Metonyms of modernity in contemporary Syrian music and painting

Abstract

This essay examines painting and music in modern Syria as cultural practices that give voice to modernist sensibilities. I argue that two important spatial and temporal tropes structure the aesthetics of authenticity in Syrian visual and musical arts: the old city and the countryside. Through recourse to these metonymic representations and evocations, Syrian artists articulate a vision of modernity in which discourses of emotion and sentiment are important bases of authentic Syrian cultural identity. In this manner they offer an alternative to European ideologies of modernity that have stressed rationality. At the same time they promote critical responses to the modern Syrian state.

Keywords:

• Aesthetics
• painting
• music
• modernity
• Syria

Acknowledgements

Ethnographic research for this article was conducted in Syria between 1996–1998, and in 2000 and 2004. Support for the research was provided by Social Science Research Council and Fulbright-Hays research awards. Versions of this essay were presented at the City University of New York Graduate Center and the University of Texas at Austin. I thank Deborah Kapchan and the editors and anonymous readers for Ethnos for helping me clarify my arguments, though of course any shortcoming are my own responsibility.

Notes

1. See also Foster (2002) for the concept of ‘bargains with modernity.’

2. For Syrians of this era, the West meant Western Europe. By the 1970s ties with Eastern Europe and the USSR were much stronger than Syria's ties to Western Europe. Today ‘The West’ refers to Europe and North America in a general sense.

3. For more on the concept of heritage, see Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1995, 1998).

4. For recent studies of music making and the construction of communal and national identities in Africa, see Askew (2002), Erlmann (1996b), and Meintjes (2003); for Latin America, see Bigenho (2002), and Romero (2001), among others. For studies of the role of painting in the formation of national ideologies, see Myers (2003), Winegar (2003), and Naef (1996, 2003).

5. In Arabic, hadâtha is usually used to gloss what we understand as modernity, as is the term mu'âsira (contemporaneity); these are used in contradistinction to heritage or patrimony (turâth). In my understanding, the concept of turâth must be understood as an artifact of discourses of modernity. See Shannon (forthcoming).

6. In similar ways, as Chatterjee (1993) and Chakrabarty (1999, 2001) have shown, modernity in India (specifically West Bengal) resides in a unique sphere of cultural and spiritual difference where intellectuals may articulate their modernity in the context of an Indian nation in which the manifest political and economic structures are Western. In both the Syrian and West Bengali cases, local differences (from cultural practices to locales to ideological and intellectual traditions) serve as conduits for modernity. In both cases as well elites selectively appropriate the customs of the working and rural classes to construct a national heritage or tradition. Such appropriation and cultural construction belie the diversity of the state, but, as Anderson (1991) and Chatterjee (1993) have shown, this process is at the heart of nationalist movements around the world.

7. Adonis (né 'Alî Ahmad Sa'îd) was born in Syria, lived and worked in Lebanon, where he founded important modernist poetic movements and wrote important volumes of literary criticism, and currently resides in France. He is generally considered among the leading Arab poets of his generation, and one of the most important Arab voices of the last half century.

8. For the concept of art world, see Danto (1964) and Becker (1982).

9. James Clifford (1988 : 236–237) suggests the utility of Bakhtin's notion of the chronotope (Bakhtin 1981) for analyzing the spatial-temporal dimensions of culture. While Bakhtin's study focuses on literary chronotopes, it is clear that non-literary forms of discourse and narrative are also structured by specific chronotopes or chronotopic representations of time-space. I treat what might be understood as crystallizations of chronotopic understandings in modern Syrian art, and not chronotopes per se.

10. Few Damascenes or Aleppines refer to the modern quarters of their cities as constituting the ‘new city,’ and unlike many North African cities, there is no Syrian concept of la ville nouvelle. The newer quarters are simply referred to by their names: e.g. Shahbâ', Jamîliyya (in Aleppo), and Mezza, Mazra', Abu Rumaneh, and Barzeh (in Damascus).

11. In 2001 the City of Aleppo, in conjunction with the international ngo gtz's Project for the Rehabilitation of the Old City of Aleppo, began to implement the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Division for Sustainable Development ‘Local Agenda 21’ initiative to reduce air, noise, and environmental pollution, as well as alleviate urban crowding and other problems in Aleppo's Old City. Similar initiatives are underway in Damascus with the support of the Syrian government.

12. Evidence of pre-modern and early modern artistic and musical traditions in Aleppo can be found in Russell (1756) and Marcus (1989), among other sources.

13. This era is also identified as a Golden Age in Egyptian and, to some extent, Moroccan music as well.

14. For example, the television serial Khân al-Harîr [The silk market] (1997–1998) featured Aboud Bashir performing as the famous Aleppine composer and performer Bakri al-Kurdi performing for merchants in such a courtyard. It served a metaphorical role in the serial for Aleppo's authentic culture, as opposed to the transformations associated with modernity, such as rural-urban migration, capital flight, and political instability.

15. See Feld 2003:226 on the associations between voice and identity.

16. Stoller (1989) and Seremetakis (1994) show the intimate relationship between bodily modes of perception and notions of deep cultural authenticity in, respectively, Niger and Greece.

17. See Feld 2003 and 1996, where he elaborates this as an epistemology of sound, or ‘acoustemology.’

18. The Syrian artist Sami Burhan argued that history was a far richer source for local specificity. His recent exhibition ‘Dedicated to al-Andalus’ (Damascus, 2004) is one such effort to, as he put it, create a dialogical globalization based on the mutual interchange of ideas, and not only on patterns of mutual consumption (Burhan personal communication, Damascus, February, 2004).

19. The Alawite ('alawî) sect is an offshoot of Shi'a Islam whose members are found primarily in the coastal and mountain regions of Northwestern Syria and in Turkey. The late Syrian President Hafez al-Assad was an Alawite, and he promoted the rise of many Alawites to positions of authority in the Syrian military and government.

20. For example, the Aleppine author Nihad Sirees's al-Kûmîdiyya al-fallâhiyya (The pastoral comedy) (1990) depicts the simplicity of the peasants and their corruption when they come in contact with modern urban life.

21. See Meriwether (1999) for an account of genealogical understandings in early modern Aleppo.

22. In Syria the project of creating a national culture in the post-independence era has been intimately linked to the project of articulating a modern self, which has its roots more deeply in the Arab renaissance (nahda) of the 19th century. (see Hourani 1962). My interest is in exploring the conjunction of ideologies of selfhood and emotion in Syrian expressive culture with broader and usually more intellectualized conceptions of modernity and the nation state. Given the strong links between these domains, nationalist discourse in Syria has to a large extent been a modernist discourse.

23. Elsewhere (Shannon forthcoming) I analyze the formation of modernity in the Arab world in terms of the trope of composition and improvisation.

24. Though no doubt my Syrian friends would scoff at the comparison, the anxieties about marginalization and the active negotiation of authenticity and meaning by Syrian artists parallel the skillful navigation of local and global identities by Pintupi Aboriginal painters as their acrylic paintings enter transnational circuits of production and consumption (Myers 2003).