Sam Bardaouil

I read this for the 2017 Modernist Studies Association Book Prize, which this book won.

Surrealism in Egypt historically and critically recuperates the Art and Liberty surrealist group in World War II Egypt. While recovering this late modernist network, it leverages the contingencies and exigencies of the group to question deep set assumptions about center and periphery as well as the critical habits that assume totalizing narratives of imperialism and Orientalism. This approach buttresses and challenges narratives of decolonization and their inherently Eurocentric focus on imperial power – it instead asks how Egyptian Surrealism extended outward and demanded global changes. Bardaouil establishes the enormous scope of the Art and Liberty movement, reaching from Spain to Syria and Cairo to Paris, but also and most effectively recovers long neglected original art and archives. The ready movement between primary materials in Arabic, French, and English brings this cosmopolitan group into coherence and demands attention from the wider study of late modernism. The “exhibition” pattern, or comparatist approach, is skilfully handled and made accessible to readers from different disciplines. With its attachment to the Art et Liberté: Rupture, War and Surrealism in Egypt (1938–1948) exhibition, Surrealism in Egypt is a polemical yet persuasively readable promise, a promise to alter how modernist studies approaches the surrealist tradition.… (más)