Suchergebnisse

Introduction : collaborative revolutionism / Nouri Gana -- Part 1. Contexts : roots of discontent. Under the emperor's neoliberal clothes! : why the international financial institutions got it wrong in Tunisia / Emma C. Murphy ; Playing the Islamic card : the use and abuse of religion in Tunisian politics / Kenneth Perkins ; United States policy towards Tunisia : what new engagement after an expendable "friendship"? / Lofti Ben Rejeb ; "Friends of Tunisia" : French economic and diplomatic support of Tunisian authoritarianism / Amy Aisen Kallander -- pt. 2. Architects : genealogies of dissent. From socio-economic protest to national revolt : the labor origins of the Tunisian revolution / Sami Zemni ; The powers of social media / Tarek Kahlaoui ; Rethinking the role of the media in the Tunisian uprising / Rikke Hostrup Haugbølle ; Visions of dissent, voices of discontent : postcolonial Tunisian film and song / Nori Gana -- pt. 3. Prospects : the postrevolutionary moment. From resistance to governance : the category of civility in the political theory of Tunisian Islamists / Nadia Marzouki ; Women's rights before and after the revloution / Monica Marks ; The rise of Salafism and the future of democratization / Fabio Merone and Francesco Cavatorta ; The fragile Tunisian democracy : what prospects for the future? / Lise Storm -- Postscript : preserving the exemplar / Nori Gana

This article examines the cultural politics of bastardy in the films of Tunisian filmmaker Nouri Bouzid at a time when questions of national and cultural identity have come to the fore in Tunisia in the wake of the Revolution of Freedom and Dignity. Nouri Bouzid is the doyen of Tunisian cinema. Not only was he involved in every major postcolonial film, whether as a screenwriter, a scriptwriter, or even as an actor, but he single-handedly directed more than half a dozen films, each of which enjoyed wide national and international acclaim. His debut film, Man of Ashes, dramatizes the trauma of child molestation and the collapse of filial relations as well as the emergence of a new generation of men who seek to recast filial and familial relations beyond blood ties and familial limitations. This same cinematic pursuit is further developed in his later films with striking consistency and perseverance. At a time when the postrevolutionary public sphere is saturated with heated debates around Tunisian national identity, propelled by fantasies of purity and virile filiation, Bouzid's bastard characters serve, the author argues, not only to warp and reclaim the political playing field for revolutionary purposes but also to remind Tunisians of the disturbing legacy of bastardy (instituted by a long history of colonial rape from the Romans to the French) to which they had been and continue to be heirs, and with which they have to reckon. Studying the rhetoric of bastardy in Bouzid's cinema leaves us in the end with the touching yet unsparing conclusion that for Bouzid there are no Tunisians until they have assumed their bastardy.

Theodor W. Adorno's by now infamous dictum that "to write lyric poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric" still weighs heavily on various modern and contemporary representations of war and violence, especially in the Arab world, where the legacy of the Holocaust, entangled with differing or dueling national claims to Israel/Palestine, exerts enormous existential pressure. This essay draws on an eclectic but substantial number of poems composed by canonical contemporary figures such as Nizār Qabbānī, Adonis, and Mahmoud Darwish to demonstrate how Arab poets strategically (even routinely) conjure up the muse of impossibility of poetry, in the wake of every act of violence committed against Arab nations since 1948, to produce poetry. Because its veritable possibility has been stymied by historical violence, Arabic poetry today is largely postelegiac and intensely metapoetic in a very specific way: it is an accentuated yet attenuated form of poetry that simultaneously bears the burden of representation but never ceases to undermine any form of consolation; it is a poetry that emerges from the full consciousness of its impossibility or, worse still, its futility, if not its ineluctable complicity in Arab suffering.

This essay seeks to investigate the aporias and dilemmas of representation that Arab writers and artists confront at a time when the Arab world has become overly mediatized and ideologically territorialized as a zone of sectarian violence and death. For all the reports on Iraq, Palestine, and Lebanon, the Arab world suffers from what might be called a collapse of witnessing. By focusing on the controversies over the humanization of terrorism in Hany Abu-Assad's film Paradise Now (Al-Jenna al-an), I demonstrate the ways in which the film grapples with the construction of a narrative terrorism that cannot be pre-discursively (and on licensed grounds) discredited as justificatory of terror. Oftentimes, narratives of terrorism are discredited not because they ostensibly raise ethical concerns over the aestheticization of terror but because they challenge the racial and geopolitical differentials on the grounds of which humanity is constructed, valued, allocated, or withheld. I argue that Abu-Assad's Paradise Now reopens the corridors of distant empathizing and shakes awake the intoxicated slumbering of our sobering imaginative impulses. Paradise Now treads the fine line between interpreting and responding to martyrdom operations (a.k.a. suicide bombing), ensuring that these complementary and simultaneous hermeneutic tasks do not slither accidentally into the moral abyss of justifying "terror-ism." I demonstrate how the film makes use of cinematic conventions (e.g., the thriller genre and camera malfunctions) in order to undo the spectacle of terror-ism—and become something other than spectacle in the very route to becoming spectacle—as well as articulate a more nuanced and challenging narrative of Palestinian nationhood, a narrative that has been so far either impermissible or readily discreditable by status occupation. Welcome to the reel desert of the real.

The essays collected in this issue of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East explore the ways in which writers and artists from Africa and the Middle East have deployed diverse genres and modes of narrative or discursive practices in order not only to challenge the entrapments of contemporary violence but also to do so in a self-reflexively anti-redemptory fashion. They conceptualize narrative violence as a modality of cultural and literary analysis, practice and critique; understand violence as a historically situated phenomenon in constant need of social, political, and cultural authorization and reinvention to be effectively implemented at the level of warfare, mobilization, and conscription; and illuminate the ways in which literary and cultural products (literature, film, graphics, etc.) not merely illustrate but actively produce and intervene into the material and palpable workings of violence. As such, the essays in this issue compel us into interrogating the widely circulated discourses about Africa and the Middle East as ahistorical places of violence, death, and disease; question our fatigued notions of the ineluctability and immutability of the contemporary institutionalization of violence; and demonstrate how particular constellations of (corporate) power, (instrumental) knowledge, and (biased) mass media work to foreclose alternative human and humane spaces of survival, agency, resistance, and, above all, narrative departures.