Crisis and Catastrophe: Conceptualizing Engaged Arab Film and Literature through a Syrian Lens
Panel 164, sponsored bySyrian Studies Association (SSA), 2018 Annual Meeting
On Saturday, November 17 at 3:00 pm
Panel Description
The Arab winter that has followed the Arab spring, has touched every country in the region, and there is little reason to hope that conditions will improve any time soon. Despite this bleak outlook, however, writers and filmmakers in the region are producing an astonishingly large and varied body of engaged work. These projects range in scope, form, perspective, and audience, including everything from self-published writing to feature length films. This panel seeks to understand the affective, ideological, and political bases for these developments. We contend that even the most pessimistic of these works are informed by an underlying sense of agency. It is that latent agency that we seek to explore and define.
The tremendous variety of the politically-engaged imaginative work coming out of the Arab world today can be categorized into two temporal modes, what we call modes of crisis and catastrophe.
“Crisis” works engage with the present. They narrate, organize and, thus, process traumas. They include works of witnessing that invite audiences to engagement. They warn against further collapse and explore current conditions and their underlying ideologies. These works assume something can be salvaged from past hopes and current conditions. They may lament losses, but assume there is value and possibility, however slight, of recuperation.
“Catastrophe” works assume that there is nothing left to salvage; the political and social paradigms of the past are no longer tenable, and the only way forward is to begin anew. They are not optimistic—they acknowledge pain and loss—but do so without nostalgia. They are often experimental, fantastical, or speculative, and address issues that transcend the Arab world (e.g. environmental or economic collapse).
Our papers aim to understand the wellspring of hope and engagement that underlies these two types of works as well as the temporal modes they employ. Is there anything to be gained by thinking about them together and across genres? How are they interrelated or interdependent? Who are the audiences for these works? What engagements do these writers and filmmakers have with activists and intellectuals? The panel focuses on Syria through three papers on recent visual media (short online videos, diasporic documentaries, and television series) that is juxtaposed against a presentation on literature that considers these questions across a longer cultural history. Two discussants connect the papers through grounded and theoretical readings.
Over the past few years, Syrian documentary filmmakers rose to prominence in the media and at the international film festival circuits. Syrian video activists have found their niches in the world news media, leading to some calling the Syrian war, the most 'YouTubed conflict' ever. This new genre of cinematic Arab documentary art springs forth from the temporal modes of crisis and catastrophe. A short overview is given of the most successful Syrian documentaries since 2014. Most recently the Syrian film "Last Men in Aleppo" has been nominated for an Oscar in Best Feature documentary in 2018. This is an historical event because for the first time in Syrian cinema history a Syrian-made documentary film is nominated for the Oscars. The film is directed by Firas Fayyad, a young talented filmmaker who lives in exile in Denmark. Another seminal film that has been doing the Festival trail, is Ziad Khaltoum's film "A Taste of Cement". Ziad is currently based in Berlin.
Based on media ethnography, and in-depth interviews with both filmmakers, Firas Fayyad and Ziad Khaltoum, this paper considers and analyses the narrative stories of the two above mentioned documentary films by young Syrian filmmakers in exile. Why have these two films recently been so successful on the prestigious international film festival circuits ? What is the cosmopolitan and cross-boundary nature of their story, art and creativity ? What kind of agency do Syrian filmmakers in exile have on the trajectory of events happening in their home country, still at war ? How do Syrian filmmakers see their future role in Syria ?
Set in a wider context, the two young Syrian filmmakers are part of a wider social network of Syrian filmmakers and visual artists from different generations, who are currently residing in Paris, Berlin and Copenhagen. In these European cities, new vibrant Syrian artist communities in exile emerged since the arrival of the first Syrian refugees of war in 2012. The paper concludes with a reflection on how the process of uprooting and forced migration have influenced the artistic output and narrative stories of Syrian documentary filmmakers. Despite most Syrian documentary filmmakers being in exile, can we still speak of a national Syrian documentary cinema?
Postcolonial studies may not have paid much attention to Arabic literature despite the ongoing projects of imperialism and Zionism in the Arab world and despite the rich contributions of Arabic literary criticism in the 1950s and 1960s to what Ghassan Kanafani called "Resistance Literature" (or adab al-muq?wma), not to mention the many vibrant debates that took place at the time around the literature of commitment (or adab al-iltiz?m); similarly Arabic literary studies may not have been particularly enthused about postcolonial theory despite the revelatory powers of Said's Orientalism and despite the many relevant insights of the work of the Subaltern Studies Collective to the kind of archival research that ought to be done in the Arab world. Yet, notwithstanding the history and particular dynamics of this variably mutual neglect, it is oftentimes the case that the two fields are summarily lumped together and identified as the stealth academic enemy par excellence-indeed, the assault on postcolonial studies in the US academy in the wake of 9/11 went hand-in-hand with the assault on Arabic language and literature, not to mention the relentless assault on Islam that has been going on for quite some time.
Now that the two fields are ripe for mutual engagement-especially with the ever increasing popularity in Arabic literary and academic circles of such words as "orientalism," "post-colonialism," and "subaltern" as well as the gradual prominence of Arabic literature in translation in postcolonial and comparative literary scholarship-it is high time that we stressed not only areas of confluence but also horizons of transnational solidarity. This paper seeks to do both: (1) to discern the psycho-affective dynamics of Arabic literary production and (2) to ponder the precarious rhetorical modes of its critical intervention in a culture continually strained to its breaking point. Postcolonial Arabic literature per-forms, I argue, a series of psycho-affective reckonings with colonial modernity, postcolonial colonialism, and the task of decolonial critique. In this sense, Arabic literature from the Naksa to the Arab Spring/Winter contributes an affective politics of resistance (I call "melancholy acts") to postcolonial theory.
Not long into the Syrian civil war, amateur Syrian actors and videographers from around the country began to produce short satirical sketches uploaded to YouTube to wider and wider audiences and recognition. This paper explores the character of this creative engagement for understanding popular responses to the catastrophes of civil war that has followed the 2011 popular uprising in Syria. I am inspired by anthropologist Asef Bayat’s observation that disenchantment in the wake of an unfinished revolution does not mean disengagement. Rather, it may open new opportunities for imagining alternative futures.
Two sketch comedy troupes are at the heart of this exploration: the Saraqib Youth Group based in northwestern Syria near Idlib and the Sketch Junubi Troupe based in the Ghouta suburbs south of Damascus. Both groups are equal opportunity satirists skewering the regime and the opposition(s). Their work is not, however, ideological or even political. It is absurdist and surreal (involving, for example, time travel and troops marching to the Pink Panther theme). As such, these artists are inheritors of a well-established surrealist strain in Syrian literature, fine arts, and cinema. They have charted new directions as a function of enduring years of civil war and meeting both the opportunities and challenges afforded by new technologies and limited resources.
Today’s war generation of creative artists still in Syria is firmly grounded in the immediacy of ongoing catastrophe. Their comedy is rooted in local contexts and regional vernaculars but its absurdist premises defy cynicism and suggest the possibility, if not the hope, in a better future.
For scholars of contemporary Syria—looking from the outside in—sketch comedy provides a window on the agency of Syrians who have remained at home and refused to succumb to despair. This paper will focus on how these performers and filmmakers navigate the extremes of on-going civil war. How do they negotiate the terrain between the political and the nonsensical; between the vernacular and the universal; between hope and despair? It is the author’s aspiration that answers to these questions will highlight the potential and power of the Syrian artists who have remained in Syria to shape the contours of a post-war revolutionary future for their country.
