This paper examines how practices of mass beach tourism in Tunisia affect national economies of intimacy and desire through an analysis of the film Bezness by Nouri Bouzid (1992). Since Tunisia's independence in 1956, economic development strategies for connecting the state to global flows of capital have been culturally rooted in the production of the nation as a modern "open society" (Hazbun 2008). The vigorous development and promotion of the tourist industry has been instrumental in producing that image. Wildly successful as an earner of foreign currency, tourism has also entailed the re-configuration of the nation's built environment. Insofar as they represent an extension of European culture within Tunisia, tourist enclaves are often perceived as a threat to the nation's cultural fabric and Islamic moral order. In spite of the emancipatory rhetoric of national feminism, post-colonial Tunisian thought nevertheless enacts a gendered division of culture into two distinct spheres--the material (male/public) and the spiritual (female/domestic). (Chatterjee 1993, Zayzafoon 2005). Bezness explores the messiness of this border between "spiritual" and "material" spaces and their gendered embodiments though an examination of male prostitution in a tourist town. The film draws a parallel between Tunisian bodies and the urban space of the coastal city of Sousse. While the city is spatially and conceptually divided between the "authentic" quarter of the medina, the functional modernism of the "ville francaise," and the fantasy-scapes of the tourist enclave Port El-Kantaoui, the Tunisian state has in fact worked to open up all parts of the city to the tourists' consumption practices. Paradoxically, the dividing line between 'Western' and 'authentic' must be re-enforced so that spaces marked as 'authentic' may be commodified as a purely Tunisian spectacle to be experienced by the tourist. Likewise, the protagonist Roufa, as a native gigolo, has developed a repertoire of racially-marked personae of Arab masculinity that he dons in order to seduce his clients into a commodity exchange. In both cases, the result is an emptying out, or loss of faith, in notions of authentic experience available to the Tunisian population itself. The film suggests a perilous instability latent in the Tunisian nationalist project, where older forms of patriarchal control have dissolved, yet newer principles of stability have not yet emerged. As a result, the only image by which the state recognizes itself is through the practice of exchange and commodification.

Islamic feminist discourse, which has its roots in nineteenth-century Egypt's feminist movement, has made a strong comeback in the 1990s. The label "Islamic feminism" has been applied to a global movement broadly defined as a reevaluation of religious sources to promote gender equality within an Islamic framework. Since the Qur'an is the founding text of Islam, some of the most provocative reinterpretations have focused on verses dealing with women, most notably those related to personal status and family law, with practices such as polygamy and the veil generating intense debates. Amidst this renewed attention to Qur'anic scripture from a gendered point of view, one verse has received little attention: the one that refers to the failed attempt by Potiphar's wife to seduce the prophet Joseph: "Kaidakunna 'adhimoun" [your (women) wiles are great] (XII: 28). The Muslim imaginary has retained this verse as a condemnation of a negative characteristic attributed to women, both in popular and high culture. In this talk, I examine how two Francophone Maghrebian women have endeavored to challenge and counter the negative impact that this verse continues to have in creative works that appeared in the late 1990s. Farida Benlyazid, the most established female Moroccan film maker, released her second full-length feature film, Keid Ensa (Women's Wiles) in 1999. Assia Djebar, a renowned Algerian writer, published La beaut, de Joseph [Joseph's beauty], a short narrative, in 1998. This talk analyzes how these works can be seen as partaking in Islamic feminism, regardless of the faith and personal position of the authors. Whether they happen to be Muslim and feminist (and therefore using Qur'anic reinterpretation of the Holy book as a strategy to improve women's lives), or whether they are Islamic feminist (Muslim believers working within their faith to achieve gender equality or parity), Djebar's and Benlyazid's works demonstrates a stance that improving Muslim women's lives must take into account the Muslim component rather than simply repudiate it. In addition, I show that Benlyazid's and Djebar's tackling of verse XII: 28 demonstrates a commitment to both the global and the local. Through her blend of Qur'anic exegesis accompanied with references to both high and popular Arab culture, Benlyazid's film engages in Islamic feminism grounded in Moroccan culture. Similarly, Djebar's book is tied to Algeria's devastating civil war of the 1990s.

Translation is traditionally seen as the transparent, innocent transmission of information from one language and culture to another. However, translation can also become a means of flattening and controlling what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak calls the "rhetoricity" of less powerful languages and cultures, engendering " a species of neocolonialist construction of the non-Western scene." This dynamic problematizes the liberal notion that translation necessarily promotes reciprocal intercultural understanding. Rather, translation often becomes an apparatus for perpetuating cultural hegemony. According to Moroccan literary critic Abdelfattah Kilito, who traces the genealogy of Arabic literary traditions that have tended to self-translate into Western literary norms at the expense of Arabo-Islamic genres, "To speak a language necessitates turning to one side. Language is tied to a location on the map or to a given space." While he treats the history of translation in Arabic literature, Kilito's argument also suggests means and themes of productive critique in Arab cinema. Meanwhile, as Algerian historian, novelist and filmmaker Assia Djebar has pointed out, translation is also highly gendered. The violence and betrayal lurking in acts of translation across historically contingent power differentials can also apply to patriarchal translations of and through women. Djebar suggests a new kind of resistance to translation when she insists on the idea of "listening to" her literary subjects rather than "speaking for" them. My paper discusses how two different Maghrebi films with Moroccan and Tunisian female protagonists theorize critiques of and through translation. First, I discuss the 1989 film by Moroccan screenwriter and director Farida Benlyazid, Bab al-sama' maftuh [A Door to the Sky / Gateway to Heaven] (1989), which portrays a woman's rebellion against self-translation into French idioms. Marshaling her command of textual Qur'anic and Sufi traditions, the heroine "untranslates" Moroccan female selfhood. Second, I discuss Tunisian director Nadia El Fani's Bedwin Hacker (2003), which foregrounds translation to interrupt European concepts of time, history, and gendering of the Maghreb. In insisting on the figure of woman beyond the colonial paradigm, these two very different films point to the ethical problems of various translational regimes. Resisting translation that would require a neocolonial version of "turning to one side," Benlyazid and El Fani instead point to the "untranslation" of Maghrebi spaces that hinges, problematically and productively, on the figure of woman.

Genre and Gender in post-1980s Algerian Cinema After independence from France in 1962, Algeria became the North African leader in cinema production, reaching international audiences with such films as Mohammed Lakhdar Hamina's 1975 feature film Chronicle of the Year of Embers, which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes. Viewed as a vital tool of the revolution, post-independence Algerian film was predominantly state-sponsored and Algerian filmmakers became employees of the state. Despite debates regarding its dominant themes, there is general consensus among scholars that the trajectory of Algerian film, and North African film more broadly, has been overwhelmingly dominated by a social realist approach whose goal is to hold up a mirror to Algerian history, society, and/or culture. Nonetheless, even before sharp decreases in state support and civil war threw Algerian film production into crisis in the 1990s, some filmmakers had begun to experiment with styles grounded in popular local art forms or to explore how Euro-American genres might be adapted to local contexts. Examining Algerian films that, beginning in the late 1980s, break with a social realist approach to explore globally popular genres (thrillers, detective and gangster films, romantic comedies, social melodramas etc.), this paper explores how they place domestic and international conceptions of gender into productive dialogue. Scholars of American genre films argue that all genre films encode social problems, projecting upon them temporary solutions that, while not resolving the underlying social issues, promote a vision of their potential resolvability. I show how Algerian filmmakers transfer this vision to Algerian contexts, simultaneously contributing to the evolution of the genres in question and to a national cinema. The social problems addressed in genre films frequently revolve around issues of gender, and I show how representations of gender relations in recent films are reformulated by Algerian filmmakers not simply as a corrective to "foreign" representations, but as a means of exploring tensions between global and local formulations of masculinity and femininity. The paper will touch on films such as Nadir Mokneche's Almodovar-esque trilogy, Le Harem de Mme Ousmane (2000), Viva Laldjerie (2004), and Dnlice Paloma (2007), Nadia Cherabi's popular melodrama, L'Envers du miroir (2007), and Lyes Salem's international success Mascarades (2008).

Nineteenth and twentieth century French Orientalists notoriously fetishized the Maghribi "harem," or the "world of women," projecting their own culturally mediated fantasies onto a sexualized Other within a colonial context that consistently manipulated the status of women. Contemporary Tunisian artists' treatment of the harem thus serves as a nexus for the examination of post-colonial gendered and national identities, along with a tempered subversion of Western portrayals of sexualized and subjugated women. In this paper, I examine the semi-autobiographical artistic rememberings of the "world of women" by several Tunisian filmmakers and authors born in the independence era. I argue that these particular Tunisian artists' depictions may subvert not only indigenous patriarchy but also colonial domination, itself expressed through fantastical representations of the harem in Orientalist art and postcards. In particular, I undertake a comparison of Orientalist postcards' treatment and Tunisian artists' portrayal of the "world of women" with respect to child socialization, formation under and through patriarchy, and sensuality and sexuality. I treat the following films, released from 1987, the year of the "great change" following Ben Ali's bloodless coup, through 2007: "Halfaouine, l'enfant des terrasses," by F?rid Boughedir (1990); "Les Silences du palais," and "La Saison des hommes," by Moufida Tlatli (2000); and "La Boote magique," by Ridha B hi (2002). I also draw parallels with two books, also published under Ben Ali: one originally in Arabic and translated into French, "Zaynab ou Les Br ches de la mamoire," by Aroussia Nalouti (2005 [1995]), and one in French, "Le Paradis des Femmes," by Ali Blcheur (2006). Post-colonial, "modernizing" Tunisia is a challenging context in which to produce art. That artists create these images of the 'world of women' within an environment where funding is limited and funding bodies have historically been first and foremost political organizations with powerful agendas, complicates the broad "value" of their rememberings; indeed, who is their audiencei Throughout the country, movie theatres are few, while pirated DVDs are cheap, numerous and often foreign; censorship, including self-censorship, is widespread. While Tunisians may wish to see "real life" in the few Tunisian movies that are released every year, many say that the socially critical stance of Tunisian films paints an unrealistic, even backwards image of their country. These threads make Tunisian writers' and filmmakers' contributions to the Tunisian social imaginary, and to the global image of the situation of Tunisian women, both more precious, and more problematic.