The Arab Nahda as Popular Entertainment

The Arab Nahda as Popular Entertainment
Author:
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2023-11-16
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0755647416

What was popular entertainment like for everyday Arab societies in Middle Eastern cities during the long nineteenth century? In what ways did café culture, theatre, illustrated periodicals, cinema, cabarets, and festivals serve as key forms of popular entertainment for Arabic-speaking audiences, many of whom were uneducated and striving to contend with modernity's anxiety-inducing realities? Studies on the 19th to mid-20th century's transformative cultural movement known as the Arab nahda (renaissance), have largely focussed on concerns with nationalism, secularism, and language, often told from the perspective of privileged groups. Highlighting overlooked aspects of this movement, this book shifts the focus away from elite circles to quotidian audiences. Its ten contributions range in scope, from music and visual media to theatre and popular fiction. Paying special attention to networks of movement and exchange across Arab societies in Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Iraq, and Morocco, this book heeds the call for 'translocal/transnational' cultural histories, while contributing to timely global studies on gender, sexuality, and morality. Focusing on the often-marginalized frequenters of cafés, artist studios, cinemas, nightclubs, and the streets, it expands the remit of who participated in the nahda and how they did.

The Arab Renaissance

The Arab Renaissance
Author: Tarek El-Ariss
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2018
Genre: FICTION
ISBN: 9781603293099

"An anthology of Arabic texts and English translations of works from the Arab Renaissance (Nahda) on modernity, language, gender, transnationalism, literary criticism, politics, travel, social justice, technology, history, and commerce. The edition is designed for the classroom, with an introduction, translator's note, and textual notes for students and teachers"--

Midnight in Cairo: The Divas of Egypt's Roaring '20s

Midnight in Cairo: The Divas of Egypt's Roaring '20s
Author: Raphael Cormack
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 283
Release: 2021-03-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 0393541142

A vibrant portrait of the talented and entrepreneurial women who defined an era in Cairo. One of the world’s most multicultural cities, twentieth-century Cairo was a magnet for the ambitious and talented. During the 1920s and ’30s, a vibrant music, theater, film, and cabaret scene flourished, defining what it meant to be a “modern” Egyptian. Women came to dominate the Egyptian entertainment industry—as stars of the stage and screen but also as impresarias, entrepreneurs, owners, and promoters of a new and strikingly modern entertainment industry. Raphael Cormack unveils the rich histories of independent, enterprising women like vaudeville star Rose al-Youssef (who launched one of Cairo’s most important newspapers); nightclub singer Mounira al-Mahdiyya (the first woman to lead an Egyptian theater company) and her great rival, Oum Kalthoum (still venerated for her soulful lyrics); and other fabulous female stars of the interwar period, a time marked by excess and unheard-of freedom of expression. Buffeted by crosswinds of colonialism and nationalism, conservatism and liberalism, “religious” and “secular” values, patriarchy and feminism, this new generation of celebrities offered a new vision for women in Egypt and throughout the Middle East.

Arab Cinema

Arab Cinema
Author: Viola Shafik
Publisher: American Univ in Cairo Press
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2007
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9789774160653

Intended for scholars of film and the contemporary Middle East, this title provides a comprehensive overview of cinema in the Arab world, tracing the industry's development, since colonial times. It analyzes the ambiguous relationship with commercial western cinema, and the effect of Egyptian market dominance in the region.

The Cambridge Companion to Modern Arab Culture

The Cambridge Companion to Modern Arab Culture
Author: Dwight F. Reynolds
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2015-04-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 0521898072

An accessible and wide-ranging survey of modern Arab culture covering political, intellectual and social aspects.

Performing Iran

Performing Iran
Author: Babak Rahimi
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2021-08-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 0755635124

The result of collaborative research from noteworthy dramatists and scholars, this volume investigates the dynamic relationship between culture, performance and theatre in Iran. The studies gathered here examine how various forms of performances, especially theatre, have and continue to undergo change in response to shifting political and social settings from the antiquity to the present day. The analysis in this book focuses on performance practices, examining drama, texts, rituals, plays, music, cinema and drama technologies. This is done in order to show how Iran has been imagined through enactments and representations, and reproduced through these performative actions. The book uses a wider definition of the concept of 'performance', offering analysis of a wide range of phenomena, including indigenous rituals – such as the naqqali and taziyeh – and online performances by diaspora communities.

Consumerist Orientalism

Consumerist Orientalism
Author: M. Keith Booker
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2019-10-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 183860068X

In a postmodern world of globalised capital, how does the concept of Orientalism inform understandings of cultural exchange? In this detailed and wide-ranging examination, Arab popular culture is explored in its relation to American culture and capitalism. Offering new insights on Edward Said's longstanding theoretical lens, Consumerist Orientalism presents an updated conceptual framework through which to understand the intercultural relationship between East and West, exploring a wide range of cultural production; from an Oscar-nominated Jordanian film to Turkish-Arab soap operas and Arab-diaspora rap. Drawing on key contemporary critical thinkers and in-depth cultural analysis, the relationship between capitalism, postmodernism and Orientalism is explored with fresh insights, making this essential reading for students of Middle Eastern culture, globalisation and postcolonial studies.

Gendering Culture in Greater Syria

Gendering Culture in Greater Syria
Author: Fruma Zachs
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2014-11-14
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0857736728

The Nahda (lit. 'the Awakening') was one of the most significant cultural movements in modern Arab history. By focusing on the neglected role of women in the intellectual Islamic renaissance of the late Ottoman Period, Fruma Zachs and Sharon Halevi provide a refreshingly interdisciplinary exploration of gender and culture in the Arab World. Focusing mainly on Greater Syria, this book re-examines the cultural by-products of the Nahda - such as scientific debates, journal articles, essays, short stories and novels - and provides a new framework for rethinking the dynamics of cultural and social change in what today we know as Syria and Lebanon. The lasting impact of the Nahda is given an innovative and thoroughly unique interpretation, providing an indispensable perspective to studying the nuanced roles of the construction and development of gender ideologies in the nineteenth century Middle East. The authors explore contemporary ideas concerning modern gender roles in the Middle East, and the extent to which these emerged in nineteenth-century Greater Syria. How were these ideas incorporated into daily lives, consumer patterns and cultural activities? Was class a determining factor in the creation of gender relations in the Muslim world? How were the subjectivities of gender moulded and articulated in fictional and non-fictional texts? The authors delineate both the evolution of a discourse on gender as well the "real-life" activities of men and women as writers, readers and participants in philanthropic and cultural societies, literary salons and educational enterprises. This book reemphasizes the position of the Nahda in the worlds of Damascus, Aleppo and Beirut as an innovative, deeply influential, and significant socio-cultural and political movement in its own right, which played a major role in shaping modern Arab culture, worldviews and self-perception. Zachs and Halevi here provide a new framework for rethinking the dynamics of cultural and social change, and present a groundbreaking new interpretation of the cumulative impact of the Nahda on gender perception in the late Ottoman Period.

Islam, Science Fiction and Extraterrestrial Life

Islam, Science Fiction and Extraterrestrial Life
Author: Jörg Matthias Determann
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2020-09-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 0755601300

The Muslim world is not commonly associated with science fiction. Religion and repression have often been blamed for a perceived lack of creativity, imagination and future-oriented thought. However, even the most authoritarian Muslim-majority countries have produced highly imaginative accounts on one of the frontiers of knowledge: astrobiology, or the study of life in the universe. This book argues that the Islamic tradition has been generally supportive of conceptions of extra-terrestrial life, and in this engaging account, Jörg Matthias Determann provides a survey of Arabic, Bengali, Malay, Persian, Turkish, and Urdu texts and films, to show how scientists and artists in and from Muslim-majority countries have been at the forefront of the exciting search. Determann takes us to little-known dimensions of Muslim culture and religion, such as wildly popular adaptations of Star Wars and mysterious movements centred on UFOs. Repression is shown to have helped science fiction more than hurt it, with censorship encouraging authors to disguise criticism of contemporary politics by setting plots in future times and on distant planets. The book will be insightful for anyone looking to explore the science, culture and politics of the Muslim world and asks what the discovery of extra-terrestrial life would mean for one of the greatest faiths.

Cultural Entanglement in the Pre-Independence Arab World

Cultural Entanglement in the Pre-Independence Arab World
Author: Anthony Gorman
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2020-11-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 1788319559

This book examines the ways in which non-Arabic cultural influences interacted with the rich, complex and sometimes conflictual environment of the Arab world in the pre-independence era. It comprises a series of 11 detailed case studies, including topics such as the songs of Egyptian forced labourers in the British Army in World War I, the translation and commentary of an Ottoman text in interwar Palestine, and the contested use of French in the Algerian independence movement, that highlight the complex interplay of colonial pressures, traditional and novel art forms, local and international practices, notions of identity and belonging. The book demonstrates how the interaction between Arabic and non-Arabic cultural and intellectual production as well as influences from imperial Europe and the Islamic East, have in various times and spaces inspired creative tensions which challenge binary views of East-West relations and the standard imperialist-colonial frameworks. In this sense the volume seeks to offer a critique of both established modernising conceptions of cultural development and nationalist, nativist frameworks based on the values of a specific political project.