Among the Jasmine Trees. Jonathan Holt Shannon

      Among the Jasmine Trees explores how musical performance offers a cultural space for the negotiation of modern subjectivities and the construction of modernity in Syria and the Arab world today. The modalities of performing and enjoying music in Syria, diverse and contested as they are, reveal some of the nodes of solidarity and fractures in a society coming to terms with itself and its place in the modern world. In Syria, the concept of “authenticity” (aṣāla) has come to play a particularly important role in precipitating debates, clarifying points of cultural cohesion and conflict, and motivating performances among intellectuals and cultural agents: writers, painters, poets, architects, journalists, playwrights, cinematographers, essayists, and, not least, musicians. What is “authentic” Syrian and Arab art? What is “inauthentic”? Who determines the shifting boundaries between authentic and inauthentic, between culture and vulgarity? In the diverse and overlapping art worlds of contemporary Syria—worlds not unto themselves but participating in a series of loosely defined regional and international art worlds and scenes—debate over cultural authenticity must be understood as an expression of the contradictions of the experience of modernity, contradictions felt across the Arab world today.

      In Syria, as elsewhere in the postcolonial world, the arts are an important arena for the struggle over visions of the past, present, and future. These visions—always plural, sometimes incommensurate—have since the 1960s increasingly been articulated in the domain of the arts through discourses of authenticity and authentic culture, often articulated through the notion of a return to heritage (turāth) as the basis for creating a viable modern Arab culture; in this manner, authenticity becomes the marker of an Arab spirit distinct from Western modernities. A common feature of these discourses is their use of a specific language of sentiment and spirit to support claims to authenticity. Such terms as oriental spirit (rūḥ sharqiyya), emotional sincerity (ṣidq), and musical rapture (ṭarab) form part of a critical aesthetic lexicon for evaluating specific artists, works of art, and performances, often in terms of their putative authenticity. The discourses of authenticity and heritage, and the critical emotional lexicon employed to evaluate authenticity, constitute what I am calling the “aesthetics of authenticity” in contemporary Syrian art. Within the framework of this aesthetic sensibility, artists and cultural practices that are thought to be endowed with such emotional qualities as oriental spirit and sincerity, or that produce the experience of ṭarab in audiences—however these terms are understood—are considered to be authentic, whereas those that do not usually are dismissed as inauthentic. The distinction between authentic and inauthentic culture is often but not exclusively articulated in terms of the opposition of authenticity (aṣāla) and modernity (ḥadātha); other common binaries in Syrian critical discourse include Western and Eastern (gharbī/sharqī), modern and traditional (muāṣir/taqlīdī), and new and old (jadīd/qadīm). The fundamental assumption behind these oppositions is that traditional culture is authentic, and modern culture is inauthentic. As I endeavor to show in this work, both “tradition” and “modernity” and the binary oppositions they enable must be understood as products of the rise of modern sensibilities and subjectivities in Syria, as around the world.

      Many Syrian intellectuals and artists assert their claims to cultural authenticity and legitimacy through an appeal to particular conceptions of the past—often the distant past (pre-Islamic, even prehistoric)—and heritage. Heritage evokes images of the collections of costumes, folk crafts, and customs that are found in so-called “heritage and folklore” museums throughout the Arab world. In a succinct critique of the notion of heritage in ethnomusicology, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1995: 169) suggests that the category of heritage usually encompasses “the obsolete, the mistaken, the outmoded, and dead, and the defunct” within a society. The designation of social practice or material culture as heritage, moreover, often “adds value to existing assets that have either ceased to be viable . . . or that were never very economically productive because the area is too hot, too cold, too wet, or too remote” (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1995: 370). My research has shown that in Syria, the broad category of heritage in many instances serves as little more than a catalogue of obsolete and dead cultural traits and artifacts—often those displayed in museums or in gift shops as traditional crafts or lifeways. Yet, in Syria “heritage” (in the form of discourses of turāth) at the same time plays a complex role in contemporary aesthetic and critical discourse, as well as in the constitution of modern Syrian national culture. Of course, not all Syrians would agree on what even counts as heritage. Does it include bodily habits and comportment as well as musical genres? Principles of creative engagement with the world as well as the material products of this engagement? Intellectual achievements in philosophy and science, as well as folkloric understandings of the world? Conceptions of heritage are fluid and frequently