Transnational Perspectives on Middle Eastern/North African Cinema

Catalog description

This interdisciplinary seminar explores the various dimensions of the cultural politics of Middle Eastern/North African cinema within transnational perspectives. We begin from the premise that representation itself is a site of contestation, with profound historical and theoretical implications impacting the subject, genre, aesthetic, and narrative framing. Drawing on various texts from diverse disciplines, including from film/media studies, literary theory, visual culture, and cultural studies, this course examines issues of representation in their various ramifications for debates over "the colonial," "the national," and "the diasporic." The course will engage in a close analysis of the films, while also taking on board the various scholarly texts written about the films and their production and reception. The course will be organized around key concepts and questions having to do with Orientalist visual culture, the imperial imaginary, contested histories, imagined geographies, gender and national allegory, diasporic identity and postcoloniality, and the graven images taboo and the theology of adaptation. The course also examines Middle Eastern/North African films in terms of image, sound, editing, and so forth, exploring the ways in which cultural representations are shaped by specifically mediatic techniques. The close study of films will be combined with the analysis of related audio-visual materials. Discussion of the readings in relation to the screening will form a substantial part of the course.