Radical Imagining: Afro, Indigenous, & Palestinian Futurisms

I was sad to miss the live broadcasting of this event, but happy to find that it is now available online, transcript and all. The panel explores speculative fiction and Afrofuturism as a source of inspiration for Indigenous, and Palestinian speculative fiction and ranges across a number of other topics. Here is a snippet of …

Documentary “Muhi – Generally Temporary”

"For the past seven years Muhi, a brave and spirited Palestinian boy has been living in an Israeli hospital, unable to return to his home in Gaza. Caught between two worlds and two peoples, Muhi is raised in paradoxical circumstances that transcend identity, religion and the conflict that divides his world. His time at the …

Tariq Jordan’s “Ali and Dahlia” and the House of Mirrors

To be hungry for representation means that you will seek to see yourself reflected anywhere, so you will enter (of your own accord) into what you know will be a house of mirrors, where distorted reflections will stare back at you, follow you, pretend to be you, make money in saying they really are you. …

On Memory: An Evening with Palestinian Writers at the Arab British Centre

On October 29th, the Arab British Centre hosted Selma Dabbagh, Jehan Bseiso, Farah Chamma and Ahmed Masoud, who came together to talk about what memory means to them as Palestinian writers. Behind the headlines and milestones and tweets, there are people and stories and morning rituals. There are memories and details so resilient they pass from …

Palestinian Historians, Historians of Palestine

A symposium entitled "Palestinian historians/historians of Palestine: writing under the Mandate and beyond" took place this Friday at King's College, organized by Dr. Sarah Irving. The day was packed full of discussion on Palestinian historiography and papers focusing on Palestinian academics and historians, figures such as Abdul Latif Tibawi, Arif al-Arif,  Izzat Darwaza, Nicola Ziadeh, Jabra …

The Arab Archive: Mediated Memories and Digital Flows

  "The Arab Archive: Mediated Memories and Digital Flows,"  which took place over the past two days at John Cabot University in Rome, was advertised as  an examination of "the political economy of the Arab Image" which "reflects upon the materiality, ethics, and aesthetics of filming, distributing and archiving post-2011."  The workshop more than lived …

Sarab by the Palestinian Circus School

Yesterday I went to see Sarab by Palestinian Circus School, part of the CircusFest at Jackson Lane. The show is a piece of circus theatre that ”shares with us the plight of refugees worldwide. The seven Palestinian performers use Chinese pole, juggling and acrobatics to reflect on their own history and the repetition of it …

Gaza Surf Club

Gaza Surf Club is a documentary film directed by Philip Gnadt and Mickey Yamine about surfers in Gaza. The film focuses mostly on three people: the main protagonist, Ibrahim, a 23-year-old man who wants to go to Hawaii to train and learn, Sabah, a 15-year-old girl who once loved to swim but has had to …

Arab Films Entered for Oscars

There are films from 92 countries entered for the Foreign Film category of the Oscars. Among these are eight films from Arabic-speaking countries. Several of the films deal in various ways with the impact of the conflict in Syria. There is the documentary from Syria, “Little Gandhi,” which follows the life and death of Syrian …

Hisham Bustani’s The Crossing

Hisham Bustani's short story "The Crossing"  has been translated into English by Maia Tabet and appears in the current issue of Newfound.  The short story was originally published in Arabic in Bustani's The Monotonous Chaos of Existence (2010). In Newfound, it appears in both Arabic and English, as in Bustani's previous work, The Perception of Meaning, …

On the Use of English in Arab(ic) Music

Ahdaf Soueif once said that “the use of English by Arab authors is expanding at a faster rate than the use of French." I haven't seen any empirical evidence for this, but it seems likely -- or if not exactly faster than French, than at least at an equal rate. Watching 47soul’s recent release “Raf Etair” …

Plays by Rama Haydar & Bashar Murkus

As part of the 2017 PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature, The Segal Center is showcasing play readings by nine dramatists, including the following two plays by Rama Haydar and Bashar Murkus.     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHDZgDHjctM   Desert of Light Written by Rama Haydar (Syria) Translated by Rama Haydar & Rebekah Maggor Directed by Rebekah Maggor …

Focus Young Arab Choreographers Opens May 25

Focus Young Arab Choreographers is a project is supported by the Italian culture ministry and eleven different dance festivals in Italy.  The aim is to promote cultural dialogue and exchange between Arab and Italian artists and choreographers. The programme opens May 25 and runs until September 23. Six young choreographers from the Arab world will …

The Oscars and the Berlinale

With the 88th Academy Awards ceremony to take place this Sunday, Al Bawaba looks back at nine films from the region to be nominated for an Oscar, including Hany Abu Assad's Paradise Now (2005) and Omar (2013), and Rachid Bouchareb's Days of Glory (2006) and Outside the Law (2010), but also Incendies (2010), adapted from …

Revolutionary Voices, Stockholm, March 2-8

Re:Orient in Stockholm, which arranges cultural events focusing on the Middle East, North Africa and the Balkans, is celebrating Music Freedom Day as well as International Women's Day  with their week long Revolutionary Voices program from March 2-8. The program includes documentary screenings, a couple of panels and a concert, featuring Rim Banna, Tania Saleh, Dina …

Naji Abu Nowar’s Theeb After the BAFTA

Naji Abu Nowar's "Bedouin spaghetti western" Theeb (2014) is in the news again, only now it is the "BAFTA-winning, and Oscar nominated, Theeb." Theeb is  "one of only 10 films from the MENA region to have been nominated for an Oscar for best foreign film since 1947, and of the 112 films submitted for the …

Native: Dispatches From an Israeli-Palestinian Life

Sayed Kashua's new book Native: Dispatches From an Israeli-Palestinian Life is a collection of reflections written between 2006 and the summer of 2014, when Kashua left Israel and moved to the US to teach at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Native was originally published in Hebrew as Ben Ha’aretz. As Adam Kirsch writes, this "title that contains an untranslatable pun. Literally, it …

From Mathaf to Madrid

The exhibition Looking at the World Around You: Contemporary Works from Qatar Museums is being held from 9 February to 19 June 2016 at the Santander Art Gallery in Boadilla del Monte, Madrid, the "first major loan exhibition in Europe of works from Mathaf, the Arab Museum of Contemporary Art in Doha."   This selection, more …

Mohamed Ben Attia’s Hedi and the Berlinale

Inhebbek Hedi, directed by Tunisian director Mohamed Ben Attia,  with Belgium's Dardenne brothers as co-producers, is "the first Arab contender in two decades" in the official competition of the Berlinale, running from 11-21 February. Hedi tells the story of "a simple young man" who "does not expect much from the life that is traced for …

International Prize for Arabic fiction shortlist

This year, the shortlist for the IPAF (International Prize for Arabic fiction) includes "a Syrian novel about Islamic State’s occupation of Raqqa to an Egyptian dystopian thriller" among other novels that “address the tragedy of the present-day Middle East.” The Syrian novel is A Sky Close to Our House by Shahla Ujayli,  although since we …

MENAR Film Festival

The Middle East & North Africa Region (MENAR) Film Festival in Sofia, Bulgaria, kicks off on January 14 and runs through the end of the month. The focus this year is on female directors - the films to be shown include Egyptian Nadine Khan's Chaos, Disorder (2012),  Tunisian Kaouther Ben Hania's The Blade of Tunis …