Art Against Authoritarianism in Southwest Asia and North Africa

＂Discussing various art forms, from street art to performance art, and from music to theatre, this book examines forms of aesthetic resilience at the heart of the political struggle against authoritarianism in Iran, Turkey, Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Sudan, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria. The authors investigate ongoing aesthetic activism after the Arab Uprisings in four ways: examining visibility and speech in the public space; the creation and sustaining of collective solidarities; and the representation of suppressed identities and narratives and the creation of alternative modes of producing and circulating art. The book questions the aesthetic frame of politics that obscures social struggles from below in favour of the political theatre of the state apparatus on the one hand and discusses how activist aesthetics cultivate a transformative imaginary of a just world, on the other＂--

Tijen Tunali is a Marie Sklodowska Curie Cofund Fellow at the University of Rennes 2, France. She is editor of Art and Gentrification in the Changing Neoliberal Landscape (2021) and co-editor of Contemporary Art Across Political Divides: Difficult Conversations (2023).

Josepha Wessels is an Associate Professor in Media and Communication Studies at the School of Arts and Communication at Malmö University, Sweden. She is the author of Documenting Syria: Film-making, Video Activism and Revolution (2019, I.B.Tauris).