Anthem Press Contemporary Art, World Cinema, and Visual Culture: Essays by Hamid Dabashi

"Contemporary Art, World Cinema, and Visual Culture: Essays by Hamid Dabashi" is a collection of writings by the acclaimed cultural critic and scholar. A thorough Introduction rigorously frames chapters and identifies in Dabashi’s writings a comprehensive approach, which forms the criteria for selecting the essays for the volume. The Introduction also teases out of these essays the overarching theme that holds them together, the manner they inform a particularly critical angle in them and the way they cohere. The Introduction dwells on the work of one scholar, public intellectual and theorist of modern and contemporary arts to extrapolate more universal issues of concern to art criticism in general. These scattered materials and their underlying theoretical and critical logic are a unique contribution to the field of modern and contemporary arts. Review “Dabashi is the grammarian of hope. He is not offering us the common liberal hopeful analysis; rather it is the analytical hope that Gramsci yearned for but couldn’t see. In these essays, Dabashi explicates the architectonics of oppressive vision(s), only to show us some of the real possibilities of practicing visions of hope.” ―Ismail Nashef, Associate Professor, Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, Qatar “A critical and insightful collection of texts, challenging many ideas about cultural relations between ‘East’ and ‘West’―with Shirin Neshat’s work as a unifying thread.” ―Silvia Naef, Professor, Arabic Studies Section, University of Geneva, Switzerland “Hamid Dabashi’s transcultural and intradisciplinary scholarship has provided a much-needed and otherwise-absent alternative critical voice in the field. The essays selected in this volume by Hamid Keshmirshekan enrich our understanding of regional and diasporic Middle Eastern contemporary art and aesthetics from a diverse and postcolonial perspective.” ―Nada Shabout, Professor of Art History, University of North Texas, USA Book Description A collection of writings by an acclaimed cultural critic and scholar of Middle Eastern history and culture About the Author Hamid Keshmirshekan is an art historian, critic, senior teaching fellow at the Department of History of Art and Archaeology, School of Arts, and research associate at the London Middle East Institute, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. He has been senior lecturer and head of Art History Department at the Advanced Research Institute of Art, Iranian Academy of Arts (2013–17) and associate fellow at the Khalili Research Centre, Faculty of Oriental Studies (2004–12) as well as in the History of Art Department at Oxford University (2012–13). He received his PhD in the history of art from SOAS in 2004 and was awarded two post-doctoral fellowships by Oxford University in 2004-5 and the British Academy, AHRC and ESRC in 2008, at Oxford University. His publications include the edited volume "Contemporary Art from the Middle East: Regional Interactions with Global Art Discourses" (2015) and "Contemporary Iranian Art: New Perspectives" (2013).