Arab Culture and Politics in Times of Crisis
Panel 232, 2016 Annual Meeting
On Sunday, November 20 at 8:00 am
Panel Description
While there have been inquiries into Arab cinematic and theatrical productions as carriers for nationalist, pan-Arabist, or regime propagandas in scholarship, it is only lately that scholars have begun to investigate the interconnectedness of cinema and theater with political projects, in particular, leftist movements (Abu-Lughod 2005, Khatib 2008, Khouri 2010, Litvin 2011, and Stone 2007.) These studies have not only expanded our knowledge of the arts as engagements with wider political discourses, but they have also yielded insights into theorizations of ideology, violence, sectarianism, and the nation-state. Building upon these studies, this panel aims to excavate the film and theater of the region as a constituent political force, in particular, during times of crisis. Taking into account the fluidity of national boundaries within the regions' cultural productions, the panel examines works from the mid-twentieth century to today from multiple regions in the Arab Middle East, while bringing together methodologies from history, anthropology, comparative literature, and cultural studies.
Collectively, the papers in this panel investigate cinema and theater as simultaneously being informed and informing trajectories, conditions, and contexts of their time. First, they explore the role of culture in representing ideologies and circulating them in wider society. Second, the papers do not isolate these plays and films within the confines of the nation-state but look to their transnational connections in order to situate them in a broader context. In contrast to studies that treat culture and politics as discrete categories or one where the the former is subservient to the latter, our approaches argue that art and politics are interconnected and contingent upon one another. More specifically, the first paper analyzes the affective potential of Maroun Baghdadi's Lebanese Civil War era films as a counter to sectarianism. The second paper examines the changing possibilities of militant documentary in the Arab world past and present, reflecting on the transformative horizons of the social movements themselves. The third paper shifts to the force of tragedy in bringing about change as seen in the theatrical works of Sulayman al-Bassam. Finally, the fourth paper analyzes Yusuf Idris’s landmark texts al-Farafir and “Toward an Egyptian Theater,” arguing for their explicitly political importance and situating them within a transnational network of theatrical intervention. Taken together, these papers seek to document and analyze the role of culture in questioning the conjuncture that Arab nation-states found themselves in during the post-colonial and contemporary eras.
Disciplines
Anthropology
History
Media Arts
Participants
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Mr. Ziad Dallal
-- Presenter
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Mr. Jeremy Randall
-- Organizer, Presenter
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Elizabeth Benninger
-- Presenter
Presentations
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Mr. Jeremy Randall
Many works about Lebanon frame sectarianism as an essential category of being Lebanese. This recurrent trope appeared in academic, literary, intellectual, and artistic productions from the post 1860 strife in Mount Lebanon onwards. In this context, sectarianism becomes a hegemonic force that subsumes all other discussions and potential readings of history and being. Rather, Lebanese history becomes a story of unending sectarianism. With the advent of the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990), Lebanon supposedly descended into a sectarian conflict that ripped apart the country’s fragile system of coexistence between religious groups. Yet, a subset of Lebanese leftists sought to challenge the dominant discourse of sectarianism. In doing so, they confronted the linear narrative of Lebanese history as one careening from one episode of sectarian violence to another. To demonstrate that some Lebanese rebelled against the reductionist framing of their identity and history, I examine Lebanese director Maroun Baghdadi (1950-1993) who produced numerous films and documentaries challenging the centrality of sectarianism to the Lebanese national narrative.
This paper explores how Baghdadi disputes the notion of sectarianism as an inherent aspect of the country and its peoples. This does not mean that Baghdadi excludes religion but he treats it as only one component out of many for a sense of selfhood and belonging. As a result, he offers the potential of reading sectarianism as a construct born out of the contingencies of each era that it appears. Preceding moments of sectarian tension must be viewed as a result of the issues of that time rather than an ahistorical explanation of the crisis Lebanon finds itself in during his time. I argue that Baghdadi’s films achieve an anti-sectarian resonance through the circulation of affects between individuals on screen which thereby make possible subjectivities contingent upon class, age, gender, political affiliation, and location rather than on reductive sectarian identifications. Therefore, Baghdadi builds his characters around assemblages of various features that do not privilege sectarianism. Those subjectivities not only demonstrate a potential state of being outside of sectarian models but also a break from ahistorical readings of Lebanon as inherently sectarian. In doing so, this paper will explore how affective subjectivities resist linear temporalization while nevertheless providing insight into historical contingencies for the moments in which they exist.
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In a recent PMLA issue dedicated to Tragedy, Helene Foley and Jean Howard mention that tragedy indexes a growing sense of consciousness, saying, “In everyday and more specialized contexts, then, tragedy is a powerful term that can serve as a veil concealing difficult truths or as a lever of critique” (618). In this sense, tragedy participates in a process of poiesis, the making out of alternatives from a situation that needs a change.
The following essay tracks the function of poiesis as both an artistic function and a sovereign function in the plays of Kuwaiti playwright, Sulyamn al-Bassam. Al-Bassam is a Kuwaiti playwright and director whose Shakespeare adaptations in the decade after 9/11 have continued to cause ripples within a regional Arab scene and have gained international acclaim. A reading of al-Bassam’s plays through the concept of poiesis aims to show the working of a new tragic sovereignty in his plays. Al-Bassam’s two Shakespeare adaptations are revealed to harbor renewed questions about the relation between the working of the imagination, sovereignty and the tragic contingency of action. These questions point toward a new theorization of political life and tragedy, and accordingly of a new sovereignty anchored in the figure of the refugee.
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Elizabeth Benninger
Yusuf Idris’s 1964 play al-Farafir and its manifesto-like preface, “Toward an Egyptian Theatre” (first published as a series of articles in 1963), are considered to be landmark texts in the history of modern Arab theatre in their call for dramatic innovation which both points to the future and draws on a long history of so-called “indigenous” Arab dramatic forms. Most of the existing scholarship on these texts addresses the cultural significance of this appeal to turath; relatively little discusses the explicitly political importance of these works, and that which does focuses exclusively on the Egyptian national context. While an understanding of this national political context is obviously crucial, to think about these works only in terms of the national is incredibly limiting. Upon closer inspection, the political implications offered by al-Farafir and its prefatory essay clearly exceed the bounds of the nation, pointing to both regional politico-cultural concerns and, in an era of continuing decolonizing struggles and various forms of Third Worldist solidarity, more global discourses addressing the relationship between political and cultural hegemony.
This paper is interested in tracing the simultaneously national and more-than-national significance of al-Farafir and “Toward an Egyptian Theatre” through a dual approach: first, by examining the import of Idris’s reclamation of the word “masrah,” usually used only to refer to dramatic literature conceived along the lines of a western European model of “theatre,” and his attendant creation of the neologism “al-tamasruh” to denote the scene of theatre that he is calling for. This careful attention to the way individual lexical items are deployed by Idris will bring to light how his essay dispatches with hegemonic narratives of literary genealogy and rewrites the origins of “theatre” along an emancipatory universalist model, while at the same time retaining a specific claim to Arab and Egyptian heritage.
Second, the paper will outline the forms of political relationality fostered by implications of al-tamasruh as praxis and, accordingly, the performative force of al-Farafir itself, arguing that the formal and aesthetic innovations of this play are intrinsically political in nature. In an attempt to further highlight the trans- or international resonance and import of Idris’s work, the paper will end by pointing to the ways in which these texts may be read in conversation with other works by contemporary Arab dramatists, such as the Syrian Sa’adallah Wannus and the Iraqi Yusuf al-‘Ani.
