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Hashemite Discourse and Jordanian National Identity in Independent Film
Abstract
The paper advances this argument through a close analysis of several films, on which there is a noticeable paucity of scholarship, including Struggle in Jerash, I am Ready, Growing up in Amman’s Suburbia, and Sharar. It focuses on the sites and spaces of 1950s and 2000s Jordan, and how each group of filmmakers treats them, their choices about what to include, and what cinematic techniques they use to situate these places, be they Jerusalem’s holy sites or Amman’s decaying urban periphery within Hashemite Jordanian national discourse. It ultimately concludes that the dissonance between Yassin’s work in 1957 and the Amman Filmmakers Cooperative’s work in the 2000s is a result of several factors: contemporary disillusionment with both iterations of Hashemite discourse, the exclusion of urban Palestinians from national identity, and the worsening material conditions in Amman’s urban periphery.
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Other
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