Understanding MENASA Film and New Media

Catalog description

This course introduces students to the diverse history of film within the so-called Middle East (Southwest Asia), North Africa, and South Asia as a context for understanding culture and media on the Arabian Peninsula, especially the UAE. By examining pre-cinematic aesthetic, performative, and representational practices, alongside factors such as colonial and state censorship, public and private funding, and social change, the course provides different understandings of films made by Western foreigners, film production from major industries in Cairo, Chennai, Istanbul, Mumbai, and Tehran, and work by independent filmmakers and new media collectives who deconstruct tropes of colonialism, eurocentrism, nationalism, and patriarchy.