Contemporary Art, World Cinema, and Visual Culture

Essays by Hamid Dabashi

Edited by Hamid Keshmirshekan

Publication date:

29 March 2019

Publisher

Anthem Press

Dimensions:

229x153mm
6x9"

ISBN-13: 9781783089192

"Contemporary Art, World Cinema, and Visual Culture: Essays by Hamid Dabashi" is a collection of writings by the acclaimed cultural critic and scholar. A thorough Introduction rigorously frames chapters and identifies in Dabashi’s writings a comprehensive approach, which forms the criteria for selecting the essays for the volume. The Introduction also teases out of these essays the overarching theme that holds them together, the manner they inform a particularly critical angle in them and the way they cohere. The Introduction dwells on the work of one scholar, public intellectual and theorist of modern and contemporary arts to extrapolate more universal issues of concern to art criticism in general. These scattered materials and their underlying theoretical and critical logic are a unique contribution to the field of modern and contemporary arts.

Section 1: Theory; 1.1 Récit de l’Exil Occidental; 1.2 East Is Not East; 1.3 Trauma, Memory, and History; Section 2: Visual Arts; 2.1 Artists without Borders: On Contemporary Iranian Art; 2.2 Persian Blues; 2.3 It Was in China, Late One Moonless Night; 2.4 The Gun and the Gaze: Shirin Neshat’s Photography; 2.5 Bordercrossings: Shirin Neshat’s Body of Evidence; 2.6 Shirin Neshat: Transcending the Boundaries of an Imaginative Geography; 2.7 Capturing the Illusion of Reality: Mapping the Visual Subconscious of a People in the Photography of Bahman Jalali; 2.8 Shoja Azari: Making the Homely Unhomely; 2.9 Ardeshir Mohassess, Etcetera; 2.10 Nicky Nodjoumi, Etcetera; Section 3: Cinema; 3.1 Quis Custodiet ipsos Custodes: Who Watches the Watchers?; 3.2 The Sublime and the Beautiful in the Time of Terror; 3.3 Women without Headaches; 3.4 Warriors of Faith; 3.5 The Rostamaneh Complex and Sohrab Syndrome; 3.6 Amir Naderi’s New York; 3.7 The '300' Stroke; 3.8 Tarek Al-Ghoussein Does Not Exist; 3.9 A Deadly Cinematic Subconscious; 3.10 In the Shadow of Two Monuments; Index.

“Dabashi is the grammarian of hope. He is not offering us the common liberal hopeful analysis; rather it is the analytical hope that Gramsci yearned for but couldn’t see. In these essays, Dabashi explicates the architectonics of oppressive vision(s), only to show us some of the real possibilities of practicing visions of hope.”
—Ismail Nashef, Associate Professor, Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, Qatar