Siobhán Shilton – författare

Art since the 1980s reveals a striking proliferation of works exploring the complex cross-cultural identities that have resulted from a long history of exchange between France and the Maghreb. This adventurous study examines distinctively visual means of presenting ‘Franco-Maghrebi’ identities in performance, video, photography and installation art. Transcultural encounters investigates the ways in which such art spurs a re-thinking of both postcolonial and feminist issues and critical terms in an uneven globalised frame. It demonstrates how this corpus develops art historical debates concerning gender and representation, while also considering emerging visions of the Maghreb. Analysing a wide range of works presented in galleries, online or in the street, this study shows how they test the boundaries of established art genres, calling for the invention of new modalities of ‘reading’ transnational visual culture. The first book to explore postcolonial and feminist approaches to contemporary art from a ‘Francophone’ space, Transcultural encounters incorporates much material that has previously received little critical attention.The book will be of interest to researchers in French studies, postcolonial studies, visual studies and gender studies, as well as curators and artists working across cultures and media.

The revolutions that began to sweep across countries in North Africa and the Middle East in December 2010 - like other revolutions in diverse modern historical contexts - have often been articulated, internally and externally, in black and white terms of success or failure, liberation or constraint, for or against, friend or enemy. These internal and external clichés are perpetuated by what Jellel Gasteli has called 'icons of revolutionary exoticism'. Paying particular attention to works from the Tunisian Revolution of 2011, this book examines a diverse body of art including photography, sculpture, graffiti, performance, video and installation by over twenty-five artists. Examining how art can evoke the idea of revolution, Art and the Arab Spring reveals a new way of understanding these revolutions, their profound cultural impact, and of the meaning of the term 'revolution' itself.