What can film studies bring to the study of Arab culture, politics, and history? The past ten years have seen an increase in historical, theoretical, and methodological exchanges between Middle East studies and film and media studies. The sub-field of “Arab film studies” (Ginsberg and Lippard Reference Ginsberg and Lippard2020, viii) has emerged as one possible intersection of these two fields of inquiry. This is illustrated by two recent book series, the Cinema and Media Cultures in the Middle East series at Peter Lang Publishing (edited by Terri Ginsberg and Chris Lippard) and the Palgrave Studies in Arab Cinema series at Palgrave Macmillan (edited by Nezar Andary and Samirah Alkassim). Waleed Mahdi's Arab Americans in Film (Reference Mahdi2020) and Peter Limbrick's Arab Modernism as World Cinema: The Films of Moumen Smihi (Reference Limbrick2020) consolidate these exchanges across ethnic studies, area studies, political sciences, (art) history, and film and media studies. While Mahdi primarily positions himself from within ethnic studies and Limbrick is first a film scholar, both have published in reference journals in film studies, Middle East studies, and cultural studies.
Mahdi and Limbrick focus on distinct understandings of film representation to establish an argument on the transnational history, politics, and lived experience of Arab culture. Whereas the transnational lens and the analysis of identity representations have proved instrumental to the study of power relations in ethnic and cultural studies since the field's formation in the late 1960s and 70s, these two approaches have developed separately in film studies. Since the 1990s, transnational cinema has gradually replaced the national as a framework of analysis. Characteristic of this turn in Arab film studies, Kay Dickinson's Arab Cinema Travels (Reference Dickinson2016) relies on Edward Said's travelling theory to re-inscribe the national cinemas and infrastructures of Palestine, Syria, and Dubai within moving geographies. On the other hand, the focus on film representation has maintained some visibility, especially in research concerned with the politics of gender, sexual, and racial identity, but textual and stylistic analysis no longer constitutes the dominant methodology in the discipline. Instead, film is now often apprehended under the larger umbrella of media studies which focuses on mediation processes, the materiality of film technologies, and film industries. It is therefore significant that these two books indirectly argue for a continued examination of film representation as a key basis for critical theory.
Despite some divergences, the two authors position their respective investigations of transnational representations within long-standing debates about Edward Said's Orientalism (Reference Said1978) and the binary construction of the East versus West paradigm. By doing so, they both insist that cinema takes shape through geopolitics, transnational exchanges, cultural hybridity, and historical entanglements. They express the fluidity of historical and ethnic categories and the need for reconfiguring Arab cinema's multifaceted positionality within the geopolitical map and for challenging hegemonic centers. Such intentions, in addition to the call for new critical engagements with the theoretical underpinnings of postcolonial studies, make the two books very appealing at a time when global media studies puts great pressure on the postcolonial framework. These two books suggest that a dialogue across disciplines can productively advance this well-rehearsed discussion. After briefly summarizing each book's arguments and main contributions, I will critically examine their distinct engagements with representation on the one hand, and transnationalism on the other.
Waleed Mahdi's Arab Americans in Film proposes a comparative analysis of film representations of Arab-American diasporic figures in Hollywood cinema and in the historically most popular film industry in the Arab world, Egyptian cinema. Stemming from the author's personal experience of navigating different forms of belonging and demands of national allegiance, the book takes popular film representations as the locus where the Otherness of the Arab and the Muslim (often conflated in the common Western imaginary) is constructed. Of particular concern to Mahdi are the constraints that orientalist and nationalist representations place on the possibility for hyphenated Arab Americans to express their identity in non-binary terms and the necessity to unsettle the national as a category of analysis. Here, the concept of “cultural citizenship” allows Mahdi to examine the tensions between formal citizenship statuses and forms of transnational cultural belonging, which are crucial to the lived experience of diasporic subjects. Chapters 1–2 criticize the binary views of Arab Americans produced by the nationalist narratives of, on the one hand, Hollywood films (where Arab Americans were until the 1970s either reduced to exotic figures or erased), and, on the other, Egyptian cinema since the 1990s (where the “Egyptian dream” is offered as a mirroring alternative to the American one). Chapter 3–4 introduce attempts by non-Arab American filmmakers and Egyptian productions respectively to challenge hegemonic representations and complicate terrorist tropes. Chapter 5 concludes with Arab-American actors and filmmakers’ struggle to represent themselves, and the counter-narratives they produce through independent films.
Building on well-established studies of diasporic cinema (Naficy Reference Naficy2001) and Arab Americans’ orientalist representations throughout Hollywood history (most famously, Jack Shaheen's Reel Bad Arabs and Lina Khatib's Filming the Modern Middle East), Mahdi's true intervention consists in partially shifting the lens towards Arab Americans as they appear in Egyptian cinema. Widely understudied in Anglophone scholarship, the popular cinema of Egypt is also generally hard to access for non-Arabic speakers. Mahdi's commitment to describing plots and specific scenes from those films provides a small yet welcome window into a vast film culture. More importantly, the book adds to the scant English literature on the figure of the Arab American in this context. It positions Egypt as a producer of meaning rather than mere fodder for Hollywood's (mis)representations. Additionally, the attempt to produce a view of the diasporic subject from the perspective of the Arab world is a compelling move away from the re-centering of Western contexts which often results from foci on migrating populations. The critical narratives foregrounded here upset teleological views that position the West as the future of Arab diasporas and propose instead to include the return to the homeland within migrants’ trajectories.
On the other hand, Peter Limbrick's Arab Modernism as World Cinema: The Films of Moumen Smihi stems from the rich work of one Moroccan filmmaker from the 1970s onwards to open up a history of intellectual exchanges that far exceeds traditional understandings of East/West relations. The research arises from Limbrick's close relationship with the filmmaker and his intimate engagement with the artist's archive, which transpires in the delicate, gentle, and generous discussion of the films. Through a detailed examination of Smihi's stylistic experiments and intertextual representations across jhistorical eras, film genres, languages, and geographies, Limbrick's erudite study excavates the cosmopolitan and enlightened heritage of Arab modernism formulated during the Nahda (spanning from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century) and presents it as a paradigm through which to study Arab modernist cinema as world cinema. The book theorizes Arab modernism's worldliness alongside Francophone, Anglophone, and Arabic-speaking authors including, but not limited to, Nahda thinkers, French anthropologists, French new wave theorists, Marxist writers, medieval Islamic thinkers and poets, and contemporary Arab feminists. At the same time, Limbrick positions Smihi's films vis-à-vis Egyptian, Italian, Brazilian, and Indian neorealist film movements. The book's construction unfolds around Smihi's crafting of a new Arab subjectivity and his call for imagining a new Nahda through film. Chapters 1–3 develop the definition of a cinematic modernism through image, sound, and intertextuality, thus taking seriously cinema's modernist play with medium specificity through style. Conversely, chapter 4 follows a thematic organization around religion and chapter 5, around gender and sexuality. These illustrate Smihi's worldbuilding project through cinema, where liberal notions of tolerance inspired by Arab philosophical history can design new aesthetic and political imaginaries of Arab modernity.
The book's great strength lies in its theoretical and methodological proposition to rethink intellectual and cinematic genealogies beyond both the postcolonial paradigm of a Western, imperialist influence on Oriental thought and the fantasy of an Arab modernity completely detached from transnational conversations with the West. Limbrick insists that such oppositional patterns obscure centuries of mutual exchanges, which are central to Smihi's project of a new Nahda and the formulation of a new Arab subjectivity. To that end, the book imports current debates between historians of Arab modernity and comparative literature into film studies, thus positioning cinema within the broader liberal project of the humanities and modernity. This move also partakes in the epistemological turn towards theories from the Global South. Moreover, the book reiterates the critique of postcolonialism and its tendency to deprive formerly colonized people of any agency by foregrounding processes of domination. Finally, it forces us to re-evaluate canons of film history and theory, including dichotomies such as realism/modernism and popular/auteur cinema. Ultimately, Limbrick continues the debates around the category of “world cinema” (often reduced to everything non-Western) that aim to rehabilitate the term's productivity for generating situated theories at different scales (Nagib et al. Reference Nagib, Perriam and Dudrah2012; Stone et al. Reference Stone, Cooke, Dennison and Mann2017). To cite him directly, the book “demonstrates that Smihi's cinematic modernism is vernacular in its local roots, Arab in its genealogy, and worldly in its aspirations” (Limbrick Reference Limbrick2020, 20). Here, “world” is taken not only as a geographic description of non-Eurocentric cinema, but also as a drive towards “worldliness” and cosmopolitanism that sheds light on longue-durée histories of intellectual exchange across film, poetry, and even architecture.
It is from the entanglements of film representation and style (of content and form) that Limbrick retrieves the histories of mutual cultural and critical engagements between East and West as well as new genealogies of Arab modernism. This is obvious in chapter 3 with its dedication to intertextuality, a narrative technique itself perceived to be intimately related to the spirit of the Nahda. Paralleling Laura Marks's Enfoldment and Infinity (Reference Marks2011), Limbrick dedicates a section to the aesthetics of the Arab built environment in Smihi's films. Here, the deliberate mise-en-scène of Arab-Islamic architecture (its patterns, shapes, colors, compositions, and materiality) frames it as a system of signs that lends itself to a reading of visual history and conjures the early medieval Islamic philosophy of optics. Despite Limbrick's assertion that the world of images the filmmaker brings together exceeds his own vision, it is more often than not Smihi's very intention, aesthetic project, and direct engagement with those sources – documented in archives and interviews – that allow Limbrick to make the connection between the filmmaker's visual composition and the broader history that it reveals. Drawing on historian of early cinema Tom Gunning, the author defends a renewed interest in the filmmaker as auteur through the prism of a struggle with the language of cinema (Limbrick 16) and as an entry point into transnational and worldly dynamics. While the successful move between the particular, the regional, and the worldly proves central to the book as a proposition to consider what may be, there can be at times a tension between the focus on a filmography like Smihi's which stands out enough to become a fascinating case study, and the fact that these films are so particular that they might constitute a limit case.
In Arab Americans in Film, film representation functions simultaneously as the direct translation of filmmakers’ intentions and a product of hegemonic, nationalist film industries. Mahdi argues that filmmakers’ representations reflect already-existing sentiments about Arab-American cultural citizenship more than they produce new modes of belonging or new experiences of citizenship (Mahdi 30). This contrasts with the epistemological proposition of Edward Said's Orientalism and other postcolonial thinkers like Homi Bhabha and Fatimah Tobing-Rony, all cited by the author, who insist that gendered and racial imperialist tropes do in fact produce colonized subjectivities. By focusing on what representations are – on whether they are authentic or not – rather than what they do, the book risks reproducing the binaries and essentialisms that it seeks to unravel.
This has implications for the analysis of popular film culture. Film studies’ invitation to pay closer attention to style, genres, and definitions of the popular helps to deconstruct the modalities of identity representations that take shape formally and emerge from specific material conditions. The book tends to collapse Egyptian cinema into a homogeneous category which levels its great variety of genres (comedies, melodramas, thrillers, etc.) and the complex articulations of distinct registers of visual language. More often than not, the study of representations and tropes is divorced from a discussion of distinct genres, their mode of operation, and their variegated engagements with the popular. For example, chapter 2 recognizes that Youssef Chahine's Al-Akhar (Reference Chahine1999) borrows from the melodrama and that Nader Galal's Hallo Amrika (Reference Galal2000) is a comedy, but it would be helpful to learn about how those genres inject different aesthetic, historical, economic, and spectatorial contexts and meanings to seemingly similar portrayals of Arab American characters (80). Scholars like Viola Shafik, Walter Armbrust, and Joel Gordon, whom the author occasionally mentions, have discussed the history and specific conventions of Egyptian popular cinemas. In this chapter and beyond, a more consistent engagement with theories of genre and global popular culture would have provided a solid framework to navigate the subtle articulations of power embedded in popular representations, which the book importantly initiates.
In Arab Americans in Film, the category of the popular constitutes a key referent that travels across the contexts that Mahdi intends to compare. It allows him to bring together distinct geopolitical contexts and national productions, including Israeli films and pan-Arab histories, in addition to the U.S. and Egyptian centers of production. This comparative framework could be enriched by a sharper definition of hegemony, a term the author uses to describe U.S. and Egyptian nationalist, homogeneous representations as a uniform “controlling mechanism” (31). U.S. and Egyptian nationalisms, broadly defined in the introduction, could be further explained and distinguished within each chapter, especially as Egypt played a key role in shaping what the concept means in the region at different time periods, with complex and changing relations to US foreign policies. A discussion of transnational approaches to film style, genre, industries, and broader political economies (Ezra and Rowden Reference Ezra and Rowden2006) would bring additional nuance to Mahdi's argument that representations are largely the product of national(ist) film industries. The comparative framework ultimately points to the author's uneven investment in the U.S. perspective at the expense of the Arab context. The book effectively condemns the discourses produced by the so-called war on terror, but it maintains a certain fascination for their strength. In contrast, the last chapter's focus on Arab American independent productions provides a welcome reading of the material and representational challenges diasporic actors and filmmakers face in the United States, which remains understudied.
While Mahdi rightfully reminds us that representation constitutes a crucial site of domination, Limbrick compellingly imagines that cinematic forms contain the possibility for living together, within and across borders. Indeed, it is the formulation of a specific yet multifaceted Arab, modernist film language that allows re-positioning the project of a new Nahda beyond mere colonial influence and within worldly exchanges. Limbrick draws genealogies where Arab modernity no longer appears as a derivation of European enlightenments but emerges from its own societal debates in conjunction with transnational dialogues. By focusing on the vernacularizing process in developing the project of a contemporary Arab Enlightenment (tanwir), the Western examples the author mobilizes tend to situate Europe as a partner in dialogue above anything else. In this context, how do we still account for the afterlives of colonialism which formed the impetus behind the project of postcolonial studies?
Mahdi's engagement with hegemony pointed to some necessary questions that linger: Where and how do we see power? Is it only located in the film industries’ nationalist project as Mahdi proposes? Or may we find it in the wider capitalist and colonial systems that neither book directly confronts? These questions point to some possible limitations of a focus on representation which downplays the material conditions of film production and distribution. The recalibration of geopolitical narratives of influence differentially allowed by both Mahdi and Limbrick's focus on “agency” does not structurally address the continued material violence of colonization, coupled with that of global capitalism. How can we maintain the tension between the promises of a new Nahda and the persistence of the colonial without having one eclipse the other? Reading Arab Americans in Film and Arab Modernism as World Cinema together highlights the great, yet necessary, challenge of formulating emancipatory critiques of geopolitical relations in general and through film in particular. Ultimately, these two thought-provoking contributions encourage us to keep bridging disciplines towards a better understanding of post/colonial presents, pasts, and futures.
