In 1974 Dar al-Fata al-Arabi, a vanguard pan-Arab Children’s publishing house linked to the PLO, was launched in Beirut. It came to represent a radical node of solidarity among Arab artists, intellectuals and writers committed to the Palestinian cause and to revolutionary change in the Arab world. In very short time, the publishing house produced an outstanding body of books, which revolutionized children’s Arabic literature in terms of politics, pedagogy, texts and aesthetics. I examine Dar al-Fata al-Arabi as a historical case study in the discursive and aesthetic conjuncture of the ‘Arab-Hanoi’; a revolutionary moment that articulated the Palestinian liberation movement within the political geography and temporality of Third-World anti-imperialism. This paper will focus on one polemical publication titled 'The Home' by Zakaria Tamer and Mohieddin Ellabbad issued in 1974. The little booklet creatively introduced to young readers the difficult concepts of nation, occupation, universal rights and struggle for liberation. Despite earning international acclaim, The Home’s encouragement of armed means of struggle in the context of children’s literature requires some careful scrutiny. I henceforth analyse the discursive and aesthetic articulation of this publication’s politics within the purview of a global revolutionary moment. I trace The Home’s social life from production in Beirut to transnational circulation and subsequent translations, including a controversial 1986 English UK edition. My paper thus probes the book’s itinerary to offer a critical reflection on the historical junctures and disjuncture of the Palestinian struggle with global politics of solidarity and more pertinently, the utopias and disenchantment of a leftist discourse of political commitment, 'iltizam', through the arts.

This paper explores Cengiz Dağcı’s and Abdullah Kadiri’s portrayal of the experiences of Muslim Turks in lands annexed by the Russian Empire in the 19th century. At first glance, Cengiz Dağcı’s Onlar Da İnsandı, which depicts the bewildering changes in the lives of a group of rural Crimean Tatar villagers in the year leading up to their forced departure from the author’s own village and its fertile lands overlooking the Black Sea, and Abdullah Kadiri’s Ötgen Künler, which foregrounds the love story of Atabek and Gümüş while also portraying the civil strife between the rulers and the people of Tashkent in the early 1800’s, do not appear to have much in common. Yet, I will argue that both novelists articulate a localized Muslim literary response to what they regarded as an “inhumane” colonization of land, infrastructure, and culture on the part of the Russians. Through comparative textual analysis I will demonstrate how the ambivalent ideological discourse of both novels regarding the “most appropriate” response to the uninvited Russian presence not only reflects the authors’ desire to understand exactly how and why the Crimean Tatars/Uzbeks succumbed to the Russians, but also expresses their analysis of the ways in which the ideals held by the Turkic Muslim Jadid reformers and the Russian Communists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when actually implemented, might converge or clash. The novels’ exploration of Tatars/Uzbek’s culpability in their own political victimization, in particular, is framed in a manner that complicates Islam’s traditional call to welcome the guest and refrain from judging “the Other” while still pointing a critical finger at oneself. Likewise, the question of whether to damn the Russian himself along with his bad behavior is framed in moral terms (and goes unanswered). As such, Cengiz Dağcı’s and Abdullah Kadiri’s literary works offer a unique vantage point from which to view the particular dynamics of their peoples’ geo-political loss and cultural recovery.

This paper differs from a large part of previous media realism-related research by focusing on the ways in which media representations relate to the lived experiences of both the creator of the media text as well as the audience members. I examine the 2015 television drama series “Ghadan Naltaqi” (See You Tomorrow) as a case study that reveals both the political, economic and cultural challenges that face Syrian refugees in neighboring countries as well as the challenges that face Syrian television drama producers after the 2011 uprising. In 2015, I conducted 16 in-depth interviews with the writer/creator of the series as well as members of the audience who communicate with him via Facebook. I also conducted textual analysis of material from 30 episodes of the series as well as secondary material from media online and print coverage. I show that with the availability of social media, a two-way process of media realism occurs in which media representation relates to the lived experiences of both the creator of the media text as well as the audience members. This leads to a highly interactive relationship between the creator and the audience members that the writer/creator compares to theater where the artist receives immediate feedback. I conclude with a discussion of the broader question of: why does popular culture matter in a time of war? I examine the ways in which my informants see the drama as a reason to continue having pride in their country even as it is in crisis; their discussion of the characters as metaphors for the Syrian conflict; and the complex nature of their “identification” with the characters in the series. At the end of the paper, I explore how, unlike actual news media of various stripes, Syrian TV drama may be able to contribute effectively to national reconciliations efforts.

My paper will analyze cinematic representations of HIV/AIDS in the Arab world, focusing specifically on Egyptian director Amr Salama’s feature film Asma’a (2011). Based on true events, Asma’a explores the traumatic ordeals that Asma’a, an HIV-positive woman, has to contend with in contemporary Egypt. When she develops a gallbladder infection, she finds that no doctor is willing to operate on her due to misinformed fears of contamination and cultural contempt. By focusing on an HIV-positive, working-class woman who willingly becomes infected, the film attempts to dispel the connection between serostatus and moral judgment—or, to phrase it differently, between innocent HIV/AIDS and that which is divine punishment. Asma’a also demonstrates how the state renders bodies marked with stigma—in this case HIV/AIDS—as disabled and relegates them to the outskirts of society. The first section of my paper provides a diegetic analysis of the film, focusing on the main events in the narrative vis-à-vis select accounts from contemporary media for contextualization. Additionally, I attempt to locate similarities between the implications of contemporary sociopolitical attitudes towards PLWHA in the Arab world and the West, especially the United States, drawing on both queer studies and feminist disability studies. The second section is dedicated to the cinematic techniques and genre conventions that Asma’a utilizes to clearly establish its departure from previous representations of HIV/AIDS in Egyptian cinema. Additionally, this section offers analyses of four films from the late 1980s and 1990s that also represented HIV/AIDS in their narratives, relying on biased and stigmatizing “outbreak narratives.” Apart from Asma’a, there have been next to no unbiased representations of PLWHA in Arab mainstream media, particularly in feature films. Thus, I argue in my chapter that Asma’a is uniquely positioned to change public awareness by subverting common misconceptions about HIV/AIDS.