From the Editor

From the Editor Salah M. Hassan U ntil less than a decade ago, the area designated as North Africa—almost half of the continent in size—was excised and totally excluded from the discipline of African art history. The reason is, as the historian Jan Vansina once argued, "its arts clearly belong to widely flung traditions centered on the Mediterranean and the worlds of Christianity and Islam." Its tradition, history, and culture were therefore considered as oikoumenical in origin; that is from the Greek expression "oikoumenikos," a reference to the idea of the "whole world."1 In contrast, sub-Saharan Africa was considered less oikoumenical and more isolated, hence different in its cultural and artistic traditions. By this artificial dichotomy, North Africa was perceived as less authentically "African" and more connected to the outside world than the rest of Africa. But such views are no longer held firmly in the discipline. Rooted in colonial tropes of representation prevalent in the academy and in popular perceptions of Africa, such classifications do not reflect ground realities. Geographic borders do not necessarily result in cultural or artistic barriers , and thousands of years of contact between North Africa and the larger part of the Mediterranean world, the Middle East, or the larger Islamic world have created undeniable continuities and influences that have shaped northern African artistic and cultural developments . Yet, North Africa should not be excised from the broader African experience or viewed as unique, especially in its contemporary or modernist manifestations. Similar exchanges have shaped the relationship between North Africa and the rest of the continent and contributed to the complex nature of the African modernist experience. In other words, realities of both sides of these divides are hybrid and mixed and, for the most part, are produced through the mobility of people, goods, commodities, and cultural products. As I have argued elsewhere, much of the African modernist project can be situated in the intersections of PanAfricanism and Pan-Arabism, the struggle for liberation and decolonization, and in the intellectual dialectics this struggle has come to symbolize in the relationships among Africa, the West, and the world at large. The Algerian war for liberation, the Anti-Apartheid movement , and the Palestinian struggle for self-determination stand out as significant events. Recent exhibitions and texts produced during the last decade (such as The Short Century, Africa Remix, or Authentic/Ex-Centric) have captured some aspects of the complexity of the African experience effectively through the interdisciplinary and visual culture approaches they adopt. They demolish the artificial and essentializing boundaries between North and Sub-Saharan Africa, so-called "Arab" Africa and "Black" Africa. Yet, recent troubling developments related to contemporary North African art warrant our attention and critical intervention. The period since 9/11 has witnessed a renewed interest in art movements and artists of North African origins. Part of a new regime of exhibitions organized under several related rubrics such as contemporary "Middle Eastern," "Islamic," or "Arab" art, this interest is engendered by a highly problematic politics of representation , reviving outdated essentializing tendencies and presenting the field with new challenges. Post-9/11 developments have heightened awareness of the interconnectedness and disjuncture between the "West" and the "Muslim" world, evident in the choice that George W. Bush offered (more specifically to people of Muslim background): You are either with us or with the terrorists . This creates qualitative dichotomies between "bad" Muslims, who practice terrorism and who hate freedom (they hate "us," modernity, and their women), and "good" Muslims, who are modern, secular, and support U.S. foreign policy. As Mahmood Mamdani has argued, this premise is based on a culturalist approach to "Islam" that turns the latter into a transcendent category .2 Such approach of course has a long genealogy in contemporary western political thought—all Muslims, according to this perspective, are potential terrorists.-5 According to Mamdani, "It is no longer the market (capitalism), nor the state (democracy), but culture (modernity) that is said to be the dividing line between those in favor of a peaceful, civic existence and those inclined to terror."4 Yet, "Islam" has no agency, and all Muslims don't necessarily speak with one voice. Moreover, this dichotomy is...