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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 August 2002
This edited volume presents recent directions in the growing scholarship on the visual arts, film, dance, and music from the Middle East. It is a much needed collection of eighteen essays and interviews that addresses several imbalances in academic scholarship and lay understanding of Middle Eastern expressive cultures. In part, the book is intended to counter negative images of the region by providing rich analysis of local art forms. The editor uses tarab, translated for the title as “enchantment,” to conceptualize the aesthetic particular to these forms. She argues that this aesthetic depends on a reflexive interaction among audience, performer, and art that is different from the distanced “appreciation” common to Western high art audiences. Images of Enchantment also aims to contribute to the growing academic literature on modernity in the Middle East. It does so by tracking the changes in expressive culture from the early 1900s to the present, and by looking at the relationship among Middle Eastern artistic production, Western art forms and technology, and political and economic changes. This analysis of the relationship between art and modernity is also intended as a counterpoint to the materials on “traditional art forms of the region” (p. 3). The editor also rightly states that the book's focus on arts such as music, dance, film, and painting offers a corrective to the massive scholarship on text-based art forms (e.g., poetry) and textuality more generally. Finally, the collection attempts to go beyond the confines of the academy by including authors who write for the popular press and short pieces by art producers reflecting on the political and social motivations of their craft.