Modern Languages: Arabic Culture

"Groundbreaking. Shabout elucidates two critical issues that have thus far received inadequate scholarly attention--the distinction between Islamic Art and Arab Art and the relatedness of the political and artistic processes in the history of Arab modernity."

Artistic expression in the Middle East is experiencing something of a renaissance. Domestic patronage is flourishing, and an impressive array of new museums and art fairs across the region is helping to stimulate international interest in an increasingly influential movement. Art of the Middle East is an accessible overview of modern and contemporary art of the Middle East and Arab world from 1945 to the present, with an emphasis on artists active today.

A. J. Racy is well known as a scholar of ethnomusicology and as a distinguished performer and composer. In this pioneering book, he provides an intimate portrayal of the Arab musical experience and offers insights into how music generally affects us all. The focus is tarab, a multifaceted concept that has no exact equivalent in English and refers to both the indigenous music and the ecstatic feeling associated with it. Richly documented, the book examines various aspects of the musical craft, including the basic learning processes, how musicians become inspired, the love lyrics as tools of ecstasy, the relationship between performers and listeners, and the influence of technological mediation and globalization. Racy also probes a variety of world musical and ecstatic contexts and analyses theoretical paradigms from other related disciplines. Written in a lucid style, Making Music in the Arab World will engage the general reader as well as the specialist.

This long-awaited project presents the results of a major research effort to determine the parameters of the stylistic variability of Arab folk music in Israel. Central to this old and highly improvised musical tradition is a unique modal framework that combines the concept of maqam--the foundation of Arab music theory--with other characteristics, including those of the text. Palestinian Arab Music is a comprehensive analysis of this music as actually practiced, examining both musical and nonmusical factors, their connection with the traits of individual performers, and their interaction with sociocultural phenomena. Working initially with their own 1957 invention, the Cohen-Katz Melograph, and later with computers, Dalia Cohen and Ruth Katz recorded and digitized several hundred Palestinian music performances. The authors analyzed the musical tradition in light of its main variables. These include musical parameters, modal frameworks, the form and structure of the music, its poetic texts, and aspects of the social functions of the tradition. As a result of their study, the vexed aspect of intonation in practice is revealed to exist in a special relationship with the scale systems or maqamat, which are in turn of great importance to organizing the music and determining its modal systems.

In this companion volume to the successful Images of Enchantment: Visual and Performing Arts of the Middle East (AUC Press, 1998), historian and ethnomusicologist Sherifa Zuhur has once again commissioned and edited authoritative essays from noteworthy scholars from around the globe that explore the visual and performing arts in the Middle East.

Scheherazade's Children gathers together leading scholars to explore the reverberations of the tales of the Arabian Nights across a startlingly wide and transnational range of cultural endeavors. The contributors, drawn from a wide array of disciplines, extend their inquiries into the book's metamorphoses on stage and screen as well as in literature--from India to Japan, from Sanskrit mythology to British pantomime, from Baroque opera to puppet shows.

One of the first internationally published overviews of theatrical activity across the Arab World. Includes 160,000 words and over 125 photographs from 22 different Arab countries from Africa to the Middle East.

This study of Egyptian theatre and its narrative construction explores the ways representations of Egypt are created of and within theatrical means, from the 19th century to the present day. Essays address the narratives that structure theatrical, textual, and performative representations and the ways the rewriting process has varied in different contexts and at different times.

Beginning with a thorough introduction situating The Arabian Nights in its historical and cultural contexts-and offering a fresh examination of the text's multiple locations in the long history of modern Orientalism--this collection of essays by noted scholars from "East," "West," and in-between reassesses the influence of the Nights in Enlightenment and Romantic literature, as well as the text's vigorous afterlife in the contemporary Arabic novel.