Event Summary
Artists, musicians, and writers in any culture act as the national conscience, reflecting on a society’s good and bad points and challenging the status quo. Creative expression, with its capacity to move and persuade audiences, and to shape and reveal identities, both explains and affects Arab societies in ways that go beyond politics.
Event Information
When
Friday, March 06, 2009
10:30 AM to 12:00 PM
Where
Stein Room
The Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Ave., NW
Washington, DC
Map
On March 6, the Saban Center at Brookings’ Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World, in conjunction with the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, hosted a panel discussion on contemporary creative expression and its impact on Arab society, with a conversation that ranged from the role of literature, poetry and music, to the relationship between art and state sponsorship, to the differences in creative expression from Morocco to the Persian Gulf.
The panelists included Basma El-Husseiny, founder and managing director of Al Mawred Al Thaqafy in Egypt, and consultant to the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts’ Arabesque: Arts of the Arab World; Palestinian author, poet and playwright Suheir Hammad; Adila Laidi-Hanieh, cultural critic and former curator of the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center in Ramallah; and Khaled Mattawa, Libyan poet and assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Michigan. Nonresident senior fellow Cynthia P. Schneider, coordinator of the Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World’s Arts and Culture Initiative, offered introductory remarks and Tamara Cofman Wittes, Saban Center senior fellow and director of the Middle East Democracy and Development Project (MEDD), moderated the discussion. After the program, panelists took audience questions.
Transcript
CYNTHIA SCHNEIDER:I’d like to tell you a little bit about the Arts and Culture Dialogue Initiative—what it’s trying to do—and set the stage for our discussion today. It sounds maybe to some of you like a little bit of an oxymoron. There are not so many policy think tanks that have arts and culture dialogues initiative. It exists here at Brookings because of a belief that creative expression is a very powerful force in society. It’s a way people understand, reveal and shape their identities and that if you want to forge a deeper understanding between cultures—and that’s a key goal of the project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World—then you need to listen to the voices of the artists and the creators and understand their impact on society.
I would say our motto might be to paraphrase the words of Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian novelist, “art humanizes, while politics tends to demonize.” So amidst all the voices of politics, we look to the artists to understand society, but we also recognize—and that’s going to be a key aspect of our discussion today—the important role that artists and writers and creative thinkers play in societies here and most definitely in the Arab world in pushing the envelopes, in looking critically at the society in which they live.
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Participants
Panel
Basma El-Husseiny
Founder and Managing Director, Al Mawred Al Thaqafy (Cultural Resource), Egypt
Suheir Hammad
Author, Poet and Playright, Palestine
Adila Laidi-Hanieh
Cultural Critic and Editor, Palestine
Khaled Mattawa
Poet; Assistant Professor of Creative Writing, University of Michigan