Cultural Sovereignty in a Global Art Economy: Egyptian Cultural Policy and the New Western Interest in Art from the Middle East

The post-1989 transformation of the Egyptian art world reveals the particular tenacity of colonial logics and national attachments in culture industries built through anticolonial nationalism and socialism. Tensions emerged between and among Western and Egyptian curators, critics, and artists with the development of a foreign-dominated private-sector art market and as Egyptian art begins to circulate internationally. This international circulation of art objects has produced rearranged strategies of governance in the cultural realm, collusions and conflicts between the public and private sector, and, most importantly, a new articulation of cultural sovereignty. [art, neoliberalism, sovereignty, nationalism, postsocialism]