Islamization as an Artistic Technique
(De)familiarising Superdiversity in Twenty-first Century Dutch Artworks
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 6055055 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Sjoerd-Jeroen Moenandar (0000-0002-1111-1553, University of Groningen, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 49 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 164-181 |
| Publication date | 2025-05-04 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Dutch Crossing (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0309-6564 • E-ISSN: 1759-7854 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/03096564.2025.2461399 |
| OpenAlex | W4407741974 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 8 |
During the first decade of the twenty-first century, there was a remarkable return of ‘the real’ in European public spaces. Genuine efforts were made to establish a discourse of ‘self’ and ‘other’ that deliberately ignored one of the most striking features of contemporary global and multicultural societies: that we are confronted on an almost daily basis with the fact that everybody is somebody’s other. In this paper, I discuss work by Dutch multimedia artists from this period in which quintessential Dutch designs and artefacts (supermarket logos, neighbourhoods, food) have been ‘Arabized’ or ‘Islamized’. By use of a number of classic concepts from the study of literature and the media, I analyse these artworks as examples of a ‘defamiliarization’ that teases out often conflicting meanings. The transformation, in these works, of ‘real’ Dutchness into something more hybrid, leads to unexpected politicizations of quotidian ‘Dutchness’, and the results serve as contributions to an ongoing debate about what counts as Dutch in the public sphere. As such, these artworks resist an oppressive ‘authenticising’ of social reality
Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Islam · Islamization · Asian Studies and History · History · Islamic Studies and History · Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and Political Violence
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |