This study focuses on gender in the cultural history of Iranian vocal music during the Pahlavi period. From the early Pahlavi period until the late 1940s and early 1950s, women prolifically performed two kinds of vocal music, namely āvāz and rhythmic vocal music known as Tasnif and Tarāneh. The period under Reza Shah witnessed an eventful era during which female performers appeared publicly. The same generation of female performers continued to perform both vocal performances throughout the 1940s and the early 1950s. However, as this article argues, as women were seen and heard publicly, the masculine elite musical culture reacted to their presence by deploying a gendered discourse in the 1950s and 1960s. The gender dichotomy in the performance of vocal music in Iran, as the article argues, should be read as the history of the opposition between two senses: sight and seeing and ear and listening. While disciplined practices of listening, ear, and body constituted the elite masculine culture, the feminine culture was expressed through public spectacles of sight. Scholarly writings on modern Iranian cultural history have not paid attention to the histories of senses, including the eye and sight and the ear and listening. This article hopes to situate the debates about the performance of vocal music at the cusp of the opposition between the aural and the visual in modern Iranian cultural history and open up a space for writing the history of senses in modern Iranian cultural history.

This paper analyzes the evolution of popular portrayals of a major femicide known as “Raya and Sakina” as a product of the coloniality of gender in Egypt. The femicide took place in the clandestine brothels of two women named Raya and Sakina who had migrated to the port city of Alexandria from Southern Egypt in the World War I era. Although the legal records suggest that the femicide was perpetrated by a network of men, Raya and Sakina became scapegoats for the murders in the Egyptian media and were subsequently executed by the state. The discussion of the case in the media in the wake of the Egyptian Revolution of 1919 turned into a debate over the root cause of Egypt’s social problems, which nationalists attributed to the effects of colonial rule on gender and sexuality. Since then, numerous Egyptian films, television shows and plays have been produced about the femicide, all of them presenting Raya and Sakina’s ‘barbarity’ as the sole cause of the murders. Through an analysis of these media productions, I explore both changes and continuities in depictions of Raya and Sakina over the past century and what they reveal about the coloniality of gender in Egypt. I show that while the gendered and racialized portrayal of Raya and Sakina as ‘barbaric’ women has remained consistent over time, the story of the femicide has been continually reconfigured in Egyptian popular culture. The most popular reconfigurations mark pivotal moments in Egyptian history, including the Egyptian Revolution of 1952, the infitah, and the resurgence of the labor movement in the late Mubarak era. The Raya and Sakina story thus continues to serve as a platform to debate the root cause of Egypt’s social problems in the wake of major political and economic change. I argue that these reconfigurations highlight the centrality of gender to Egyptian conceptions of the political and economic order. At the same time, the attribution of social problems to ‘barbaric’ women is a product of the coloniality of gender and an attempt to silence serious discussions of gender violence in Egypt.

Pakistani cinema in its heyday from the mid 1950s to the late 1970s was largely a commercial enterprise. Commercial films were constructed with the elements of melodrama, comedy, romance, song and dance and action. While political themes were not overtly addressed in the films, there were few left-leaning directors and writers such as Khalil Qaiser and Riaz Shahid who dealt with politics in the few films that they directed. Two of their films Shaheed/Martyr (dir. Khalil Qaiser, 1962) and Zarqa (dir. Riaz Shahid, 1969) situated and showcased anti-colonial struggles in the Middle East. While Shaheed/Martyr set in the year 1922 was about fighting against British colonial forces looking for petroleum in the deserts of fictitious Middle East area called watan/country, Zarqa set in 1948 was about Palestinians fighting to save their watan/country against the settler colonial forces of Israel. While both films were commercially successful in Pakistan, Zarqa broke records of commercial success and finished a hundred weeks in cinemas, particularly attracting women in the audience. The films in Urdu language with Arabic sprinkled here and there were shot and produced in Pakistan with the local cast and crew. How was the Middle East discursively produced and constructed as a site of resistance for Arabs in these popular films? How were local codes of Pakistani cinema such as visual style, narrative, gender, and song-and-dance deployed to produce an anti-colonial narrative in the Middle East for a local audience in Pakistan? What other local, transnational, historical sources influenced the popular yet political codification of colonial oppression and anti-colonial resistance? This article investigates the discursive construction of these films and highlights both constraints and possibilities of the politics of the popular.

As a social figure, the tramp held significant prominence in 19th and 20th-century Western culture, appearing in literature, vaudeville, and early cinema, notably exemplified by Charlie Chaplin’s iconic “The Tramp.” Similar to discourses surrounding other modern social figures like the flaneur, prostitute, and hysteric, early discussions on the tramp emerged from socioeconomic shifts, technological and institutional developments, and power structures resulting from industrialization and modernization. Initially perceived as deviant and criminal, tramps were linked to economic turmoil and labor disputes, often depicted through a flaneur’s lens as lazy, drunk, and frequently of foreign origin. However, by the early 20th century, there was a shift in the portrayal of tramps, with some romanticized depictions highlighting their lifestyle as a symbol of freedom and adventure, as exemplified by Chaplin’s tramp.This paper explores the resonance of these urban discourses and representations of tramps in 20th-century Egyptian cinema, first in Egypt’s “first wave” of cinema in the 1920s and 1930s, second, in Egypt’s first “realist” wave in the 1950s, and finally in Egypt’s “new realist” wave in the 1980s. Initially, I examine two comedy films—Egypt’s “first” silent film, Barhum Looks for a Job (Muhammad Bayumi, 1923), and the early talkie, Everything is Fine (Niyazi Mustafa, 1937)—both reflect global sentiments of the (roaring) 1920s and the following Great Depression, as well as local nationalist and anti-colonial politics following the 1919 Revolution and Egypt’s semi-independence from British rule. Subsequently, I analyze shifts in tone following the 1952 Revolution, as seen in films like Cairo Station (Youssef Chahine, 1958) and The Tramps (Dawud Abd al-Sayyid, 1985). Here, the tramp is no longer a deviant, criminal threat to bourgeois morality (as he was in the 19th century) nor a romantic, adventurous, and comedic figure (as illustrated in early 20th century), at least alone; he now evolves to embody revolutionary sentiments and critiques within a neorealist urban setting, representing themes of social mobility and class dynamics. In that light, I view the tramp as a transnational anti-hero of urban modernity, contrasting with the bourgeois flaneur, and explore their depiction in relation to class, gender, and sexuality. Thus, I examine Egyptian tramps, old and new, as reflections of shifting social realities across different eras and genres of cinema.