking volume in Saffron Asian Art and Society series brings together artists, curators, critics and scholars from a range of geographies who engage with the multiplicity and diversity of Arab identities imaged by contemporary Arab artists in the diaspora. Centring on images produced by artists working in the diasporas of Britain, the Arab world and the United States, the authors rethink the processes which constitute 'belonging' (and therefore 'unbelonging') through gender, geographies, race, ethnicity, religion and sexuality, the specificities of different diasporic spaces, and the multiple ways in which shifting and intersecting points of identification are negotiated and re-presented in contemporary visual art practices. Moving beyond issues of the gaze and the 'other' this volume offers new ways of considering the complex interplay between the cultural politics of location, memory, and embodiment through an investigation of the specificities of difference and displacement in the long neglected area of contemporary Arab visual culture in the diaspora.
