Part Three of the long article: “The State of the Arts - Current Issues in Artistic and Literary Creativity in the Arab Region”
Basma Al-Husseini – December 2017
Six years of armed conflicts in Syria and Libya and more than two similar years in Yemen have left, and are still leaving behind, hundreds of thousands dead and wounded and millions of people forcibly displaced or made refugees. The damage done to cities, villages, houses, schools, and hospitals is incalculable; the same can be said of architectural and archaeological monuments that have stood for thousands of years. Meanwhile, the Israeli occupation of Palestine continues, marked by an escalation of oppression and violence against Palestinians after the Second Intifada in 2003 (reaching unprecedented levels in the 2008 War on Gaza), and the US occupation of Iraq also continues taking the form of various armed conflicts , ultimately spawning armed Islamist terrorist groups, the most notorious of which is the Islamic State (known as ISIS) The political and militaristic nuances of these regional conflicts are beyond the scope of this article, but of particular interest here is their impact on the cultural production and artistic creativity of the region. I will try to provide a brief overview of this impact in all its manifestations, bearing in mind that some indirect and deeper effects will only appear in the fullness of time, since the state of the arts and creativity cannot be separated from people's moral and material situations.
Read the full article here: http://www.arabcp.org/page/976
