Positioning itself beyond the physical-geographical conceptualization of the Middle East, Theater in the Middle East: Between Performance and Politics seeks a performative understanding of the regional term in its title to adopt a transcultural approach. The term “Middle East,” accordingly, defies its colonial, Eurocentric roots in this collection of essays and frames itself as a performative term, “that is, enunciatory practices that change the realities they seek to depict through performance” (4). This definition resonates deeply with the conceptual, rather than encyclopedic, structure of this body of essays, a structure that pivots around a highly unstable and complex region. Divided into two clearly defined sections entitled “Pedagogy and Tradition” and “Politics and (Trans)nation,” Theater in the Middle East highlights the diverse sociocultural and dramaturgical components that flout a stereotypical view of the people of the region as passive subjects well disposed to Western colonial formations. To that end, this multifarious collection, pointing to a wide range of topics such as pedagogy, political resistance, storytelling traditions, translation, and cultural negotiations, dissents from a monolithic attitude towards the Middle East. In his introduction, designed as much a statement as an outline, editor Babak Rahimi proclaims the book as arguably the first collection of essays that investigates “the question of ‘Middle East Theatre,’” which includes “non-Arab theatrical cultures, with the understanding that this dynamic region with its historically shifting national borders and diasporic boundaries cannot be reduced to a locked-up entity of cultural totality” (14). It is with this trenchant perception that Theater in the Middle East foregrounds the role of theatre as a medium that quests after a critical engagement “with lived reality through performance, staged or otherwise” (14). While prior books and collections of essays such as Doomed by Hope: Essays on Arab Theatre, edited by Eyad Houssami (2012), address a range of cultures and countries in the Middle East, Theater in the Middle East brings a novel and more inclusive approach to understanding the highly diverse theatre of the region.
In the first part of the book, four chapters address the crucial strands of pedagogy and tradition in Middle Eastern theatre. Michael Malek Najjar’s essay opens the section by proffering a discerning account of teaching an undergraduate course on Middle Eastern theatre at the University of Oregon, where he has offered courses on contemporary Arab American theatre and theatre history. As a case study calling attention to the substantial challenges one may face in designing a course around highly sensitive subjects such as Sunni-Shia discord and the Armenian genocide, Najjar’s experience serves as an illuminating example for teachers coping with comparable challenges. By the conclusion of his essay, one has gained rewarding insights into the complications of defining the term “Middle East,” pedagogical methodologies, and selecting plays from the rich and distinctly diverse dramatic literature of the region for an inclusive syllabus averse to unacknowledged suspicions and biases against Middle Easterners. Najjar, for instance, broaches the issue of translation and concludes that having an accessible body of dramatic literature from various ethnic groups in the region is more noteworthy than having a solid definition of the term “Middle East.”
In a compelling chapter titled “Harem Entertainers: Female Performers in Qajar Courts” that summons Afsaneh Najmabadi’s seminal work, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity (2005), Rana Salimi enters the conversation on gender roles and women cross-dressing in the Iranian Qajar era (1789–1925), exploring the performances—ta’ziyeh, erotic and lascivious games, dance and music—that extended space to women demurring to a patriarchal order in silence and secrecy. Building on Najmabadi’s explanation of the Iranian society’s transformation from a non-gender-based culture in the premodern era to a heteronormalized and Europeanized society in modern times, Salimi thoughtfully propounds the idea that “such cultural and social transformation had started earlier on, at the time of Naser al-Din Shah (1848–1896), who was dedicated to modernize his country” (54). In her closing lines, Salimi explains that the Qajar-era women performers were not feminist advocates and did not manage to effect wide-ranging cultural reforms, “but they did lay the ground for next movements that followed in the twentieth century and onward” (60).
The subsequent chapters in this section reflect on the significance of independent theatre and indigenous drama. Indeed, what emerges from Marvin Carlson’s essay on the Egyptian theatre and the theatre artist and educator Nehad Selaiha is a model to be esteemed by dramatists and instructors alike. Selaiha’s belief that art is not created in a void—but instead aims to usher the political into the aesthetic—served as a guiding principle in her artistic and scholarly work. She promotes a self-reliant theatre undaunted by governmental and profit-oriented regulations. Within the scope of aboriginal and independent theatre, the concluding chapter in the initial section, written by Khalid Amine, deftly scrutinizes pre- and postcolonial milieus of storytelling traditions in Moroccan theatre. Amine delves into storytelling, framing techniques, and the resignification of patriarchal afflictions in Dialy, “a feminist play that gives voice to contemporary Moroccan heiresses of Shahrza\d, the legendary storyteller of Thousand and One Nights” (77). In his analysis, Amine deems the reenactment and restaging of the repetitive patriarchal violence by women in public to be insurgent. That is to say, “If male violence, especially in public spaces, is a religiously veiled and repetitive patriarchal oppression, performative restaging of such violence by women in public is subversive in its very displacement of gender norms along with the oppressive conventions framing them” (79).
The last section of the book, hinging upon the political themes of displacement and migration, addresses multifarious issues such as resistance, identity, Israeli-Palestinian dissensions, and asylum. The Freedom Theatre (TFT), which arose in a refugee camp administered by the United Nations in northern West Bank, Palestine, is a major concern for Gary English in the fifth chapter. In the face of censorship and policing of political drama, TFT renders resistance practicable in the Palestinian community by promoting actors’ creativity and political agency as members of a marginalized society. In the next chapter, which touches upon the same thread of Israeli-Palestinian conflicts, Shelley Salamensky probes into the far-reaching implications of homelessness in the performance and video works of two progressive artists: Jewish Israeli Sigalit Landau and Palestinian American Emily Jacir. Salamensky provides detailed descriptions of some works by Jacir and Landau to illustrate how issues of space and place are both explored and enacted. Stressing the liminality and lack of fixity in a diasporic space—“Jewish, Palestinian or other”—Salamensky posits that “The displaced dwell ‘here,’ ‘there,’ nowhere, and everywhere at once” (120). In this context, performance, video, and installation arts, as specified by Salamensky, have the potential to question and hybridize geopolitical and spatiotemporal divisions. Jacir’s 2005 Embrace, for example, is an installation that, as a looped airport-type luggage carousel, responds to the presence of viewers by never ceasing its circular motion to signify the everlasting quest of Palestinians in both diaspora and the occupied territories for home (119).
Dwelling on the enduring ramifications of displacement resulting from the Syrian Uprising, Edward Ziter casts light on radio performances in the Syrian diaspora. Turning to radio drama serials, Ziter broaches the subject of trauma and argues that auditory performances broadcast on Radio SouriaLi evoke a sense of nostalgia to serve as a form of redress through remembrance. This also functions as a way of generating a sense of belonging for a diasporic community. The final chapter, propounding another media form, attends to documentary theatre and its capacity to expose the “truth” that may be invisible to mainstream media. By deliberating on her documentary performance No Demand No Supply: A Rereading of Lebanon’s 2016 Sex Trafficking Scandal, Sahar Assaf argues for a documentary theatre that affects the mainstream media and encourages them to recast our collective and social consciousness by giving an opportunity to the silenced women to render their stories visible to the public.
Eluding the fixity of premediated borders, Theater in the Middle East invalidates any unitary approach to Middle Eastern dramaturgical histories and practices. While Theater in the Middle East, as Rahimi also mentions, does not pose as an exhaustive collection, it is indisputably a worthwhile, imaginative, and timely addition to the generative Middle Eastern theatre scholarship. Cultivating both a transcultural and translational understanding of Middle Eastern theatrical traditions and heritage, Theater in the Middle East appeals to artists, activists, teachers, and scholars interested in a region whose political fluidity is reflected in its aesthetic fecundity.
