This paper investigates the constitution of the Arab Network for Human Rights Film Festivals (hereafter ANHAR) and the implications of the local mediation of international human rights economies for the Arab regional cinema production more broadly. Established in 2015 by the Jordan-based collective of thinkers and workers Ma3mal 612 Think Factory, ANHAR currently counts nine members, with human rights film festivals in Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Mauritania, Tunisia, Morocco, Palestine, the Sudan and Syria. Here I follow Meg McLagan’s focus on the “circulatory matrix” of human rights advocacy “out of which human rights claims are generated and through which they travel” (McLagan 2006, 192). I examine how ANHAR establishes a multi-faceted platform dedicated to the exchange between activists and filmmakers, the promotion of co-production, and the support of advocacy campaigns. I argue that the creation of a regional network alongside European formations such as the Human Rights Film Network is best suited to local human rights needs. Moreover, it enhances Arab cinematic production at large. In effect, by bridging various local organizations dedicated to supporting independent productions like SEMAT (Egypt) and Bidayyat (Lebanon) with film festivals in isolated areas (as in Gaza), ANHAR develops a communication infrastructure (McLagan 2006) for regional human rights, which simultaneously aims to benefit the development of a regional film industry more broadly. I conclude that the regional redefinition of human rights cinema includes the necessity of infrastructure, that is to say, the very possibility to produce human rights films. This research is based on fieldwork conducted at the Jordan-based Karama Human Rights Film Festival, interviews of ANHAR and HRFN members, and discursive analyses of the promotional material of the two networks and their key festivals. As a result, I demonstrate that the establishment of a separate Arab network not only readjusts human rights claims to the regional needs, but doing so also reconfigures the promotion of human rights around the development of adequate economic infrastructures and platforms for both human rights advocacy and Arab independent cinema production.

In the spring of 1976, the World of Islam Festival opened in London, celebrated by royalty and diplomats from around the world. For three months, the city of London was filled with different exhibitions, performances, and lectures about the historical Islamic past in order to inspire Muslim-Christian unity in then present-day Britain. Archival documents, which have not yet been examined or cited in the existing literature, reveal that the authority to present Islam was held in the hands of former diplomats, and other private interests. The event was funded by what organizers called “Moslim governments” in conjunction with the British government, and other private investors. Although the festival had educational intentions, it was met with mixed reception, including intense criticism from Christian Evangelicals who saw the event as proselytizing Islam, and from British Muslims, who felt unrepresented. An event that was designed to promote unity ultimately created more divisions. Utilizing the decolonial methodologies of Walter Mignolo and archival documents from the festival organizers, this paper examines how representations of a timeless, historic Middle East were crafted at the World of Islam Festival. This paper has several interrelated aims. First, utilizing archival material, it highlights what sorts of representations the organizers crafted and how, specifically using history and religion for contemporary goals. Specifically, what was the relationship between the organizers and Islam, and from where did they attempt to derive their authority? Second, this paper highlights how the World of Islam Festival was received by the public. Third, it considers how smaller galleries at this time, such as the Mathaf Gallery and the Long Gallery, both in London, presented contemporary art from the Arab World, a topic notably absent from the World of Islam Festival. This paper promotes further questions about how historical Islamic objects are currently used to “represent” the Middle East and for what purpose.

This question of Turkish cultural power, who has it and the ways in which it impacts representations of Turkey in the world, has important ramifications for scholarly understanding of the relationship between national and world literature. This paper takes the literary prize as a case study to illustrate how rhetorical divisions in Turkey’s cultural sphere contain competing visions of the world through which Turkish literature circulates. This requires scholars to rethink the relationship between national and world literary spaces, in which success at the international level is proceeded by success at the national level, referred to as the “concentric circle” model of world literature. Turkish literature and its surrounding literary prize culture is a compelling focal point for this re-evaluation because of the ways in which the nation/world relationship is constructed and imagined by different cultural stakeholders: one which imagines the world as an alternative literary space to the national, and the other in which the national is the basis for constructing an alternative world. This paper examines two competing bodies of literary authority in Turkey. Turkey, like other nations worldwide, is going through a period of extreme political polarization that reflects long-standing divides in Turkish society over competing definitions of Turkishness that underpin national identity. Because literature has historically been a defining site of Turkish nationalism, literary production in Turkey is endued with extraordinary cultural and political importance. On one side of this divide, translated fiction by Turkish authors such as Orhan Pamuk and Elif ?afak has garnered near global acclaim through winning literary prizes. Their writing and the place it creates for Turkey in the canon of world literature can be understood as fulfilling the cultural promises of Kemalism’s Western, international orientation. This literature and the authors who write it take part in a global literary elite who value literature’s ability to cross borders, participate in the free press, and affirm liberal humanitarian values. These authors and their fiction are often read as Turkey’s ambassadors for world literature. Contrary to this cosmopolitan commitment, AKP government officials have increasingly promoted a different version of Turkish literary culture that emphasizes alternative histories, publishing networks, and crucially, competing literary values that directly reflect the ruling party’s political and social interests.

After Edward Said, Orientalism has started to be discussed as a Western way of patronizing the representation of the Orient or a political device of Western imperial and colonial interests. Orientalism as an academic field, therefore, has been treated as a scholarly domain producing information and an epistemological base for European control over the Orient. The Orient has often been regarded as rather a passive recipient of what was produced within this hegemonic discourse while the question of how “the Orientals” responded to European Orientalism has often been missed in this portrayal. This paper examines both Ottoman diplomatic response and scholarly presence in the International Congresses of Orientalists, a landmark institution of academic Orientalism, and aims to answer how the Ottomans experienced these congresses and how they positioned vis-à-vis European Orientalism. Taking the participation of Ottomans in the International Congresses of Orientalists to its center, this paper contends the idea that academic Orientalism was solely a European product. Instead, I argue that Ottomans engaged in an active dialogue with the Western production of academic knowledge through participating in International Congresses of Orientalists in both diplomatic and scholarly levels since the first congress that was held in Paris in 1873. Utilizing a wide range of sources from Ottoman diplomatic correspondences and scholarly articles dealing with academic Orientalism to personal accounts of the Ottoman participants, this paper illustrates how these congresses became a venue to establish a complex and reciprocal dialogue between Ottomans and European Orientalists. On the one hand, these congresses have been monitored closely by the Ottoman diplomats to control the knowledge production about and image-making of the Ottoman Empire both locally and internationally. For the Ottoman diplomats, these congresses provided an international setting not only to fight against the European imperial interests but also nationalist movements among the Empire’s own confessional communities. As for the Ottoman intellectuals who participated and delivered papers, including the leading intellectuals of the period like Ahmed Vefik Pa?a (d. 1891), Ahmed Midhat Efendi (d. 1912), Ali Suavi (d. 1878) and Ahmed Agaev (d. 1939), these congresses became an arena of not only intellectual exchange but also for contributing to academic knowledge production.