In recent years, the large body of scholarship on women in Iranian cinema have, for the most part, focused on the ‘representations’ of women in (pre-revolutionary and/or post-revolutionary) Iranian cinema. Those works that have engaged with the role of women as filmmakers within Iran’s film industry have mainly centered on the rise of women filmmakers in post-revolutionary Iranian cinema as an unprecedented historical phenomenon that seems at odds with the gender hierarchies of Iranian society and the sexual politics of Iran’s Islamic state. Regardless of the scarcity of historical information and archival materials as well as the low numbers of women filmmakers prior to the 1979 Islamic Revolution—only 3 women directed fiction, feature films: Shahla Riahi, Marva Nabili, and Kobra Saidi (aka. Shahrzad)—comprehensive historical studies on these early women filmmakers and their works seem crucial for understanding both the female subjectivity in pre-revolutionary Iranian cinema in regard to tensions and negotiations of gender roles in filmic production, and the gender structures in today’s Iranian cinema as a response to this historical past. By focusing on the cinematic career of Shahla Riahi, the first Iranian woman filmmaker and a popular actress, and in particular, on the production and reception of her first and only film "Marjan" (1956), I provide a historical, gender, and socio-cultural analysis of her contributions to the Iranian cinema and society against various historical narratives and historiographic approaches that have overlooked her and her work(s). I further point to Riahi’s presence in cinema as an actress from the 1950s to the early 2000s as a reflection of the continuity of Iranian female subjectivity in this medium, which necessitates a historiographic reconfiguration and a historical re-reading of Iranian cinema regarding the role of women. As Annett Kuhn and Jackie Stacey assert, “[R]ather than being simply ‘about the past’ in any straightforward way, screen histories are of necessity concerned with past-present relations with a view to the future” (1998, 9). By historically analyzing the gender dynamics of Iranian cinema and the influences of Shahla Riahi, I reframe the historical filmic narratives on this figure and connect them to the strong presence of women in contemporary Iranian cinema and society. I thus argue that the legacy of Shahla Riahi in today’s Iranian cinema resonates in the professional career of popular actresses, such as Niki Karimi, who have become prominent filmmakers as well.

The Egyptian media displayed a high level of diversity in content in the final years of the Mubarak regime before the 2011 uprising. This diversity extended considerably after the uprising when national media – including the strictly controlled state media – embodied expressions of dissent with unprecedented openness, in defiance of the entrenched identity of the journalist as the regime’s guard. This identity resurfaced after the military coup of July 2013, when the national media resumed its role as the favourite platform for excluding dissent in the name of the regime’s stability. This paper looks at the short-lived ‘revolts’ within Egyptian traditional newsrooms searching for new identities, investigating the challenges, hopes and trade-offs of a painful process of change. The paper argues that while the journalistic agency gained unprecedented dynamism and helped supporting trends toward democratization in media and politics in the immediate aftermath of the uprising, it also acted as powerful platform in “othering” opponents preparing the ground for the return of autocratic practices and ultimately the fall of the democratic experiment. The paper explores the agentic dynamics in the journalistic practice in an uncertain times within a highly context transition to democracy. It is rooted in ethnographic research with journalists and media stakeholders in Egypt from the 2011 uprisings until the phase immediately following the military takeover.

The conventional scholarship on the history of the Ottoman printing establishment is filled with assumptions and generalizations. It also contends itself with either the 18th century beginnings under Ibrahim Müteferrika or focuses on the Hamidian period by taking a leap of almost a century and a half. A new focus on the Ottoman archival material, however, has made it possible to weave together a coherent story of the formation of the Ottoman printing enterprise during the Tanzimat period when the Ottoman state itself was transforming. Arguing that the consolidation of the Ottoman printing press and related policies took a new turn with the establishment of the Directorate of Takvimhane-i Amire in 1831, this paper is going to construct a new periodization unique to the printing policies of the empire in three stages based on a supply-demand model. The general outline suggests that from 1831 to 1840, the state almost singularly shaped the demand for printing through its related policies and this demand was met by the main supplier, the Imperial Press. From 1840 to 1857, however, private customers, as authorized by the imperial decree of 1840, appeared as agents on the demand side of the enterprise by commissioning books at the Imperial Press. The supplier, once again, was the Imperial Press. This period also witnessed an increasing number of actors and agents penetrating into the printing world for their own different reasons, and placing the Ottoman state in a conflictual relationship with different parties. In the process, a series of legislations were enacted as a means of positioning the legal interests of state against these factions. Competing interests also suggested that the Ottoman printed book market between 1840-1857 had entered a phase of commercialization. After 1857, the demand for printing came from both state and the private customers as before, but the suppliers of printed books expanded to include the private printers as much as the Imperial Press. Overall, I argue that the changing economic and political dynamics of each specified time interval of the nineteenth century also dictated a change in the perspective to print; new concepts, agents and institutions, each ending up being regulated by standardizing decrees and regulations, defined a new and convoluted phase in the development of printing in the Ottoman Empire.

The Seventies brought about an unprecedented wave of unambiguous political and historical criticism in narrative Egyptian cinema. Though filmmakers were anything but unrestrained, as the production and distribution of these films remained completely dependent on the state’s censorship apparatus, these post-67 critical films represent the sharp schism the Naksa caused in popular political discourse in Egypt. New tropes and motifs were rapidly produced and regurgitated, and the result was the creation of a limited, but novel space in which filmmakers and critics could express and debate grievances from the Nasserist regime, as well as attempt to assign blame for the failure of the Egyptian military. Through analyzing select films and critical writings from this era, this paper seeks to demonstrate the trajectory of popular critiques of Nasser and Nasserism. I will be particularly focusing on four Egyptian films from the Seventies, as well as select contemporary critics’ response to them. These films are: Youssef Chahine’s The Sparrow (1972), Hossam al-Din Mostafa’s The Bullet is Still in My Pocket (1974), Ali Badrkhan’s al-Karnak (1975), and Hussein Kamal’s We Are the Bus People (1979). The four films in question were widely covered by critics of the period, and they overlap tremendously in their approach to historical and nationalist revision while maintaining an aesthetic, thematic and structural diversity throughout, making them a sufficient entry point to larger issues and trends of Egyptian cinema at the time. Though the films in this paper have been previously studied in the context of their commentary on the Naksa, I argue that these films require a novel (re)framing that does not separately analyze them based on genre and technique. One of the primary goals of this paper is to demonstrate that these films, despite the vast differences in their craft and style, were united in their participation in an era-specific political discourse that sought to make sense of the 1967 defeat and identify causes and/or persons to be held accountable. Furthermore, this paper will also distinguish itself from major scholarship on the era by not focusing on the films’ aesthetic value, except only when commented on by the critics, and will instead focus on the overlapping and contentious political and nationalist themes in the films. In this way, I seek to demonstrate the existence of a distinct political-cinematic wave from 1967 to 1979 that grew more critical and pessimistic the further the films were released from 1967.