Though it begins in the (in)discipline of visual studies, my intervention is interdisciplinary and takes into account largely ignored ecological considerations in MENA-region analyses of empire. The ongoing and misleadingly named “garbage crisis” in Lebanon, once again re-ignited since 2015, precipitated my engagement in the necro-and-geopolitics, materiality, and visuality of waste. This paper is a preliminary exercise to rethink the politics of waste through a close reading of The Blue Barrel Grove (2013–), an ongoing investigative research and artistic practice by the Beirut-based writer and artist Jessika Khazrik. Texts, exhibition installations, interactive performances, a poem, and a play revolve around an illegal toxic waste shipment that left Italy and ended up in Lebanon in 1987 during the civil war (1975–90). Khazrik works with the extensive photographic and scientific archive of Pierre Malychef, an eco-toxicologist and herbal pharmacologist assigned by the Lebanese state in 1988 to investigate the case, closed seven years later with his indictment as a “false witness.” I argue that her work, with and beyond the archive, unfolds in two registers. On the one hand, she imagines with matter and its “intra-action,” in Karen Barad’s terms, pursuing waste as it exiles beings and spaces. On the other hand, she reveals the workings of language in the judiciary proceedings that charged the scientist with false testimony, questioning what ends up counting as “evidence” and “witnessing” in the linguistically-embedded economy of exile and denial. Through The Blue Barrel Grove then, Khazrik participates in a feminist intellectual movement that disavows questions of representation to refocus on matter. The result is an artistic practice that proposes a new way of thinking about waste by literally returning to it, enacting a historical cut to its modern exile in the region in the context of a colonial discourse on hygiene. What ensues is an unruly imaginary where waste and the land collaborate against what I call “real-estate governmentality.” Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfways: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Hanssen, Jens. “Colonial Anxieties, Scientific Missionaries, and Social Containment in Fin-de-Siècle Beirut.” Archaeology and History in the Lebanon 22: 51-61. Khazrik, Jessika. 2017. “I Am Not Your History.” The Funambulist 14 “Toxic Atmospheres” (Nov-Dec): 54-57. Mbembe, Achille. 2003. “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15, no. 1: 11-40. Nixon, Robert. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, Ma: Harvard University Press.

This paper will address the aesthetics of dispossession and space in contemporary Maghribi documentaries. While paying particular attention to two recent films, Un rond point dans ma tête (Hassan Ferhani, 2015) and Samir dans la poussière (Mohamed Ouzine, 2015), my paper situates them in relation to other destabilizing representations of reality, such as Tariq Teguia's La clôture (Haçla) (2004), Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche's Bled number one (2006) and several new films from Tunisia. These filmmakers experiment with interview, performance, direct address, and a formal preoccupation with the border between fiction and the real, all of which function to further localize the sense of despair articulated by their male characters. Such an experimentation centers on the creation of an imaginary from the interaction of documentary subjects and the filmmaker in a way that recalls Jean Rouch’s experiments with “cine-ethnography.” Like Rouch, these filmmakers are interested in the ways that performance might allow for a different kind of imaginary to be constructed, one that would allow for new relations between places and people. Their attempts to “improvise” cinema (Mouëllic) owe a great deal to this approach, but they also draw on legacies of Arab cinema from the postcolonial period. Consequently, this paper addresses the films that historical context, too, considering them in the light of earlier cinematic articulations of social reality such as those of the “defeat-conscious cinema” identified by Nouri Bouzid. Bouzid traced changing representations of the male hero in the aftermath of 1967, which produced, he argued, a new realist cinema for a new imaginary, one dominated by the traumas of that year--the loss of Palestine and the resignation of Jamal Abd al-Nasser. The contemporary Maghribi documentaries analyzed here produce a different sense of defeat, one borne out of the failed promises of the so-called Arab Spring and a consciousness of the perils and impossibilities of Mediterranean migration. In so doing, they offer a new postulation of gendered Maghribi imaginaries within a global Middle East. Bouzid, Nouri. “New Realism in Arab Cinema: the Defeat-Conscious Cinema.” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, 15 (1995): 242-50. Mouëllic, Gilles. Improviser le cinéma. Crisnée, Belgium: Yellow Now, 2011. Rouch, Jean. Ciné-Ethnography. Edited and translated by Steven Feld. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.

In this paper, I will reconstruct the spatial history of Shargiyya (Eastern Province), from desert oasis to industrialized center of oil production. In so doing, I will counter official narratives of the exceptional US-Saudi alliance and its role in building Saudi Arabia. Mainstream scholarship on US-Saudi relations omits a big picture that is captured by only few writers. Robert Vitalis’s America’s Kingdom provides a well-researched and patiently-argued account of transformation and racialization of the landscape that began in the 1930s. Vitalis recounts the untold story of labor and human currency by using Aramco company documentation, public relations records, films, magazines and unpublished employee correspondence and documents. In Desert Kingdom, Toby Jones addresses the spatialization of al-Hasa and Qatif by focusing on central governance’s environmental impact on natural resources, revealed through the archive of critical local press from the 1950s through the 1970s. Finally, Mohammed Al-Saif’s biography of Abdullah Al-Tariqi, Saudi’s first oil minister, tells an alternative history of the kingdom through the life of one of the most important personalities of oil politics during the second half of the 20th century. My own work, however, subjects this alternative narrative to further visualization. By using found and archival still images and footage, including public relations material, radio broadcast archives, and TV news, my research is revisualizing the way that space was produced in the Eastern Province over the decades. This study will emphasize the labor strikes and resistance movements during the 1950’s, 60’s and 70’s and their impact on labor laws and nationalization of oil. Such a history provides a stark visual contrast to the phantasmagoria of a so-called oil-independent Vision 2030, with its entertainment industry spectacle and fantastical promises of social progress and reform removed from civil discourse and a nonexistent civil society. Using a Lefebvrian theoretical framework, and extending the work of Vitalis, Jones, and Al-Saif with my own archival research, I will revisualize the production of social space in Eastern Saudi, highlighting the stark contrast between social spatial histories, questionable visions of sustainability, and the futuristic grandeur of modernization. Al-Saif, Mohammed. Abdullah Al-Tariqi: Sukhur an-Naft wa Rimal as-Siyyasa (Oil Rocks and Political Sands). Beirut: Jadawel, 2007. Jones, Toby. Desert Kingdom: How Oil and Water Forged Modern Saudi Arabia. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010. Vitalis, Robert. America’s Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier. London: Verso, 2009.