Reorienting the Middle East

"I find this collection a much needed and timely post-colonial re-mapping of film histories and cinematic practices around the Persian Gulf, aptly shifting the focus from land to water, from national borders to arenas, contact zones, from hegemonic historiography to transcultural stories and identities."—Viola Shafik, author of Arab Cinema: History and Cultural Identity

"In de-essentialising the Gulf and presenting it to us as a critical method, this collection achieves two key things: it contributes to the decolonisation of knowledge production about the Gulf, its peoples, cultures and societies and invites us, at the same time, to rethink the fields of Arab and Middle Eastern media and cultural studies beyond static, colonial configurations of geography. This wide-ranging collection recognizes the Gulf as a complex transcultural space; a conduit to relational histories and cultural encounters that transcend the limiting and teleological imaginations of nations and regions in film and area studies. This is a terrific and a much-needed book. I strongly recommend it to scholars of Middle Eastern media and cultural studies and also to those researching media practices and uses in the global South and beyond."—Tarik Sabry, author of Cultural Encounters in the Arab World: On Media the Modern and the Everyday

"A cornucopia of information and insight, Reorienting the Middle East manages to do what the title promises. It reorients discussion of Gulf Media by expanding the corpus and scope in multiple ways, first of all by counterpointing portrayals of the Gulf with portrayals from the Gulf. Rather than approach the region as a static place, it uses the Gulf as an epicentric prism to reveal the fluid movement of ideas, images and films across borders. The book treats transnationality not as a mere inventory of nation-states involvement but rather as an intricate cross-border process embedded in the transnational imaginary of and about the Gulf. Reorienting the Gul describes a constantly morphing transcultural arena of interconnected histories, migrating cultures, of uncanny resemblances, subterranean affinities. Rather than a simple binary of metropole and colony, we find palimpsestic formations where a nation can at once be indigenous, postcolonial, para-colonial and colonial in the sense of exploiting migrant labor from the Global South, in situations where multicultures intersect and interfecundate in hybrid formations. The book also addresses the various forms of transnational projections, as in the case of South-South stereotyping (Egyptian films mocking rich Gulf State Arabs, and Bollywood films portraying the Gulf as corrupting the innocent Indian nationals, Replete with intriguing surprises, the book engages such topics as entrepot film culture in Dubai, romanticized narratives about ruling families, American corporations extracting oil while injecting stereotypes and segregation into Saudi Arabia, the transoceanic aurality of love and yearning, blackness in Iran, and the filmic imagining of the lives of domestic workers. Admirably transmediatic, the book expands the corpus beyond fiction features to include documentaries, TV shows, tourism commercials, YouTube videos, and digital activist videos. It is hard to imagine the reader who would not learn from this book."—Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, authors of Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media