La Nouvelle Bande Dessinée arabe. Short Histoires Courtes En bande Dessinée ed. by Mohammed Shennawy (review)

Little known in Europe, the works of comic artists from the Arab world have also long remained marginal in the creative and culture scenes of their home countries. For a long time, they were looked down upon by the general public as mere entertainment for children. The past ten years have changed this considerably.

During the so-called Arab Spring (2011-2013, with sustained uprisings in Tunisia, spreading to Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, and Yemen), many young Arab artists accompanied and critically commented on the political and cultural conflicts in their countries using contemporary forms of artistic expression, such as street art, graffiti, blogs, videos, rap, poetry, caricatures, animated shorts, and especially comics.

It is all the more welcome, therefore, that—even after the Arab Spring subsided due to cultural restoration and renewed repression—the Institut français d'Égypte, the Institut français in Paris, the Goethe-Institut in Cairo, and the German-French Cultural Fund have taken the initiative to present the following comics from the Arab world in an exhibition as well as in a 259-page volume: twenty-seven of the most important Arab comic artists from Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Morocco, Tunisia, Iraq, and Jordan; seven of the most important comic magazines and fanzines (Lab619 from Tunisia, Mesaha from Iraq, Tok Tok from Egypt, Samandal from Lebanon, Shefkef from Morocco, Zeez from Lebanon, and Habka from Libya), and ten key comic websites.

The exhibition was held in January 2018 at the Comic Festival in Angoulême, France, under the title "Nouvelle Génération: BD arabe d'aujourd'hui" ("New Generation: The Contemporary Arab Comic").

The exhibition catalogue was published by the French publishing house Actes Sud. Three excellent introductory articles, both knowledgeable and entertaining, provide a basis for understanding the contemporary Arab comic scene.

In her introductory essay, Mathilde Chèvre, French researcher and publisher (Le port à jauni), brilliantly elaborates the history of the development of Arabic illustration. Paying special attention to Egypt, she emphasizes the importance of the great Egyptian illustrator Mohieddin Ellabbad (1940-2010) for the current developments of Egyptian and Arab comics. In his contribution, the US-American scholar Jonathan Gyer (Harvard University) explores the avant-garde character of Arab comic art in form, (colloquial) language, and themes. He shows that Arab comic artists also like to provoke, both aesthetically and thematically, and thus consciously challenge the censorship authorities over and over again. The third article transcribes a roundtable discussion between the Algerian comic artist Rym Mokhtari, Shennawy from Cairo, and the Lebanese artist and musician Mazen Kerbaj, who lives in Berlin. The French journalist Tewfik Hakem skillfully moderated this fascinating conversation about their respective artistic careers, the new narrative strategies of Arab comic art, and the overt and more hidden interactions between the movements of Arab Spring and contemporary comic art.

In Arab countries such as Egypt, Tunisia, and Yemen, young people under the age of eighteen now make up 40% of the population and are most affected by dictatorship, social upheaval, and the lack of prospects in their home countries. For them, the many demonstrations in the Arab world (e.g., on the famous "Tahrir" Square in Cairo), as well as in social media, were not only about political demands for "bread/work" and "social justice," both of which phrases were repeatedly chanted, but above all about "freedom." This also explicitly meant freedom of expression, including the freedom to express oneself artistically in new forms and to take a stand on all, even taboo, topics.

La nouvelle bande dessinée arabe is an important publication at the right time: In his comic Bouteille de sable (Bottle of Sand; pp. 209-214), the Syrian comic artist Salam Alhassan drastically shows that the "critical genie" has long since escaped the bottle in the Arab...