About Displacement and Difference

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

About the Editor

Fran Lloyd is Head of the School of Art and Design History at Kingston University, London. Trained as an art historian at the University of Manchester, she has published widely on contemporary visual culture. Editor of Deconstructing Madonna, Contemporary Arab Women's Art: Dialogues of the Present, and co-editor of Secret Spaces, Forbidden Places: Rethinking Culture, she is contributing a forthcoming chapter in Feminist Visual Culture. Her current research focuses on issues of gender and difference in contemporary art in Britain and in Japan.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Images, Diasporas and Difference. Fran Lloyd. 10
• 2 Internationalism and Art: Re-evaluating the Concepts of Beauty and Individuality. Els van der Plas. 24
• 3 American-Arab Artists and Multiculturalism in America. Salwa Mikadadi Nashashibi. 32
• 4 Mobile Identity and the Focal Distance of Memory. Sabiha Khemir. 42
• 5 Our Bodies, Our Orient and Art. Mai Ghoussoub. 52
• 6 Palestine Art: Imaging the Motherland. Tina Sherwell. 62
• 7 Enacting Vision: a Personal Perspectives. Houria Niati. 74
• 8 Re-Making Ourselves: Art, Memories and Materialities. Fran Lloyd. 81
• Artists' Biographies. 157
• Artists' Bibliographies. 181
• Contemporary Arab Art: General Bibliography. 189
• List of Illustrations. 197
• Notes on Contributors. 201
• Index. 203