Decolonization and Calligraphic Abstraction

Bibliographic Data

ID20058478
AuthorsIftikhar Dadi (corresponding author)
Year2025
Pages253-276
Publication date2025-04-22
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeCHAPTER
VenuePostwar Revisited (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/9781478060437-014
OpenAlexW4408516183
ISBN9781478060437
LanguageEN
References cited131

Postwar decolonization engendered the rise of modernist calligraphic abstraction in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia. An intensive search for new artistic languages began at that time, which would seek to recover expressivity that had been repressed under colonialism and that would also actively produce a new modern culture. Modernist experiments in calligraphic abstraction, by artists such as Ibrahim El-Salahi (Sudan) and Anwar Jalal Shemza (Pakistan), have foregrounded textual, abstract, and calligraphic modes and evacuated iconic signifiers. The illegibility of modernist calligraphy—in its dialogue with postcubist figuration and in its nonornamental renderings—reterritorializes the Arabic/Persian/Urdu script, foregrounding its discursivity, while also making its aesthetic permeable to the outside, thus problematizing a simple homology between art and national identity

Abstraction · Decolonization · Epistemology · Political science · Politics · Programming language · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Computer Science · Japanese History and Culture · Law · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies