Hanan Toukan

Hanan Toukan’s interests include Politics and society of the Arab World; aid and art, ‘cultural diplomacy’, professionalisation and NGO-isation of the field of contemporary cultural production; politics of modernity, negotiated representations, neo-orientalism and post-orientalism.

Toukan’s thesis looks at the role of foreign donors (both international and regional) in the contemporary cultural production scene in Lebanon generally and the representation of reflexive post-civil war art more specifically, by way of their funding processes, and the channelling and professionalization of the domain through their intervention. His focus on civil war-related visual output and discourses on trauma, memory and subjectivity produced in post-Taif Lebanon as part and parcel of a wider neoliberal process in the world of cultural production make use of research and literature across the disciplines of politics, IR, cultural, and visual studies.