Review Essay

7KHDWUHDQGWKH9DQJXDUGVRIWKH$UDE6SULQJ Hala Nassar

Theatre Journal, Volume 66, Number 2, May 2014, pp. 291-300 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/tj.2014.0039

For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/tj/summary/v066/66.2.nassar.html

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Review essay Theatre and the Vanguards of the Arab Spring Hala Nassar

The Avant-Garde: Race, Religion, War. By Mike Sell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press / Seagull Books, 2011; pp. 356. Doomed by Hope: Essays on Arab Theatre. Edited by Eyad Houssami. London: Pluto Press, 2012; pp. 224. Hamlet’s Arab Journey: Shakespeare’s Prince and Nasser’s Ghost. By Margaret Litvin. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011; pp. 296. The Theatres of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia: Performance Traditions of the maghreb. By Khalid Amine and Marvin Carlson. Studies in International Performance series. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012; pp. 272.

On 17 December 2010, Mohamed Bouazizi, age 26, set himself on fire as an act of protest against the confiscation of his fruit-and-vegetable wagon, and against the harassment and humiliation inflicted by the municipal officials of the town of Sidi Bouzid. His burnt body set the spark for the Tunisian Jasmine Revolution the next day, leading longtime president Zin Abidine Ben Ali to leave the country in January 2011. The revolutionary sparks found the right kindling in neighboring Egypt and Libya, and even all the way to Yemen, Bahrain, Jordan, and Syria.1 In the West, media outlets were surprised by the domino ef-

Hala Nassar has taught modern Arab culture, literature, and theatre at UC Berkeley, Columbia, and Yale, where she was an assistant professor. She is the senior editor of Mahmoud Darwish: Exile’s Poet, and has written on Palestinian theatre and culture in several journals. Currently, she is a visiting assistant professor of comparative and world literature at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 1  These uprisings were as follows: Tunisia: Bouazizi’s self-immolation led to the ousted of longtime president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in January 2011. Egypt: 25 January 2011 led to the overthrow of the country’s longtime dictator, Hosni Mubarak, in February 2011; Egypt’s second revolution on 30 June 2013 led to the ousting of President Mohammed Morsi (in office from 30 June 2012 to 3 July 2013). Libya: the uprising, from 15 February to 23 October 2011, ended the dictatorship of Muammar Gaddafi. Yemen: the uprising, from 27 January 2011 to 27 February 2012, led to the ouster of the country’s president, Ali Abdullah Saleh. Additionally, there are ongoing uprisings in Bahrain, Jordan, and Syria.

Theatre Journal 66 (2014) 291–300 © 2014 by Johns Hopkins University Press

292 / Theatre Journal fect of mass street protests, public square sit-ins, and the toppling of Arab leaders. The Arab world, which has been fermenting for decades under inhumane living conditions, restricted freedoms, censorship, high unemployment, and dim future prospects, eventually went to the streets to voice outrage against despots—corrupt and autocratic regimes supported by the West. Since then, 24/7 media coverage and a large body of scholarship have started to discuss the role of social media in mobilizing the people: in Egypt, what some call the “coup” and others an “extension of the January 25th revolution,” followed by the new constitution under General Sisi’s military rule; in Syria, the impasse between the Assad government and rebel fighters; in Iran, the debate over nuclear facilities; and across the Arab world, the impact of events on their US relations. Meanwhile, media outlets and experts have been scrambling to make sense of why the Arab world is suddenly in revolt. The ongoing protests we are still witnessing in the Arab world have been waged before, targeted both internally and also at the West. However, analysis of this volatile region always seems to originate from the perspectives of political analysts, anthropologists, social scientists, and experts on Islam and its history, often at the expense of any focus on literary or cultural production. One cannot help but notice the comparative lack of scholarship in English on theatre and drama in the Middle East in general, and in the Arab world in particular, in spite of the staggering number of studies done in Arabic on the topics. Of the many possible explanations, most prominent among them is a lack of familiarity both with Arabic as a language and the cultural context with which any researcher needs to review manuscripts and journal and newspaper articles and to conduct interviews. This language and culture gap means that the West remains deeply unaware of the fact that when it comes to theatre and drama in the postcolonial Arab world, there are heated debates that argue between modernity and traditions, between Western adaptations and local voices, between the role of theatre in politicizing the masses and art for art’s sake, and the relevance of utilizing hybrid performances—all reflecting questions raised by theatremakers, artists, and Arab citizens alike. Certainly, the events of 9/11 prompted a surge in teaching Arabic as a foreign language and created an increasing demand for Arab-native speakers in the American academy. As a result, many Centers for Middle East Studies began to introduce new courses on the politics and society of the Arab world, recruited more faculty members, and promoted study abroad, internships, and Arabic-language study beyond US campuses, at sites across the Arab world. In spite of all these efforts, a noticeable scarcity persists when it comes to shedding light on the rich cultural heritages of the region. For instance, after a quick look at the Middle East Studies Association program of the last decade, one cannot help but notice the insignificant number of panels dealing with theatre and performance in the Arab world, especially in comparison to panels on Ottoman history and Middle Eastern politics. The same applies to academic associations on theatre, with the notable exception of the 2007 “Arabic Theatre Working Group” within the International Federation for Theatre Research. These facts themselves reflect the shortage of scholars working on Arab theatre and performance in Western academia. Following from this lack of linguistic and cultural knowledge is the dearth of plays and works translated from Arabic into English. Exceptions to this are Palestinian Salma Khadra Jayyusi and Roger Allen’s anthology Modern Arabic Drama (1995) and Jayyusi’s Short Arabic Plays (2003), which offer translations of plays from countries in the Arab world, but these remain isolated examples.2 This fact, in turn, leads to the dependence by Western schol2  Salma Khadra Jayyusi and Roger Allen, eds., Modern Arabic Drama: An Anthology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995); Jayyusi, ed., Short Arabic Plays: An Anthology (Northampton, MA: Interlink, 2003).

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ars on secondhand resources, which tend to either gaze at the Other or take a dismissive stance toward Arab cultural production. The exception here is Shmuel Moreh’s Live Theatre and Dramatic Literature in the Medieval Arab World (1992), which traces various performances during medieval times to debunk any claim that Islam as a religion is the reason that theatre did not flourish in the Arab world.3 Yet, this singular example has done little to unseat one of the earliest reference works on Arab theatre, Jacob Landau’s dismissive Studies in the Arab Theatre and Cinema (1958), which remains largely unchallenged in the current critical discourse.4 Similarly, in their coauthored book The Theatres of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, Khalid Amine and Marvin Carlson note that anyone who wishes to pursue research on theatre and drama in the Arab world will rely upon the works of two British scholars, M. M. Badawi and Philip Sadgrove. Amine and Carlson argue that the Arab world has long been ignored by scholars, and note particularly that the works of Badawi focus mainly on Egypt, with some attention to Syria, while the rest of the Arab world is relegated to mere paragraphs, themselves either dismissive or troubling. The authors cite the case of Algerian theatre, noting Badawi’s claim that Algerian “‘intellectuals were too much taken up with French culture’ to give Arabic drama any encouragement, while the general public ‘did not much like the literary drama,’ preferring ‘the Algerian national dramatic entertainment, which was a mixture of song, laughter, and improvised scenes’” (4). Even more troubling to Amine and Carlson is the significant marginalization of Arab drama by Arab scholars and Englishlanguage scholars alike. We note that this might be the case for Moroccan, Algerian, and Tunisian theatre and drama, but it is not universally true for Arab theatre—with notable exceptions in the Syrian and Iraqi theatres, for instance. While English-speaking scholars have not yet addressed these traditions in any significant way, the body of scholarly work in Arabic on these theatres is significant and is definitely not in accord with Badawi. Amine and Carlson’s book responds beautifully to this vacuum, presenting for the first time in English a history of theatre and performance in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. The book is divided into three sections: a history of the theatre from the Romans up to the colonial period; theatre under colonialism; and the theatre during the postcolonial period. Although the book sometimes reads as if the three countries are treated as one, it provides scholars with a solid historical basis on any one of these theatres, complete with names of theatres, prominent dramatists and actors, and a sense of the countries’ rich theatrical traditions. Chapter 1 focuses on traditional oral performances, such as al-hakawati (the itinerant storyteller), who performs in a halaqa (circle)—a type of performance that predates the Arab-Islamic conquest. What is striking is that the titles of these performances, which are based on Arab heroes of the Arab and Islamic golden age—heroes like Antra Bnu Chaddad and Siirat sauf ibn Dhi Yazan—resonate with the same kind of hakawati performances in the Levant, albeit with a different format. It is this same tradition that the avant-gardist Fantz Fanon used in Algeria to defy colonialism. Amine and Carlson explore other rich traditions found in Maghreb theatres: popular shadow plays and costumed performers; carnival and ritual performances; seasonal celebrations (like Sultan al-Tulba); l’bsat (literally, “a carpet,” but the term refers to social satire and court entertainment); and Sid Iketfi (an offshoot of l’bsat and popular in the Moroccan city of Rabat). This variety makes clear that when colonial powers arrived in North Africa, a rich performative culture already ex3  Shmuel Moreh, Live Theatre and Dramatic Literature in the Medieval Arab World (New York: New York University Press, 1992). 4  Jacob M. Landau, Studies in the Arab Theatre and Cinema (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1958).

294 / Theatre Journal isted, yet was viewed at best as “quaint local customs certainly unworthy of the name of art, and at worst, perverse and unpatriotic locations for the expression of subversive and anti-colonial expression” (52). The authors proceed to trace how, with French and Italian colonialism, European-style theatre was introduced into Maghreb culture in order to cater to the substantial European community: in Tunis, for example, by Italian immigrants, and in Algeria as part of the French colonial project (60). Amine and Carlson are also careful to note, however, that the first play published in Arabic, in Algeria in 1847, was a response to the encroachment of colonialism. Yet, in spite of colonial control, Algeria and Tunisia maintained strong ties with the rest of the Arab world, as the authors document that many Egyptian theatre troupes visited, some staying on to help initiate local Arab theatres. The authors trace these influences through the 1920s and ’30s, when local theatres in the Maghreb started to allude to the social and political struggle under colonialism, despite strict censorship rules. In part 3 of their book, Amine and Carlson map out the theatre movements in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia from their first years of independence up through 2010. The authors’ approach to this period is multilayered in each respective country, examining the role of government, which, at times, supported theatre and banned it at others, and attending specifically to the marginalization of Amazigh culture and theatre. Amine and Carlson also focus on the hybridization of the colonial subject and the traumatic experience as a result of colonization, including the revival of indigenous forms like the storyteller and the halaqa and the formation and the dismantling of many local theatres. Readers will find interesting discussions of the contributions of Kateb Yacine and other writers, along with readings of specific performances and texts. Part 3 also contains an analysis of the Algerian civil war and the targeting of theatres and artists (1990–2010), resulting in the forced exile of theatre-makers and artists to Europe, where they established themselves and garnered international fame. A discussion of the continuing presence of female solo performances rounds out the wide range of topics on Maghreb performance, theatre, and drama that can be found in The Theatres of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. Another new addition to the field of theatre and Middle Eastern studies is Margaret Litvin’s 2011 Hamlet’s Arab Journey: Shakespeare’s Prince and Nasser’s Ghost, which provides a sense of how literary reception and appropriation of Shakespeare’s most famous character manifests in the Arab world, mainly on the post-1952 Egyptian stage. Instead of relying upon models of postcolonial rewriting, Litvin guides the reader through a global kaleidiscope model to consider the appropriators’ political, artistic, and philosophical situations and concerns. After broadly exploring Hamlet’s meaning in today’s Arabic political vocabulary, she turns to link the play’s appropriation across five decades as a text for political agency. Litvin provides a fascinating account of the first translations of Hamlet into Arabic through French versions, which often went through changes and cuts. She also considers the influence of British films of the play—Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet (1948) and Grigori Kozintsev’s Gamlet—which became part of the Egyptian intellectual scene during the 1960s. Since, as Litvin argues, Arab theatre appropriators view Hamlet as a political play, the character is used to mirror political moods in the Arab world, encompassing “[e]uphoric pride after the Egyptian Revolution of 1952; soul searching and impatience for progress in the mid1960s; anger and defiance after the disastrous June War of 1976 and Nasser’s death in 1970; and a mixture of cynicism and nostalgia since the mid-1970s, as stale autocracies spread through the region and stifled its dreams of national awakening” (10).

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Litvin’s historical tracing of the Arab Hamlet ends with a discussion of six plays written between 1976 and 2002, each portraying Hamlet differently. Departing from previous depictions of the character, each portrays a new version of Hamlet, who now lacks verbal power and eloquence, unlike the original. These Hamlets do not themselves advance a political message and tend instead to be listeners, finding no ears attentive to their soliloquys. Hamlet Wakes Up Late (1976) by Syrian playwright Mamduh Adwan bitterly mocks the tradition of Hamlet as Arab hero by alluding to contemporary politics and reflecting on the crisis of the Arab intellectual after the 1967 war (the Six-Day War) with Israel. From Jordan, Nader Omran’s Theatre Company Found a Theatre and Theatred “Hamlet” (1984) stages a response to the slogan, “Bring Arab theatre back to its roots,” of the Portable Festival of Arab Theatre in Rabat. Omran’s aim is to present theatre-making as an “autonomous force that evades both the 1960s-style allegorizer and censor” (159). The third rewriting of Hamlet that Litvin examines comes from Egypt: Mahmoud Abudoma’s Dance of the Scorpions (1988), which finds the hapless prince witnessing a collapsing kingdom and underestimating his task to expose a ruthless regime. The 1990s rewritings include the melodrama Ismail/Hamlet by Syrian Hakim Marzougui wherein Hamlet is merely an average person working in a bathhouse, whose real aim is to replace his stepfather to be the new despot. Litvin also presents Iraqi playwright Jawad al-Assadi’s Ophelia’s Window/Forget Hamlet (1994), which evokes Saddam Hussein’s Iraq as the imagined kingdom, Ophelia as a fearless witness to murder, and Hamlet as impotent and passive in the face of Claudius’s tyranny. Taken together, these five Hamlets allude directly to the state of Arab politics and regimes during the 1990s. The final play in the study, Kuwaiti British playwright-director Sulayman alBassam’s 2002 The al-Hamlet Summit, presents its audience with Arab dictators holding an Arab League–style summit wherein Islamist insurgents, arms dealers, militarized global capitalism, and oil interests mimic not only the rhetoric of Arab politicians, but that of the United States as well. These six Hamlet plays have appropriated, rewritten, and performed the character for several decades to represent the futile efforts to instigate political change in the region. However, they also can be read in the context of postcolonial societies’ attempts to respond to the failure of nationalist agendas after independence, and to negotiate their place, identity, and future under oppressive regimes. Representing yet another approach to the gap in English-language studies of Arab theatre, Eyad Houssami’s collection Doomed by Hope: Essays on Arab Theatre brings together essays that “zoom into definitive moments of Saadallah Wannous’s life and repertoire, and they illuminate how Wannous’s legacy manifests itself in and informs [Arab] theatre today—from reading plays in a classroom and writing plays for a city to performing in a security state and directing in theatres, prisons, and international festivals in a time of revolt” (7). To many Arab theatre practitioners, Syrian dramatist and playwright Wannous (1941–97) epitomizes Arab political theatre after the 1967 war. Unfortunately, none of his plays nor any of his political writings, which amount to three substantial volumes, has yet been translated into English. To remedy this absence, Houssami’s edited volume introduces Wannous to Western readers. The prominent Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury writes about Wannous’s legacy and friendship in the Foreword, and Iraqi director Jawad al-Assadi introduces the playwright’s most celebrated work, Soiree for the 5th of June. The only essays that directly analyze Wannous’s dramatic work come from Edward Ziter and Assad al-Saleh. Ziter shows how Soiree for the 5th of June responds to the Arab defeat in the 1967 war, arguing that the play gives political agency to displaced Palestinian and Syrian refugees. It also questions the autocratic Syrian government in controlling public

296 / Theatre Journal reactions to the defeat, and highlights the failure of the regime to liberate the occupied Golan Heights. Additionally, the play raises issues concerning the role of Syrian nationalism and the need for collective action and a call to arms. Similarly, al-Saleh examines Soiree for the 5th of June in the context of the Syrian conflict since March 2011. He briefly discusses the influence of Mikhail Bakhtin and Bertolt Brecht on Wannous’s work and how the playwright formulated his notion of political theatre to instigate change. In Soiree, Wannous shows how the Syrian regime silenced the voices of the people, took away their political agency, and denied them any channels for dialogue, thus rendering them impotent against tyranny. The ongoing Syrian conflict, which is a metaphor for the political structure of the entire Arab world, mirrors the critiques of Wannous’s political plays of the state as a brutal force oppressing its citizens. The remainder of the essays in this collection shed light on other forms of Arab theatre in different contexts. Zeina Daccache takes the reader inside Lebanon’s notorious Roumieh prison, where she directed an adaptation of a cold war teleplay by Reginald Rose. Katherine Hennessy discusses performances in Yemen and links them to the 2009–10 youth protests in Sana’a. The Egyptian essays by Dalia Basiouny and Samia Habib also demonstrate how collective memory plays a role in a time of revolt against tyranny. Together, the essays pay due tribute to the spirit and impact of Wannous’s legacy on Arab theatre. These three books have laid the groundwork for further research on and future studies of often-marginalized Arab theatre and performance. The merit of these books lies in filling the void of work on Arab theatre in the hope that new scholarship will challenge the almost uniformly essentialist studies on Arab cultural production that have preceded them. The books discussed above unquestionably provide scholars with a solid introduction to the theatres of the Arab world, but more work is needed on each individual country. The books also leave space for scholars to consider the role of and linkage between North African theatre and political and national resistance to French, Italian, and British colonial rule. Indeed, much work remains to be done: for instance, to trace how folk and traditional theatricality have been utilized in times of struggle, and how they might have impacted neighboring Arab countries like Libya; to follow how Arab theatre traditions have traveled during the postcolonial period; to review how nationalist agendas have failed to fulfill the aspirations of Arab citizens onstage; to study the appropriation of canonical Western texts other than Hamlet (from Antigone to Waiting for Godot) in different geographical and theatrical locales; and to consider the recent performances of Wannous’s work on the stage of the American University of Beirut and examine the long-term impact of adapting his plays in Arab countries still under colonial rule. Most importantly, these books also remind scholars that more work on Arab theatre from the Persian Gulf to the Atlantic is necessary in order to change our “understanding” of the region simply as the binary poles of the West versus Islam; end the marginalization of Arab and Muslim cultures, with their multiethnic and racial groups; and better integrate this newfound understanding into both theatre and Middle Eastern studies. At this point, we might invoke Edward Said, whose writings on Orientalism, Islam, and Palestine show the way forward for scholars in these fields, on the role of the public intellectual. In his seminal essay “The Public Role of Writers and Intellectuals” (2002), Said writes that “behind the Punch-and-Judy show of energetic debate concerning the West and Islam, for example, all sort of anti-democratic, sanctimonious, and alienating devices (the theory of the Great Satan or of the rogue state and terrorism) are in place as diversions from the social

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and economic disentitlements occurring in reality” (32).5 As for the intellectual, he “offers instead a dispassionate account of how identity, tradition, and the nation are constructed things, most often in the insidious form of binary oppositions that are inevitably expressed as hostile attitudes to the Other” (ibid.). Said urges the intellectual to take lessons from decolonization, although some academics have “turned it into an ambiguous contest between ambivalent opponents” (38). In spite of the significant contributions of the books reviewed above in trying to shed light on the theatre of the Other, this “binary opposition,” in Said’s terms, is still apparent when it comes to theatre studies in the West. These three books help fill the gaps in the scholarship; taken together, they also demonstrate that more detailed and in-depth studies need to be done in order to further shape the discourse. Most often, scholarly work in the West on Arab theatre, even when it is informed by postcolonial and cultural studies, consciously or not ends up by dismissively duplicating the binary opposition that Said warns about simply by defining its subject in terms of the Other. Into this current state of affairs we turn to Mike Sell’s The Avant-Garde: Race, Religion, War as an unlikely, if compelling compass for how studying contemporary and current performances in the Arab world can overcome such binaries, and where the cultural context, the traumatic impact of colonialism, the role of religion, and the political turmoil that it is still sweeping the region are all taken into consideration. Sell takes the catalytic events of 9/11 and its aftermath as his point of departure to view the avant-garde as a political endeavor and to examine overlooked global cultural objects—not necessarily Western art or literature, but “group stories,” ideas, genealogies, and implications—to reveal the vanguard activism implicit in their production. Sell’s case studies cross boundaries of all sorts, beyond the cultural, geographical, and historical parameters of the field, and he unpacks the social dimensions of and material oppositions to established structures of power. Packed with theories, histories, controversial issues, and genealogies, The Avant-Garde is a difficult read for nonspecialists, but its numerous merits reward the effort. Although the author covers the avant-garde across traditions, geographies, and histories, his arguments on performance and the Arab world have a great deal to contribute to the field. In his lengthy introduction, Sells tries to move away from a mere historical study of the avant-garde in order to reveal its presence as an economy of discourses that appears in exhibitions, museums, academia, and elsewhere, which offers different ways in which to study the avant-garde’s political effects. Consolidating the works of various critics and scholars who have investigated the avant-garde in a “theoretically rigorous, ethically self-reflexive, historiographically dexterous, and institutionally conscious way” (40), Sell provides and defends his own definition of the avant-garde, and presents his tropological approach in the book’s three chapters. Since the “avant-garde is a minoritarian formation that challenges power in subversive, illegal or alternate ways, usually by challenging the routines, assumptions, hierarchies and/or legitimacy of existing political and/or cultural institutions” (41), the author extends the existing definitions in order to respond effectively to the new challenges imposed on the avant-garde after 9/11, arguing that “both the genealogies of 9/11 intruded into the field (that is, of Islam and military special forces) and the renewed consciousness of the contingency of avant-garde studies it has provoked” (40). Sell’s second chapter, “Religion,” has the most direct and potentially field-changing implications for the study of theatre and performance in the Arab world. Here, he argues for 5  Edward W. Said, “The Public Role of Writers and Intellectuals,” in The Public Intellectual, ed. Helen Small (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 2002), 19–39.

298  /  Theatre Journal including religion in the study of the avant-garde. Considering a wide range of resources, Sell locates avant-garde tendencies in several aspects of religion and aptly discusses these in three fundamentalist movements—in particular, Egyptian theologian Sayyid Qutub’s scientific materialism. In the introduction, Sell writes that despite the “staggering violence, I doubt that too many in the field of the avant-garde were surprised by 9/11 hijackers’ motives and methods. The attack intertwined the symbolic, the performative, the economicinfrastructural, and the ethical, in a style straight from the rule book of the avant-garde” (6). Although they were not the familiar kind of avant-garde artists, the hijackers, like the historical avant-garde, aimed for cataclysmic change through a series of events that Sell calls “propaganda by deed” (ibid.). Since the avant-garde postulates that the modern world is “terminally out of joint” (7), the author seeks to reconcile this historical stance with the events of 9/11 and their aftermath in the Arab world. Noting that scholars as early as 2002 invoked the avant-garde to make sense of the event (as did Osama bin Laden himself, who called hijackers a “blessed group of enlightened Muslims, the vanguard [Taliah] of Islam” [17]), Sell nonetheless advocates for the need to be attentive to the shifting nature of cultural politics, and to the different ways that cultural power can be displayed. Particularly illuminating is his performance studies approach to the Islamism of the twentieth century as advocated by Maulana Maududi in Pakistan, Qutub in Egypt, and also in Egypt the Moslem Brotherhood—hardly an “unconscious avant-garde,” as Matei Calinescu would put it (according to Sell, referring to Calinescu’s Five Faces of Modernity).6 Sell demonstrates that, although Islamist activists are anti-Western, they still embrace the vanguard models of Hassan al Banna, who modeled the Moslem Brotherhood after the Russian Bolsheviks and Spanish Falangists. Maududi uses the term vanguardism within the context of the story of the Hegira—the exile to Medina and the insurgency of the Prophet Muhammad to take over power in Mecca—as a way to break with the society of jāhilīya (pre-Islamic times) and achieve a nonviolent, modern political system in Pakistan. Influenced deeply by Maududi, Qutub similarly invokes the Hegira, but uses the term jāhilīya to include all who rebelled against God’s rule. Sell argues that Qutub sacralized an existing community form: the men’s prison during Nasser’s regime. Here, Qutub developed his concept of the vanguard talā’i´—an avant-garde theory that could only be written in an ̇ Egyptian dungeon—which reaches the conclusion that the current Muslim society presents a situation similar to the one that, centuries ago, early Muslim believers faced in Mecca. Qutub’s solution, Sell shows, lies in returning to the old dogmas and convictions of the early Islamic way of life though led by a modernist vanguard—an ideology that allows for a view that the “vanguard of God is as justified in its use of violence as Muhammad and the Companions when they chose sword and knife to fight their way back to Mecca” (213). The author brilliantly unearths the relationship between the vanguard and Islam, particularly by invoking Said’s Orientalism (1978) on the influence of Islam on the Romantic movement.7 Specifically, he shows how Qutub’s committed mujāhidūn were not unfamiliar with Western culture. Qutub himself did not attend a traditional Islamic Kuttāb and was part of the Wafd Egyptian Party, and although Sell does not mention it, Qutub traveled in the United States between 1948 and 1950, wrote an article in Islam Amrīkāni (1952), and was familiar with Romantic literature. Sell acknowledges that the “avant-garde metaphor 6  Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987). 7  Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).

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is part of the problem,” accounting for why connections between the vanguard and Islam had not been made earlier. Following Said, he notes that the mystical pilgrimage, particularly the Hegira, “attained a vogue of considerable intensity” (217) among many Romantic poets. Robert Southey’s Mohamed: A Fragment (with contributions from Coleridge), Sell notes, shares many vanguard themes with the Hegira story: “the self-imposed exile; the moralization of space and time; the sensory and intellectual sensitivity enabled by rebellion; the world-historical significance of contrarian attitudes and action and performance. It’s hard not to read the thing as a commentary on avant-garde studies itself, scrambling in one direction while its object remains safely ensconced” (218). The genealogical line that “winds from Romantic Orientalism to the events of 9/11” leads Sell to conclude that rather than the “avant-garde being [the] disavowed European origin for radical Islam, exactly the opposite is the case: it is Islam that is the disavowed origin of the avant-garde” (ibid.). After chapters on “Race” (chapter 1), which touches on Arab theatre primarily through Fanon and his work in colonial Algeria, and “Religion” (chapter 2), the final chapter of The Avant-Garde, “War,” discusses the original meaning of avant-garde, which was a military term. Most relevant in this chapter is Sell’s discussion of war and the liberal arts in which he returns to the War on Terror, hence bringing the book full circle. He sees the ever-important role of higher education in the humanities, social sciences, and fine arts in the war, emphasizing the cultural dimension (for example, in Argentina and China) and education (in Guinea-Bissau and Yemen) in any given conflict to confront power and terror. Sell ascribes this importance of culture and education to United States Marine Corps manuals, noting that the corps’s Small Wars Manual discusses the specifics of the anti-avantgardes: “Small wars are no longer best understood in terms of the nation-state; rather, they are cross-national or regional conflicts often ignited by marginalized elites affiliated across national borders.”8 In order for the corps to gain a step on al-Qaeda, it must factor in the cultural, ethnic, religious, and economic dimensions because, after all, “small wars are much more about ‘the human element’ as opposed to ‘technical aspects’ the latter of which dominates ‘much contemporary military writing.’”9 Here, universities play a role as a “research-and-development resource for the military, providing for example the highaltitude infrared surveillance equipment that helped track down Che Guevara in Bolivia” (310). Small Wars Manual stresses the benefit of education, especially liberal arts education, to prepare the “liberal-arts warrior,” in Sell’s words (ibid.). The author ends the chapter and the book by asking scholars, teachers, critics, and artists: “What is our role in the War on Terror?” (ibid.). Before answering this, he poses another: “How have the conditions of the War on Terror strengthened what William Fulbright called, in 1967, the ‘militaryindustrial-academic complex’?” (ibid.). Sell notes that many students are enlisting, many soldiers are returning to be educated, many will impact their societies, and many will rise in the ranks, and he advocates other ways to deal with war beyond the “neat binaries of conventional thinking” (313). He hopes that the moments, movements, cases, minority groups, “and other vanguards of war provide useful object lessons for academics in a world war in which there are seemingly nothing but avant-gardes. The ultimate question is: who will take the lead?” (ibid.). In this spirit, Sell does not mean to limit his “object lessons” to educating the future US Marine Corps, but rather to induce academics to teach all students in a world of war. These United States Marine Corps, Small Wars Manual (Washington, DC: USGPO, 1940), qtd. in Sell, The AvantGarde, 307. 9  Ibid., 308. 8 

300  /  Theatre Journal questions should not only pertain to the War on Terror, for they can also apply to studying the different Jihadists, Salafists, and Takfirist groups actively “performing” by propaganda in Syria, Libya, and Egypt. As nationalist postcolonial projects have failed to fulfill the visions and dreams of peoples in the Arab world, who for decades have been yearning for equality, dignity, and free democratic societies, they have made it possible for radical Islamists to lead the resistance against despotic régimes. And because, as Sell shows, radical Islamists can be regarded as avant-gardists, the question is how these groups might be incorporated into both avant-garde and performance studies. These religious radical minorities are not only continuously and insistently challenging the structures of powers (as did the historical avant-garde) as they endeavor to establish an Islamic state in Syria and Iraq, but they will also increasingly challenge the well-established tradition of postcolonial revisionist history, which attempts to make sense of radical Islamist performances in the region. While Sell’s book provides a new angle on the study of the vanguard of Islam, the neglected field of Arab theatre and performance needs similar models and approaches to move the field forward. Arab theatre and performance studies remains a burgeoning field for Western researchers because the few available studies have been approached through the Western gaze at the Other, which is dismissive at best. The time is now ripe to chart new paths that will cross boundaries in a comparative transnational manner. This new research will likely consider a combination of approaches, no matter how unsettling these may be—postcolonialism, hybrid influences not necessarily Western, avant-garde studies, among others—as long as the cultural, religious, and political contexts are not marred by essentialism or fundamentalism. This new multifaceted research must give voice and agency to the experiences, aspirations, and nationalist visions of Arab citizens; the field of Arab theatre and performance studies must open such spaces for these individuals to speak for themselves. The Arab world is still being shaken by demonstrations, rallies, sit-ins, and revolts, where Arab youths are at the forefront of the fight for basic civil and human rights. Although none of the books under review here deals directly with the topic, we must seek to understand these “performances” by using a variety of approaches—some presented in these books, others not. The intersections between activism and the politics of aesthetics, the avantgarde and religion, and performance studies and Middle Eastern studies must be taken into account so as to modernize the field of Arab theatre and performance studies. As Said taught us, the role of the intellectual—namely, intervention and elaboration—is to “protect against and forestall the disappearance of the past, which in the rapidity of change, the reformulation of tradition, and the construction of simplified bowdlerizations of history, is at the very heart of the contest described by Benjamin Barber rather too sweepingly as Jihad versus McWorld.”10

10 

Said, “The Public Role of Writers and Intellectuals,” 37.