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Humorous Takes on Marriage in the UAE: Digital Comics, Social Media Comedy and Short Films Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-04-25 Doris Hambuch, Sarah Nesti Willard, Urwa Tariq, Al Anood Alboainain
This article investigates humorous representations of marriage in digital comics, stand-up comedy and short films created by Emirati artists and content creators who primarily rely on social media as their most effective form of distribution. Studied against theories of humor in the Western and the Arabic traditions, selected examples demonstrate that the story-based genre appears less light-hearted
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The Atomic Future: Technology, Labor and World Peace in the Thought of ʿAli Rashid Shaʿath Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-04-11 Hebatalla Taha, Pelle Valentin Olsen
In 1946, one year after the atomic bombings of Japan, Palestinian thinker ʿAli Rashid Shaʿath (1908–1967) published a book entitled Min al-binsilin ila al-qunbula al-zarriya (From Penicillin to the Atomic Bomb). An accessible work of popular science, it contains highly optimistic reflections on the future and predicts the following two events as a result of nuclear technology and energy: a workers’
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Collecting Traces, Documenting Past and Present: How Archiving Became a Way to Open Futures in Contemporary Arab Political Experiences Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-04-11 Leyla Dakhli
One of the ways this political dream of the recent Arab Revolutions had been re-actualized is through building archives. In countries where political regimes had sought to deprive citizens of their futures by concealing traces of their past, archiving might be understood as a revolutionary gesture. This article studies archival projects born in the Arab region during the 2000s. It interprets the gesture
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Refractions of a Grim Future: Figuring Dissonant Beirut in Barrack Rima’s Speculative Graphic Narratives Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-04-11 Rasha Chatta
This essay discusses the speculative turn in recent Arab literature and arts by focusing on the comics genre. It first attempts to outline the genealogies and ramifications of a growing canon of graphic narratives—qiṣaṣ muṣawwara as they are known in Arabic—concerned with the speculative element as a lens or tool to deal with socio-political aspects. Moreover, it focuses on the analysis of selected
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Returning to ‘Nature’: Jurjy Zaydan and Sabri Musa’s Imagination of Future Egypt Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-04-11 Teresa Pepe
This study investigates the link between futurism and the environment from a historical perspective by studying how the future of ‘nature’ is imagined in two Egyptian speculative texts written during the 20th century, specifically, an essay entitled ‘Baʿd miʾat sana’ (‘One Hundred Years After’) written by the Lebanese writer and intellectual Jurjy Zaydan in 1900 and the novel as-Sayyid min Haql al-Sabanikh
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Reckoning with the Legacy of the Digital: Toward a Renewed Quest for Modernity in the Middle East Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-02-19 Mohamed Zayani, Joe F. Khalil
Although the digital Middle East has received wide attention, there has been little engagement with the cultural roots of ongoing transformations. This article offers a critical analysis of the region’s technological journey over the past century, revealing how the pursuit of the digital aligns with a historical quest for modernity and aspirations for socioeconomic development. By examining the cultural
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Inventing a Selfie Studio: Turkey’s Studio Görçek Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-11-01 Özge Baykan Calafato
Through a case study of Istanbul’s Foto Görçek, playfully dubbed ‘the world’s first selfie studio’, this article focuses on the changing photographic practices from the mid-1940s–1960s in modern Turkey, which experienced a dramatic political transition during the 1950s with the introduction of the multi-party regime following three decades of strictly secular Kemalist rule. This study explores how
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The Media and the Islands Crisis: Understanding the Heteronomization of the Egyptian Media Field through a Comparative Discourse Analysis Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-11-01 Amr Abdelrahim
Attracting large audiences during the late Mubarak era and the revolutionary period that followed, Egyptian political talk show hosts played an important role in supporting the authoritarian rollback initiated during the summer of 2013 before seemingly losing much of their hard-won influence. To understand their marginalization better, this article claims that the habits and practices these secular
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Choreographing Movement as ‘Double Critique’ in Bouchra Ouizguen’s ‘Corbeaux’ Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-10-27 Rachid Belghiti
This article analyzes movement in and around Bouchra Ouizguen’s dance performance ‘Corbeaux’ (2014) through the conceptual framework of Abdelkabir Khatibi’s ‘double critique’. The article explores how ‘Corbeaux’ choreographs its reenactment of the hal Sufi traditional head movement and how this choreography epistemically emerges as a ‘double critique’ or a crisis of both the immobilizing sacred pastness
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‘I Dance, I Revolt’ Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-10-27 Shayna M. Silverstein
During the intensification of migration and border politics throughout Europe in the mid-2010s, displaced Syrians fleeing war to seek asylum and a livable life were simultaneously welcomed as vulnerable strangers who could contribute to European economies and societies and perceived as threats to the imaginaries of a homogenous Europe. This essay critiques the logic embedded in this narrative, namely
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Shikhat, Nashat and (Un)serious Theory Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-10-27 Moulay Driss El Maarouf, Taieb Belghazi, Farouk El Maarouf
In nashat-loaded circles, the shikha, claiming the center of her pedestal, asks the question: ‘al-hlawa fin kayna?’ (sweetness, where is it?). She pauses tantalizingly and looks around, but no one offers an answer. She inquires again with a smile. As she proceeds, what seems like mere initiation into eroticism and sensuality becomes a deeply philosophical pursuit of the rather far-flung meanings of
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To Follow Bousaadiya Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-10-27 Leila Tayeb
This article takes the figure of Bousaadiya, once performed in varying iterations throughout central North Africa, as an entry point to approach the problematics of mobility and memory in Libya. Bousaadiya performance, a multidimensional set of practices that I read critically as dance, produces an embodied social ground upon which Libyans have enacted and contested racialized practices of belonging
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Visual, Spatial and Temporal Aporias in the Post-Palestinian Films of Basma Alsharif Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-10-12 Kristin Lené Hole
This article focuses on the films of diasporic Palestinian artist Basma Alsharif, analyzing the visual strategies she mobilizes to negotiate three aporias in Palestinian experience around visuality, space and mobility and temporality. Focusing on Ouroboros (2017) and Home Movies Gaza (2013), I explore the ethical ways she represents a situation of suspended violence without spectacularizing suffering
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Eventocracy, Affective Supremacy and Resistance in Turkey’s Captured Media Ecology Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-05-16 Ergin Bulut
The Turkish government has captured media to build ‘eventocracy’, a regime of ‘ruling by event’ to manage public attention and disrupt politics. Eventocracy strives for affective supremacy, a mode of political-emotional domination where the ruling AKP positions itself as the self-righteous national power. Through a chain of events, it casts the opposition’s grievances as national threats. Two specific
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Missionizing Affects Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-05-16 Heather Jaber
This article examines the fictionalized retelling of a real 2017 controversy, after images proliferated of fans raising the rainbow flag during the Lebanese band Mashrou Leila’s concert in Egypt in solidarity with the band’s openly queer frontman. It examines the Egyptian musalsal or Arabic-language drama serial, ‘Awalem Khafeya, Hidden Worlds and suggests that the program engages in the ‘recoding’
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A ‘New India’ for the Arab World Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-05-16 Ada Petiwala
This article investigates the formations of ‘Brand Modi’ and ‘Brand Bollywood’ and their strategic and overlapping foray into the United Arab Emirates, considering it a pivotal moment in contemporary transregional media production. Two branding campaigns form the basis of my analysis: Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s highly mediatized 2015–2018 U.A.E. visits and Shah Rukh Khan’s 2016–2019 ‘#BeMyGuest’
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Not Afraid of My Sponsor Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-05-16 Claire Cooley
This article considers the role of media infrastructures in the U.A.E. racializing the South Asian migrant workers making, maintaining and interacting with them. Employing a sonic methodology, I historicize these infrastructures and legacies of racialization by considering the fiber optic cables carrying telecommunications in the region and their positioning along colonial trade routes, telegraph networks
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Precarity and Possibility Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-05-16 Blake Atwood
At first glance, Iran and Lebanon may appear to have very little in common when it comes to state intervention in the media economy. The Iranian government oversees nearly every aspect of media production, distribution, and exhibition, while the Lebanese state exercises relatively little oversight of media and offers no financial or infrastructural support to the country’s robust creative industries
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Rejecting the Ottomans, Revisiting the Mamluks Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-05-16 Yasmine M. Ahmed, Claire Panetta
This article queries the sociopolitical implications of a wave of popular interest in the legacy of the Mamluk dynasty (1250–1517) in post-2013 Egypt. Although the era’s sultans have traditionally been derided in mainstream culture as tyrannical ‘foreign’ leaders, they have recently been reframed as the last nationalist rulers before the Ottoman invasion. This revised characterization underpins the
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Narrating Crisis through the Loyalist Witness Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-03-18 Samer Abboud
Scholarly interest in Syrian wartime witnessing has overwhelmingly focused on how cultural production bears witness to state violence. In this article, I shift attention to a form of loyalist wartime witnessing by asking how the films of Syrian director Joud Said construct war stories giving meaning to regime narratives of a ‘crisis’. Drawing on two of his films, Maṭar Homs and Darb al-Sama, I argue
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‘I’m Interviewing a Sheep’ Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-03-18 Lindsey Pullum
In this article, I summarize the state of Arabic (as a medium and a message) in Israeli state media and compare attitudes towards the Arabic language with content from the popular bilingual (Arabic-Hebrew) sitcom written and created by a Palestinian-Israeli writer, Sayed Kashua. I argue that Kashua’s work in his show, Arab Labor, reiterates poor attitudes towards Arabic and foreshadows the ethnolinguistic
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Equal in Death?: The Cultural and Emotive Politics of Death and Dying in Morocco during the Pandemic Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-03-17 Yousra Sbaihi
The COVID-19 pandemic has sparked new perceptions of death—dying has lost its disinterestedness and transpired to be a site of cultural, existential and political struggles, despite efforts to shelve the idea of an unavoidable death from everyday life. Moroccan media, in particular, has centered its focus on mass burials, over-crowded hospitals and spiraling death rates to amplify citizens’ fear of
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Subtitling Taboo Expressions from a Conservative to a More Liberal Culture: The Case of the Arab TV Series Jinn Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-03-17 Ahmad S. Haider, Bassam Saideen, Riyad F. Hussein
Subtitling involves constraints about differences between cultures. This requires a set of translation strategies, especially when subtitling from relatively conservative to more liberal cultures. This study explores subtitlers’ strategies when translating the Jordanian Arabic vernacular series Jinn into English. Jinn has been selected because it’s Netflix’s first Arabic-Jordanian series containing
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Using the Clubhouse Platform in Politics: The Emergence of a New Social Media Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-03-17 Yagoub Y. Al-Kandari, Khaled H. Alqahs
This study analyses the political aspects of the Clubhouse platform used in Kuwait as an emerging social media. An e-questionnaire considering demographical variables and scales was distributed, and 1,539 social media users in Kuwait were surveyed. SPSS (version 24) was used for data entry and analysis. Data showed a difference in the percentages of males and females using this platform without significantly
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The Violent Story: The Case of A Separation Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-03-10 Hamid Taheri
The depiction of violence in Iranian cinema has always been debated. The vitality of this issue is due to the desire of right-wing groups to restrict cinema. Conversely, reformists want to escape these ‘accusations’ and the ensuing censorship. This article argues that both groups are inaccurate because they view violence in cinema as moments and images rather than a narrative process. Following Galtung’s
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The Joker in Iraq’s Tishreen [October] Protests Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-12-30 Balsam Mustafa
This article explores how the cultural symbol of the Joker, from the 2019 American movie Joker, first unfolded during the 2019 Iraqi Tishreen [October] Revolution as radical-gradual creative imagery both shocking and contested among Iraqi activists. Considering the visuals as modes, I argue that they first emerged as antenarrative, open to multiple interpretations. The antenarrative quickly transformed
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Exasperating Rides and Bittersweet Duties Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-12-26 Nadine Sinno
This article offers a contextual analysis of Annemarie Jacir’s film Wajib. I argue that Jacir employs the tropes of ‘the exasperating ride’ and ‘bittersweet duty’ as a means of demonstrating the material conditions endured by Palestinians in Nazareth, documenting mundane acts of sumuud in the face of personal and collective traumas, and articulating the complex sociopolitical landscape inhabited by
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Al-Abad: On the Ongoing Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-11-09 Eylaf Bader Eddin
This article focuses on the word al-Abad, literally meaning forever, infinite and immortality, and how it was deployed by the Syrian regime. The word is used excessively in different discursive mediums within Syria’s political culture, either in the form of banners, graffiti, photos, slogans or songs. The article seeks to analyze al-Abad through its different dimensions: its literal meaning in language
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Al-nuzuh: Displacement as Keyword Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-11-09 Anne-Marie McManus
In 2022, more than half of Syria’s population have been displaced as they escaped from the destruction of their homes and livelihoods, forced resettlement, terror and overall defeat. This article focuses on the keyword al-nuzuh (displacement). It explores how al-nuzuh generates new representational codes for Syrian and Syrian-Palestinian experiences concerning the politics of displacement and an accumulated
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Characterizing the Engagement of Syrian Women in the Revolution Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-11-09 Emma Aubin-Boltanski, Oussama Khalbous
The Syrian 2011 revolution was a moment of unprecedented expression and graphic conquest of the public space. Written and chanted words, sometimes shouted and sang during the demonstrations, have somehow crystallized hopes, disillusionment and indignation of the Syrian people. Harâ’ir حرائر (Free Women) is one of them. When it appeared on the revolutionary scene, it quickly raised a fierce debate
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From Shame to Pride Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-11-09 Haian Dukhan
This article is about the word Shawaya. Before the Syrian uprising, many Syrians used the term Shawaya in a derogatory manner when referring to a class of people perceived as backward, uneducated and vulgar. However, during the course of the Syrian uprising and subsequent civil war, self-identification as a Shawi (the singular of Shawaya) became more prevalent among people belonging to this group of
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Infiltrators among Us Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-11-09 Nura Ibold
This article focuses on the word ‘Mundas’ (plural Mundasīn), which literally translates as ‘infiltrator’, and was one of the words most frequently used to describe those opposing the Syrian regime. The word was rarely used within the Syrian political repertoire before the outset of the revolution. However, it soon became a marker separating those who supported President Bashar al-Assad from those who
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Jawlān Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-11-09 Aamer Ibraheem, Adrien Zakar
In this article, we focus on the keyword Jawlān to highlight one of the most critical, if overlooked, dimensions of autocracy in modern Syria. Occupied by Israel in 1967, the Jawlān is a borderland where words have made political relationships possible, sustaining forms of national and kin attachments for decades. We show how, within post-1967 Syria, the Jawlān came to function as a discursive vessel
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The Political Potential of Ya Hef in Contemporary Syrian Politics Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-11-09 Kurstin Gatt
Slogans and songs are fundamental components of the revolutionary experience. In its linguistic and musical form, the phrase ya hef (‘what a shame’) became a slogan of the 2011 Syrian revolution and served as a force for instigating a socio-political change in contemporary Syria. This paper investigates ya hef and its political potential in contemporary Syrian politics from a discourse-analytical perspective
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‘Rojava’: Evolving Public Discourse of Kurdish Identity and Governance in Syria Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-11-09 Thomas McGee
The Syrian conflict has contributed to major debates in culture, media and politics around transitions linked to borders, ethnicity and identity. Against this backdrop, this article explores the use of ‘Rojava’, a keyword referring to Kurdish-majority areas in the country. It examines the term’s changing meanings and usage against the evolving backdrop of the governance project led by Kurds since the
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Romancing the Nation Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-11-09 Rahaf Aldoughli
Spanning the era of the two Assads (father and son) up to 2007 (the referendum year confirming Bashar al-Assad’s continuation as president) and songs produced during the war, this study will explore the role of ‘love’ (hub) and its relation to ‘blood’ (dam) in the continuity and persistence of heroism in the national narrative. As a form of politics, love and blood have served the Baathist state in
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Tashbih: The Logic of Annihilation of the Other Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-11-09 Yazan Badran
Tashbih, in Syrian vernacular, has long referred to a diverse constellation of practices and acts—invariably illegal and often articulated with violence or the threat of violence—perpetrated by individuals and groups, the Shabbiha, with deep (often kin-based) ties to the Baathist regime of President Hafez al-Assad and later his son, Bashar al-Assad. The ebb and flow of the role played by the Shabbiha
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The ‘Un-revolutionary’ Figure Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-11-09 Razan Ghazzawi
Since protest movements had swept the Middle East and North Africa regions in early 2011, new politics have emerged, creating unimagined spaces, ways of existence and knowing the world, and more importantly, new subcultures of othering. This article critically examines revolutionary subcultures of non-comradeship, figurations of ‘non-authentic revolutionaries’ and ways of revolutionary othering by
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Narratives of Continuity and Change in Jeddah Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-09-16 Stefan Maneval
The historiography of Jeddah’s tower houses, from the question of their origin to their abandonment by their Saudi owners, serves as an example in this article of how different imaginary institutions of society inform writings on architectural history. Based on a discussion of books, journal articles and Ph.D. theses by Saudi architects from the 1980s and 1990s, as well as a book chapter by Geoffrey
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No Spaces without History Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-09-16 Bettina Gräf, Laura Hindelang
Research on urban spaces in the Gulf region has increased substantially over the last two decades, particularly with a strong focus on contemporary phenomena. However, this focus often overlooks entangled histories and past trajectories that are formative for the present. Moreover, it perpetuates the notion of the region’s ahistoricity. To challenge the Gulf cities’ presumed lack of history, we have
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Saudi YouTube Influencers, Their Relationship to Dubai and the Role of Social Media in Dubai’s Urban Branding Strategy Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-09-16 Sabrina Zahren
YouTube influencers, especially from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), command a huge (young) audience and form part of a global pop cultural mainstream representative of the fast-growing digital content industry. These YouTubers are on one hand embedded in a highly professionalized network, consisting of multi-channel networks (MCN s), media companies, TV stations and advertising partners, all operating
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Thinking of the City through Film and Cinema: Roll’em Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-09-16 Ulrike Freitag
The Saudi film Roll’em (director Abd al-Illah al-Qurashi, Jeddah, 2019) tells the story of a young would-be film director and his dream to make a film about his native Jeddah. Shot just before the official opening of cinemas in the country, Roll’em was filmed at the beginning of an enormous boost to the Saudi entertainment industry. The film engages the history of filmmaking and cinema in Saudi Arabia
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The Transregional Illustrated Magazine Al-Arabi Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-09-16 Bettina Gräf, Laura Hindelang
This article investigates the transregional cultural magazine Al-Arabi (al-‘Arabi) during the late 1950s and 1960s under its first editor, the Egyptian scientist Ahmad Zaki. Founded in Kuwait, the magazine’s establishment and sociocultural-political agenda are reconstructed within the context of Kuwait’s cultural diplomacy and pan-Arabism during decolonization and early Cold War politics. Al-Arabi
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Arabic Prose Poetry Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-07-10 Nevine Fayek
This article attempts to outline the most significant linguistic and conceptual transformations brought about by the developing periodical press and the translation movement in Egypt toward the beginning of the twentieth century. Both these phenomena entailed the need for new writing practices, which in turn led to intense discussions about the form and status of the literary/poetic text. While poetry
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Early Egyptian Radio Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-07-10 Ziad Fahmy
This article historically traces some of Egypt’s early private radio stations which operated from the late-1920s until May 1934 when they were all forcefully shut down by the Egyptian government. It sheds light on this important early period in Egyptian media history and highlights the role of many unacknowledged early radio pioneers. More importantly, the article analyzes the early forced transition
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Intermediating Aural and Visual Divides in Ahmed Shafie’s Print Literary Media and Hassan Khan’s New Media Art Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-07-10 Marie Thérèse Abdelmessih
New literary media in print has changed its paradigms by converging with new media art; likewise, new media art draws on narrative techniques and poetic images. These paradigm transmutations have generated collaborative links binding distinct creative practices, intensifying the reading engagement and/or immersive experience. The mutual interpenetrations of print literary media and new media art challenges
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Meandering Through the Magazine Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-07-10 Walter Armbrust
In the context of the Middle East, conventionally, ‘new media’ have been viewed as digital media that have emerged over roughly the past two to three decades. The advent of any new medium has always disrupted the affordances of existing media—a fact widely recognized in historically inflected media studies. My paper explores the illustrated magazine in interwar Egypt. In this case the form of the printed
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Public and Private Diaries Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-07-10 Teresa Pepe
This article analyzes a number of Egyptian blogs in relation to their print ancestors, in particular private notebooks written by young effendis in the 1920s and public fictional diaries serialized in the periodical press in the same period in Egypt. It compares the media transition taking place in Egypt in the early 2000s following the adoption of blogging and social media to the one occurring in
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Regimes of Visibility in the Global Parkour Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-07-10 Ines Braune
Parkour is often defined through its strikingly visual dimension with breathtaking images of leaps covering amazing distances, recordings of seemingly impossible body movements and flying bodies apparently no longer constrained by gravity. However, the basic idea behind parkour is to find the most efficient or direct path as one crosses from one point to another while overcoming all obstacles using
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Relaunching the Arab Intellectual Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-07-10 Yvonne Albers
One year after the 1967 June War, also known as al-naksa, the Syrian poet Adunis announced the launching of a new cultural journal: Mawaqif. The article discusses how that launch in 1968 became the point of culmination in the poet’s strategy to emancipate himself from the poetry journal Shiʿr after resigning from its editorial board in 1964. A close examination of Adunis’s public interventions before
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‘Translating’ Orality and Sociability into Print Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-07-10 Barbara Winckler
The Beirut-based women’s magazine al-Mar’a al-Jadida (The new woman, 1921–1927), edited by Julia Tu‘ma Dimashqiyya, regularly published articles that reported on cultural events, summarizing and quoting from speeches and poems delivered during the meetings of Jami‘at al-Sayyidat (the Women’s League) or in other forums. In this paper I examine how these forms of orality and sociability were ‘translated’
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When the Silent Past Gets a Troubling Voice: Facebook Publics, Circulatory Texts and the Negotiations of National Identity Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-03-17 Nermin Elsherif
This article traces the contemporary (re)interpretations of a 14 minutes of American newsreel footage depicting 1928 Cairo as it circulated through popular Facebook communities dedicated to the nostalgic discourse of Egypt’s ‘good old days’ or ‘al-zaman al-gamīl,’ perceived as an era of morality and proper Egyptianness. Among the several orientalist scenes captured on the footage was a character improvisation
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Game without Game: Children’s Activism and the Politics of the Everyday Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2021-11-18 Moulay Driss El Maarouf, Taieb Belghazi, Farouk El Maarouf
The atmosphere of contestation in Moroccan streets post-2011 has offered children the unique opportunity to participate in mounting social critiques and political protests. This paper contributes to the emerging literature on children and social movements in MENA by examining the role children play as social and political activists. We relate a number of examples from the post-2011 events in which
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From Weddings as Resistance to Resistance to Weddings: Un-weddings in the Palestinian Films ‘Villa Touma’ and ‘In Between’ Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2021-09-23 Ariel M. Sheetrit
This study focuses on two films in which weddings are conspicuously absent, Villa Touma (Suha Arraf, 2014) and In Between (Bar Bahr, Maysaloun Hamoud, 2016). Both films have a distinct focus on weddings: they are mentioned repeatedly—whether with longing or loathing, occasionally rendered in the films’ hazy perimeters, in ways that mark them as unsubstantial, inane and infecund, but most often they
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A Women’s Empowerment Campaign in Egypt: Is It Really Empowering?: A Campaign Creators’ Perspective Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2021-09-21 Aya Shata, Michelle I. Seelig
The last few years have seen many movements aimed at empowering women worldwide. The question of what it means to be empowered and how to empower others needs to be studied further. Using ‘Taa Marbuta,’ a women’s empowerment campaign in Egypt, this paper attempts to understand the process of empowerment from the campaign/content creators’ perspective, including levels of empowerment and forms of power
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Hizbullah’s ʿAshura Posters (2007–2020): The Visualization of Religion, Politics and Nationalism Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2021-09-16 Sarah Hamdar
This article examines Hizbullah’s annual ʿAshura posters. It focuses on the campaigns created between 2007 and 2020 and places them against a backdrop of contemporary political events to demonstrate how the posters act as a significant site of political contestation and nationalist manifestation. By linking ʿAshura to contemporary politics in an ongoing reinterpretation of Imam Husayn’s martyrdom,
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How Ibn Saud Became a Romanticized Legend in the U.S., British and French Press (1920–1953) Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2021-09-16 Sylvie A. Briand
Despite the vast research on Abdulaziz Ibn Saud, the founder of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, there has been little attention given to the impact of his representation by the British, French and U.S. press in the first half of the twentieth century. The man who built the kingdom in line with his Islamic sect’s doctrine has been portrayed as a puritan reformer and a modernist, in sharp contrast with
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Serial Readers United: Independent Bookstore Cultures in Kuwait Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2021-09-16 Ildiko Kaposi, Shahd Al-Shammari
Through an exploration of Kuwait’s independent bookstores, the article challenges the reputation of Gulf Arab monarchies as generally lacking a reading culture. It treats independent bookstores as urban spaces designed to enable participation in the practices and rituals of reading books and as indicators of reading microcultures in the country. Run by readers and writers, independent bookstores fill
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Sacred (re)Collections: Culture, Space and Boundary Negotiation in Turkish-Islamic Memory Politics Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2021-10-06 Torsten Janson, Neşe Kınıkoğlu
This article discusses how state-organized, memory-cultural production drawing on religious signifiers contributes to a sacralization of Turkish public memory institutions and public space. This reinforces an Islamic-nationalist imagination of contemporary Turkey. The article explores state-led, disciplinary interventions in museal space (the Sacred Trusts exhibition of relics at Topkapı Palace Museum)
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Beyond the Nation and the Diaspora: Examining Bollywood’s Transnational Appeal in the United Arab Emirates Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2021-09-28 Sreya Mitra
The MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region has long been a site of Hindi film consumption and circulation, with Dubai emerging in recent years as a potent hub for Bollywood’s overseas distribution and marketing. Though the role of the “Gulf” in articulating immigrant experiences and regional identity among Malayali Indians is well documented (Radhakrishnan 2009), Hindi cinema’s popularity in the