Art, Race, and Capitalism in the Postcolonial Arab Gulf States

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The emergence of a high cultural sector in the Gulf began with the opening of its market as a "fix" for the asset price bubble building in the historic Western capitals of the art market during the 1990s and 2000s (Harvey, 2001). Starting with this initial drive to incorporate the Gulf's surfeit of petrodollars, my PhD thesis traces the processes through which a particular Western model of high culture has been exported to the Gulf. Recent interdisciplinary research has demonstrated the central role that racial ideas inherited from empire play in global markets (Abourahme, 2019; Danewid, 2020; Leroy and Jenkins, 2021; Lowe, 2015; Robinson, 1985; Wearing, 2021). Building on this work, my research shows how race lubricated this art market expansion, with racial ideas resolving the tensions that emerged as the cultural sector's liberal ideals chafed against the profoundly hierarchical conditions of global markets in labour and goods. More specifically, it shows how racial discourses separate "high culture" as a set of ideas from the culture industry as a set of profoundly material practices, comprising circuits of capital, art objects, built institutions, workers, and the social relations that bring them together. To fully grasp the political economy of high cultural institution building thus necessitates an "infrastructural" approach. This means taking account not only of art objects and the practices of meaning-making associated with them, but also of the gamut of disciplines and markets involved in creating an entire cultural infrastructure: architectural design, engineering, construction, heritage conservation, and urban planning. Emphasising the inextricability of such concrete practices from the high culture industry, my research also demonstrates how cultural infrastructures on the Arabian Peninsula gave racial ideas, and the uneven distribution of power and resources they license, a durable existence in the urban landscape. As I note, these racial dynamics do not fit neatly within postcolonial theory's traditional geographies (East/West) and periodisations (colonial/postcolonial).My research therefore offers a new approach to the study of the transnational field of high culture. Indeed, while such material underpinnings are obscured by the long-term existence of museums, galleries, and art fairs in the historic Western capitals of the high culture industry, they remain equally central to them. Additionally, by highlighting race and carbon-based economic interdependence as colonial afterlives that are central to the political economy of the Gulf's emerging cultural infrastructure, my research offers a bridge across the two prevailing strands of sociological research on high culture: one focusing on the legacies of colonialism and the other on the penetration of contemporary art by finance capital. Finally, the thesis argues for the need to stretch the conceptual machinery of postcolonial theory to fit the more complex racial and economic dynamics my research uncovered. In line with what I outlined in the previous section, this Fellowship will enable me to turn the innovative, interdisciplinary research described here into three published articles in high-impact journals. It will also allow me to secure a book contract with either Cambridge University Press or University of California Press. This book will make a major contribution to the interdisciplinary study of the Middle East, straddling racial, urban, and cultural studies, as well as international political economy and political geography. Beyond these published outputs, the Fellowship will also allow me to undertake a range of non-academic research dissemination activities (see above). These activities will benefit research users across the professional and political arenas that my research engages (see below).