Generations of Dissent: Intellectuals, Cultural Production, and the State in the Middle East and North Africa

By R. Shareah Taleghani, Suzanne Gauch, Eman Morsi and 6 more

Situated in the fields of contemporary literary and cultural studies, the ten essays collected in Generations of Dissent shed light on the artistic creativity, cultural production, intellectual movements, and acts of political dissidence across the Middle East and North Africa. Born of the contributors’ research on dissidence and state co-option in a variety of artistic and creative fields, the volume’s core themes reflect the notion that the recent Arab uprisings did not appear in a cultural, political, or historical vacuum. Rather than focus on how protestors "finally" broke the walls of fear created by authoritarian regimes in the region, these essays show that the uprisings were rooted in multiple generations and various acts of resistance decades prior to 2010–11. Firat and Taleghani’s volume maps the complicated trajectories of artistic and creative dissent across time and space, showing how artists have challenged institutions and governments over the past six decades.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Syracuse University Press
• Release date: Jul 23, 2020
• ISBN: 9780815654940

Book preview

Generations of Dissent

Contemporary Issues in the Middle East

Mehran Kamrava, Series Editor

Select Titles in Contemporary Issues in the Middle East

Colonial Jerusalem: The Spatial Construction of Identity and Difference in a City of Myth, 1948–2012

Thomas Philip Abowd

Democracy and the Nature of American Influence in Iran, 1941–1979

David R. Collier

Iraqi Migrants in Syria: The Crisis before the Storm

Sophia Hoffmann

Making the New Middle East: Politics, Culture, and Human Rights

Valerie J. Hoffman, ed.

The Mizrahi Era of Rebellion: Israel’s Forgotten Civil Rights Struggle, 1948–1966

Bryan K. Roby

Ottoman Children and Youth during World War I

Nazan Maksudyan

Political Muslims: Understanding Youth Resistance in a Global Context

Tahir Abbas and Sadek Hamid, eds.

We Are Iraqis: Aesthetics and Politics in a Time of War

Nadje Al-Ali and Deborah Al-Najjar, eds.

For a full list of titles in this series, visit https://press.syr.edu/supressbook-series/contemporary-issues-in-the-middle-east/.

Copyright © 2020 by Syracuse University Press

Syracuse, New York 13244-5290

Chapter 5, Lost Homelands, Imaginary Returns: The Exilic Literature of Iranian and Iraqi Jews. Copyright © 2020 by Ella Shohat

All Rights Reserved

First Edition 2020

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For a listing of books published and distributed by Syracuse University Press, visit https://press.syr.edu.

ISBN: 978-0-8156-3669-4 (hardcover)

978-0-8156-3679-3 (paperback)

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2020934663

Manufactured in the United States of America

Contents

Acknowledgments

A Note on Transliteration and Translation

Introduction: Generating Forms of Dissent

Alexa Firat and R. Shareah Taleghani

Part One: Dismantling and Negotiating State Discourses

1. Ghosting Dissent: Tariq Teguia’s Zanj Revolution

Suzanne Gauch

2. The Gatekeepers: Nation Building and the Emergence of a New Intellectual Class in Post-1952 Egypt

Eman Morsi

3. Hadatha, Dissent, and Hegemonic Masculinity in the Short Stories of Zakariyya Tamir

Alessandro Columbu

4. The Artistic Universe of Ziad Rahbani The Quest of a Dissident in Service of the Darawish

Chloe Kattar

Part Two: Exile and Dissident Identities

5. Lost Homelands, Imaginary Returns The Exilic Literature of Iranian and Iraqi Jews

Ella Shohat

6. The Exilic Condition and Resistance in Jordanian Literature

Alexa Firat

7. Breaking Ranks with National Unanimity: Novelistic and Cinematic Returns of Jewish-Muslim Intimacy in Morocco

Brahim El Guabli

Part Three: Subversive Aesthetics

8. Muhammad al-Bisati and the Aesthetics of Dissent

Yasmine Ramadan

9. Aesthetics of Journalistic Dissent in Kurdish Women’s News

Caroline McKusick

10. Docu-ironies and Visions of Dissent in the Films of Omar Amiralay

R. Shareah Taleghani

Bibliography

Contributors’ Biographies

Index

Acknowledgments

The idea for this collection of essays grew out of debates and discussions during a seminar we organized for the annual meeting of the ACLA in 2015. The original double seminar, entitled Between Dissidence and Co-option: Literature, Intellectuals, and the State, brought together a series of papers focusing on the relationship between cultural producers, dissent, and the hegemonic authority of the state in world literature. We would like to thank all of the participants in that original seminar for their engagement with the topic, and we are especially grateful to the insights of a number of contributors, a few of whose essays are included in this volume: Jonathan Bolton, Zeina Halabi, Eman Morsi, Yasmine Ramadan, and Max Weiss. This seminar was followed by the Generations of Dissent symposium funded by Temple University’s Center for Humanities at Temple Middle East North Africa Group, Global Studies Department, and Department of Asian and Middle East Languages and Studies with participants including Alessandro Columbu, Suzanne Gauch, and Eman Morsi. A third panel, Generations of Dissent: Cultural Production, Oppositional Aesthetics and the State, which included some of the early drafts of papers in the volume, was also organized for the annual meeting of the Middle East Studies Association in 2016 with participants including Zeina Halabi, Yasmine Ramadan, Eman Morsi. We would like to thank the Office of the Dean of Arts and Humanities at Queens College for providing travel funding for both the ACLA and MESA meetings for R. Shareah Taleghani. We would also like to thank additional contributors to the volume for their diligence and patience in the process of bringing this work together: Brahim El Guabli, Suzanne Gauch, Chloe Kattar, Caroline McKusick, and Ella Shohat.

A Note on Transliteration and Translation

We have followed the International Journal of Middle East Studies (IJMES) system of transliteration for modern standard Arabic except in the following cases:

1. For simplification, we have not employed diacritical markers, except those indicating ‘ayn and hamza, for stand-alone Arabic terms.

2. Chapters 1 and 7 include some common French spellings of Arabic and Amazigh names and words.

3. When citing and quoting from published translations of texts and subtitles in films, some contributors have opted to retain the spelling found in those previously published or screened versions.

4. In some cases, such as chapter 4, contributors have opted to transliterate terms as they are pronounced in local dialects, such as Lebanese colloquial.

Additionally, chapters 5 and 7 contain some transliteration of Hebrew, while chapter 9 uses Turkish spelling as well as Kurdish in the Latin alphabet for expressions and proper nouns.

Generations of Dissent

Introduction

Generating Forms of Dissent

Alexa Firat and R. Shareah Taleghani

Decades prior to the 2009 Iranian Green Movement and the 2010–11 Arab uprisings, intellectuals, writers, filmmakers, and artists have articulated creative forms of dissent from the status quo of authoritarian regimes across the Middle East and North Africa. Situated in the fields of literary and cultural studies, Generations of Dissent brings together ten essays that shed light on the ways in which cultural producers and intellectuals across the region have been responding to, working against, and navigating forms of state hegemony for the past seventy years. Emphasizing the interplay of creativity and dissidence in literature, film, music, and journalism, these scholarly works promote an understanding of dissent that transcends normative frameworks of protest or claims to organized resistance. Likewise, we focus on how intellectuals and cultural producers generate alternative discursive spaces that confront state, societal, and/or institutional norms and expectations.

The essays in this collection explore the following questions: How and to what effects do cultural producers and intellectuals engage in opposing the politics of a given state both directly and indirectly, even if from a position of exile? How do they work to challenge undemocratic state policies and the politics of authoritarianism both individually and collectively? What types of aesthetic interventions have different authors made in order to contravene the discourse and directives of the political regimes under which they live? How have writers’ and intellectuals’ engagements with the state challenged traditional concepts of authority, authoritarianism, and authorship? Simultaneously, how do writers and intellectuals negotiate with the issues of state co-option of dissidence and critique, state censorship, and state patronage?

Born out of a 2015 American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) seminar on creative dissidence and state co-option of artistic and intellectual production, this volume engages with the notion of dissent at its most basic definition: a discursive process that expresses a difference of opinion as well as political opposition to states and their policies. While we recognize that movements of political opposition in the Middle East confront nonstate entities and actors, the essays collected here shed light on challenges and negotiations specifically with the state and its regimes as enacted by cultural producers and intellectuals. We also acknowledge that not all forms of dissent are democratic or advocate for democracy, though the modes of dissidence examined by our contributors work against authoritarianisms, totalitarianisms, and essentializing forms of nationalism.

The essays in this collection focus in particular on the intersection of cultural production, state authority, and dissidence from the 1950s to the present. The studies offered here begin in the decade in which the majority of states in the region had achieved independence from direct European colonial rule and pivot to subsequent decades in which authoritarian regimes emerged throughout the region in the aftermath of colonialism. Moreover, because of the diversity of geographies, histories, and media discussed by the authors here, the volume demonstrates the need for a broader conceptualization of dissent, especially in the realm of culture. To work and push against norms takes ingenuity, courage, and community. The works discussed in this volume emerge out of particular sociopolitical conditions and showcase innovative interventions into the often repressive and constrictive constructs of state hegemony. In this way, the cultural and intellectual products analyzed in this volume stand as individual testimonies to fraught and often untenable political conditions.

We intentionally use the word generation in the title to evoke a double sense of meaning: first, the term stands as a reminder that various dissidents, cultural producers, and intellectuals have engaged in often decades-long struggles to critique, contest, and call out the authoritarianism and modes of political oppression of the states under which they live. Second, drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, our collection demonstrates that power is not just repressive, but generative—the disciplinary regimes of states result in the production of forms of resistance and opposition, even if in a limited fashion. As such, we are not invoking the term generation to imply newly found or recognized groups, movements, or collectivities that share a set of characteristics in response to a period of time or conditions. Nor are we engaging in inter- or intragenerational comparisons in particular locations. Rather, we offer this collection of essays as a reminder of the diverse and variegated forms of individual creative dissent across the region over seventy decades.¹

The essays in this collection build on and complement earlier scholarship that either touches upon or deals directly with dissent and cultural production in the region. Much of this rich and informative body of scholarship focuses on one nation-state or on one form of cultural production. One key example is Samia Mehrez’s Egypt’s Culture Wars. Mehrez’s work on the Egyptian cultural field clearly demonstrates that the circulation of texts, ideas, and artworks are never far removed from the field of politics.² Her book captures the tenuous relationships between cultural producers (writers, artists) and the Egyptian state since 1981, when the Mubarak regime came to power, until the early 2000s (pre-2011). Mehrez focuses on the circulation of ideas through multiple media in the cultural sphere by way of cultural battles and, like our collection, disrupts simplistic characterizations of the relationship between artists and authority. The essays in our volume also span a range of technologies, from film to literature to journalism, and closely analyze the ways in which dissent may be read in art—broadly speaking—and culture. Moreover, the essays demonstrate the aesthetic potential of dissident discourse and steer away from formalizing characteristics of resistance, aiming instead to broaden and enrich conceptualizations of resistance to demonstrate its multifarious nature.

Likewise, miriam cooke’s text Dissident Syria takes the Asad regime’s slogan Culture is humanity’s highest need plastered on the walls of Damascus as a point of departure to investigate the dialectic between the state and cultural producers. Cooke not only discusses how the regime used culture to control people, but also how cultural producers are able to navigate and to a certain degree thrive artistically within these confines, much of which she identifies as commissioned criticism. Since, at the time of publication, much contemporary, dissident Syrian culture never left the country and barely circulated before being banned; the criticism was not deemed a threat because to a certain degree the state permitted select forms of dissent in order to manipulate it and potentially convert it into state ideology.³

In music studies, Bronwen Robertson’s study Reverberations of Dissent examines Iran’s underground rock music scene as a rich example of antiauthoritarian youth culture. For Robertson, the development and persistence of such a culture by a select group of Tehrani youth produces and expresses divergent identities in a politically and socially subversive way.⁴ Though she does not explicitly define her understanding of the term dissent, Robertson draws clear connections between the use of poetry and folk music as a tool for social reform and political critique and resistance in Iran, including prior to the 1978–79 Revolution, and the more contemporary function of rock music to express opposition to and within the Islamic Republic. Borrowing from the work of Hakim Bey, she also argues that musicians create temporary autonomous zones free from restrictions of the state through virtual festivals and performances.

In film studies, Joseph Gugler has brought together scholarly works on dissent and political opposition in cinematic works across the region. The essays in Film in the Middle East and North Africa: Creative Dissidence focus on feature films from Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco, and the analysis of these works focus primarily on auteur directors as intellectuals cum artists critically engaged in politics.⁵ Without specifically offering a definition of dissent or dissidence, Gugler focuses on particular themes of dissidence in films across the region and argues that filmmakers such as the Iranian director Rakhshan Bani-Etemad express dissent from political regimes, patriarchal customs, religious movements, and Western interference in the region.⁶ At the same time, Gugler traces how filmmakers navigate state censorship. He notes that, though films may express opposition to the nation-states in which they are made or are about, often filmmakers are compelled to retreat from outspoken critiques to fare less objectionable to the powers that be.⁷ Notably, documentary film is entirely absent from the analyses presented in Gugler’s volume; our volume offers a critical overview of dissent and irony in the films of Syrian documentarian Omar Amiralay. Additionally, Gugler’s collection covers far more male than female filmmakers.⁸

Our collection nods to the vast arsenal of artistic strategies cultural producers use to voice their resistance, as demonstrated by the volume Resistance in Contemporary Middle Eastern Cultures.⁹ Yet, whereas Laachir and Talajooy’s text focuses on practices of resistance in cultural productions, that is [how they] subvert dominant social and political hegemonies in the region, our text locates dissent more particularly at the site between the state and culture.¹⁰ Likewise, while the essays in Generations of Dissent are loosely framed by the materiality of nation-states, they are not bound by a particular history or event, nation or ethnicity. Rather, individually and collectively, they underscore and highlight the deep connective tissue of discursive dissent as practice and, as such, construct a map of varying mechanisms and modes of thinking that bespeak the dialectic between artist and state. In this way, dissent is not a practice connected to the political as much as it is a practice that creates—that is, generates—its own aesthetic grammar.

In using dissent in our title we are attentive to the Cold War legacies of the term in English and the fact that the word was, and often still is, problematically deployed as a homogenizing label for those opposing particular kinds of political regimes, specifically Communist states prior to 1989. Engaging with Jonathan Bolton’s scholarship on dissidence in Czechoslovakia, we highlight the fact that forms of dissent are diverse, multivalent, dynamic, and particular.¹¹ In Arabic, for example, there is no exact translation of the term dissent, though often the term mu‘arada is used to signify not just dissidence, but also resistance and opposition. While we emphasize the notion of dissent throughout the collection, the Arabic term mu‘arada reminds us of the interconnected nature of terms like dissidence, resistance, opposition, and protest—all of which are linked to discourses of confrontation.¹² Following Robert Ivie in his reflections in Enabling Democratic Dissent, our collection engages with notions of dissent as an act of protest, discourse of confrontation, and condition of alienation that is contrasted with consensus or even perceived as a goad to a new consensus.¹³ Furthermore, many of the essays address the work of cultural producers who generate or participate in counterpublics (i.e., public spaces of expression and creativity that function outside the norms of the dominant public arena as alternative sites of creative opposition, in Ivie’s terminology).¹⁴

This volume also demonstrates that, historically across the region, the actors generating forms of dissent to Middle Eastern and North African states do not necessarily fit into the presumptive and generalizing parameters and categories of dissent and resistance as defined by the mainstream Western media, particularly in comparison with its coverage of the Arab uprisings of 2010–11 and its focus on social media and youth culture. In offering this collection of essays about diverse and covert and overt modes of dissent located in various forms of cultural production, we also remind our audience of the existence of political opposition to the states of Middle East and North Africa that is both antiauthoritarian and anti-Western and anti-American. The counterpublics that Middle Eastern and North African cultural producers generate, as the essays in this volume will attest, frequently diverge from and confront those presupposed by the Western media.

The chapters of Generations of Dissent reflect on the ambivalences, complicities, and contradictions not just in dissident movements but in the works of art generated by cultural producers as they confront and mediate state authority. In this way, a number of themes materialize throughout the collection and across genres and geographies. Part one focuses on how intellectuals and cultural producers dismantle and negotiate state discourses. In the first chapter, Suzanne Gauch examines how a recent film of Algerian filmmaker Tariq Teguia, Zanj Revolution (2013), depicts profound crises in the nationalist ideologies that guided filmmaking in Algeria for three decades. Teguia’s film journeys without destination, according to Gauch, in order to trace not only an impossible map, but to sketch out a history uncontainable in any archive. Zanj Revolution (and Teguia’s other films) challenge state-sponsored discourse by revisiting the revolutionary, Marxist, internationalist, thirdist ideologies that initially shaped Algeria’s postindependence nationalist discourse.

In the second chapter, Eman Morsi interrogates the national project and nation building of the Egyptian state in the Abdel Nasser era by exploring the emergent class of intellectual gatekeepers in debates about freedom of speech. Her analysis centers on the popular periodical Ruz al-Yusuf and investigates the debates on freedom of expression that took place immediately before Egypt’s declaration of independence in June 1953. Morsi shows that the arguments employed to justify the suppression of individual rights during the process of nation building in the 1950s established a new class of intellectuals and cultural producers. This new class of gatekeepers, benefiting from a wide readership and audience, helped protect the state and its institutions from external and internal destructive criticism. Meanwhile, the impact of this class and its influence can still be felt in Egypt today.

The book’s third chapter, by Alessandro Columbu, demonstrates how the short stories of Zakaria Tamir break down the Syrian state’s discourses of modernity and hegemonic masculinity. The author analyzes how Tamir’s stories channel different forms of dissent against past tradition, patriarchy, inequality, and authoritarianism to reinforce a form of hegemonic masculinity complicit with Ba‘thist discourse. Moreover, Columbu maps how Tamir’s oeuvre, which was initially influenced by "hadathi" modernist ideas and existentialism, later shifted to focusing on exploiting figures of emasculated male and female characters in response to the growing authoritarianism of the state.

Chloe Kattar’s contribution in chapter 4 examines the life and work of Lebanese composer Ziad Rahbani to highlight how the figure of the engagé in Lebanese music champions both political distrust of the state and an ascetic ethos. Tracing how al-Rahbani exposed the realities of a divided Lebanese society and its confessional state, Kattar focuses on the key political and social tropes of contestation that appear in his works: the political system, sectarianism, and class struggle. First examining themes of dissent in his early songs, plays, and radio shows (1973–87), she then looks at his postwar contributions and demonstrates how, by continuously rejecting the institutions and symbols of power, Rahbani’s musical work contributes to the making of a new Lebanese identity—that is, the "darwish" ethos, one that shares values of political distrust and desire for a simpler life.

The chapters in part two investigate identity and exilic conditions as modes of dissent and the ways in which they reevaluate and renegotiate nationalist memories and intimacies. Ella Shohat’s contribution examines the tensions, dissonance, and forms of dissent embedded in writings of and about the Iran-Iraq War by Iranian and Iraqi Jews from the perspective of geographical exiles and linguistic displacements. The chapter traces the question of how we can understand the representation of religious/ethnic minorities within the intersecting geographies of Iraq and Iran even when the writing is exercised outside of these geographies in languages other than Arabic and Farsi, and how addressing this war precisely in geographies where the war was invisible came to form a return to a lost homeland. By conveying a sense of fragmentation and dislocation, Shohat shows how the linguistic medium itself becomes both metonym and metaphor for highly fraught relations to national and regional belonging.

The following chapter by Alexa Firat examines the condition of exile, whether as a result of political, economic, or social conditions, or a general condition of existential unbelonging. Reading closely two novels by Jordanian authors, the chapter looks at identity as a productive site to read resistance in the context of national, social, and ethnic cultural norms engendered by both state and society. The generative power of these two novels can be found in a discourse that rejects the simulacrum of unity necessary for state stability and as such, undermines national metanarratives.

In chapter 7, Brahim El Guabli traces the proliferation of literary and cinematic productions about Moroccan Jews over the last twenty years, arguing that these works represent a break with conventional official and civil society positions on Morocco’s Jewish past. This recent trend subverts the traditional position of the monarchy to exploit the issue of Palestine by attempting a complex reconciliation between rehabilitating Morocco’s plural past and supporting the Palestinian people’s struggle. In arguing that the literary and cinematic works about Moroccan Jewish memory rehabilitates an erstwhile, shared Jewish-Muslim life without ignoring the colonial situation in Palestine, El Guabli opens up a new space for a fresh understanding of how memory, intimacy, and place subvert old positions and create a critical nuance in the representation of Jewish-Muslim past in a context of political struggle.

Part three highlights what Yasmine Ramadan refers to as the aesthetics of dissent in her analysis of the works of Egyptian writer Muhammad al-Bisati. In her chapter, Ramadan argues that al-Bisati’s novels react against conventional notions of social realism as well as state power. She explores his use of magical realism as a means to question the dominance of earlier social realist narratives in the Egyptian literary field and the ideas of the nation-state that they supported. The work of al-Bisati blurs the lines between reality and fiction, questioning linearity as a reliable structuring device and foregrounding multiple, polyphonic voices, often those from the margins. This chapter also interrogates the notion of magical realism as an aesthetics of dissent and illustrates the need to connect these narrative strategies both to magical realism in Latin America, Africa, and elsewhere, as well as to Arabic storytelling traditions.

In her chapter, Caroline McKusick argues that Kurdish women journalists use a specific aesthetics of journalistic authority in order to redefine what is newsworthy, to express dissent from state-sponsored media in Turkey, and to circumvent the severe crackdown on oppositional journalists in the country. The chapter focuses on how these journalists have drawn on authoritative, aesthetic forms of journalism, from its conventional writing styles to its preferred camera angles, while at the same time encouraging everyday women to embrace their right to express themselves. These journalists’ interventions demonstrate how the aesthetics associated with the state can be a resource for opposition—perhaps not through transforming the state-dominated discourse, but through using its aesthetics to nourish opposition.

In the volume’s final chapter, R. Shareah Taleghani analyzes the last film of the late, renowned Syrian documentarian Omar Amiralay as a self-reflexive and satirical repudiation of his first, state-sponsored film A Film Essay on the Euphrates Dam (1970), which hailed the economic modernization projects and celebrated the populist rhetoric of the early Asad regime. Banned in Syria, Amiralay’s film focuses on the ill-conceived construction of the Tabqa Dam and reflects on how both ordinary citizens and Ba‘th party loyalists have been impacted negatively by the state education system, economic development policy, and official propaganda. The author argues that the stark realism, visual techniques, and filmmaker’s self-critical narration emphasize the role of oppositional irony in generating dissidence, but also reflect the insecurity and vulnerability of the state’s official discourse.

Taken together, the essays in this collection present new and innovative analyses on the state and artistic creativity, cultural production, intellectual movements, and modes of political dissidence across the Middle East and North Africa. The volume’s core themes are grounded in the notion that the recent Arab uprisings did not appear in a cultural, political, or historical vacuum. Rather than focusing our analyses on how protesters finally broke the walls of fear created by authoritarian regimes in the region, these essays demonstrate that the uprisings were intrinsically connected to multiple generations and modes of resistance to official, state hegemonic discourses decades prior to 2010–11. The volume maps the complicated trajectories of specific cases of artistic and creative dissent across time and space, not limiting the notion of dissidence to a particular history, but rather showing how institutional pressures are challenged by artists. Our contributors highlight how artists create a third space, one outside the dialectic of power that open up channels of dissent, more of which we will certainly see in the future.

1. In offering this overview of dissent and the essays collected in this book, we are mindful of the critique of the scholarly romanticization of both the idea and term resistance in examinations of the work of Middle Eastern cultural producers. Several of the essays in this collection deal with works that circulated locally, were not necessarily treated or received as works of dissidence, and as such not necessarily valorized (i.e., romanticized solely as expressions of resistance). Additionally, particular essays in the collection, such as Eman Morsi’s contribution, tackle the complex question of state cooptation of dissent and resistance. For more on the issue of the romance of resistance, see Lila Abu-Lughod, The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformations of Power Through Bedouin Women, American Ethnologist 17, no. 1 (February 1990): 41–55. See also Laudan Nooshin, Whose Liberation? Iranian Popular Music and the Fetishization of Resistance, Popular Communication 15, no. 3 (2017): 163–91.

2. Samia Mehrez, Egypt’s Culture Wars: Politics and Practice (Cairo: American Univ. in Cairo Press, 2000).

3. miriam cooke, Dissident Syria: Making Oppositional Arts Official (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2007), 73.

4. Bronwen Robertson, Reverberations of Dissent: Identity and Expression in Iran’s Illegal Music Scene (London: Continuum, 2012), xix.

5. Josef Gugler, ed., Film in the Middle East and North Africa: Creative Dissidence (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 2011), 3.

6. Gugler, Film in the Middle East and North Africa, 3.

7. Gugler, 14.

8. Following this one, Gugler published an additional volume surveying the lives and works of particular Arab filmmakers. While this more recent collection focuses on similar themes of dissent, its essays also place a greater emphasis on the biographies of the filmmakers, as well as on sources of and controversies over funding and censorship. See Josef Gugler, Ten Arab Filmmakers: Political Dissent and Social Critique (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 2015).

9. Karima Laachir and Saeed Talajooy, eds., Resistance in Contemporary Middle Eastern Cultures (New York: Routledge, 2013).

10. Laachir and Talajooy, Resistance in Contemporary Middle Eastern Cultures, 4.

11. It’s worth noting that Bolton participated in the original ACLA seminar from which the collection emerges, as acknowledged earlier.

12. Robert L. Ivie, Enabling Democratic Dissent, Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 1 (February 2015): 46–59, 47.

13. Ivie, Enabling Democratic Dissent, 47.

14. Ivie, 48.

Part One

Dismantling and Negotiating State Discourses

1

Ghosting Dissent

Tariq Teguia’s Zanj Revolution

Suzanne Gauch

A floating abstract image crops up twice in Algerian filmmaker Tariq Teguia’s third feature film, Zanj Revolution (Thawrat Zanj/Révolution zendj, 2013).¹ Jarring in its departure from the film’s representational character, it consists of a slow red-tinted pan over a surface etched with crisscrossing lines, almost like a piece of scratched slate or a chalkboard. First appearing after a friend attempts to dissuade the film’s protagonist, the journalist Battuta, from journeying to Iraq in order to research the ninth-century Zanj rebellion—an armed uprising against the Abbasid Caliphate undertaken by Black slaves in the vicinity of what is today Basra, Iraq, and lasting from 869 to 883—it is followed by a brief scene in which two white American contractors sit counting money in a room in contemporary, American-occupied Iraq. When the film returns to Battuta, he is slumped in a chair at a nearly empty, yellow-hued Algiers airport. The same or a very similar black-and-white image crops up near the conclusion of Zanj. Again, it is intercalated between sequences related to Battuta’s intent to travel to Iraq. In the scene that precedes its appearance, Battuta, now in Beirut, asks Nahla, a young Palestinian woman from Greece who is the film’s coprotagonist, East or West? What’s to be gained, a country? she replies. I don’t think so, he answers. Layered between silent aerial nighttime pans over a city and a shoreline, the scratches on the image are just starting to resolve into a map when Battuta reappears in profile, gazing out the window of an airplane into the dawn light, presumably on his way to Iraq. Yet the scrubby, rocky, light-saturated hillside filling the next two soundless shots is indistinguishable from the stretch of the Greek coastline over which Nahla and her Palestinian friend Rami scramble after their clandestine landing on the beach a few scenes later.

This spectral image, which repeatedly holds out the promise of spatiotemporal orders of relation, of a situational or identitarian logic,