Description:

Elizabeth Derderian, Anthropology

EDGS Graduate Lecture Series

States have long drawn on art and culture to represent the state and to form a national identity, from the Louvre after the French Revolution through world’s fairs and up to the present day with soft power and cultural diplomacy. The Emirati state attempts to use artists in its nation-making projects, making distinctions amongst artists according to their citizenship status. State actors draw on the contributions of non-citizen artists to show the state as tolerant and cosmopolitan, and of citizen artists to portray a civilized, cultured nation. Artists redirect these attempts to conscript them into nation-making projects in various ways, often refusing to participate on the given terms, selectively disclosing their status or declining outright. The Emirati case reveals an important paradigm shift, as non-citizens emerge as critical to national representation, precisely because they cannot ever belong to it, revealing the tensions wrought by increased transnational migration and the emergence of majority-foreign, minority-citizen states.