Surviving Images: Cinema, War, and Cultural Memory in the Middle East

Surviving Images explores the prominent role of cinema in the development of cultural memory around war and conflict in colonial and postcolonial contexts. It does so through a study of three historical eras: the colonial period, the national-independence struggle, and the postcolonial. Beginning with a study of British colonial cinema on the Sudan, then exploring anti-colonial cinema in Algeria, Egypt and Tunisia, followed by case studies of films emerging from postcolonial contexts in Palestine, Iran, Lebanon, and Israel, this work aims to fill a gap in the critical literature on both Middle Eastern cinemas, and to contribute more broadly to scholarship on social trauma and cultural memory in colonial and postcolonial contexts. This work treats the concept of trauma critically, however, and posits that social trauma must be understood as a framework for producing social and political meaning out of these historical events. Social trauma thus sets out a productive process of historical interpretation, and cultural texts such as cinematic works both illuminate and contribute to this process. Through these discussions, Surviving Images illustrates cinema's productive role in contributing to the changing dynamics of cultural memory of war and social conflict in the modern world.

Table of Contents:
Introduction Chapter 1. Productive traumas: Cinema, social conflict, cultural memory Chapter 2. Colonialism, memory, masculinity: The Four Feathers and the redemption of empire Chapter 3. Freedom, then silence: Memory and the women of Egyptian and Tunisian independence Chapter 4. The time that is lost: Cinematic aporias of Palestine Chapter 5. Sacred defenses: Treacherous memory in post-war Iran Chapter 6. Wanting to see: Wartime witnessing and post-war haunting in Lebanese cinema Chapter 7. "Sawwaru Waynkum" Human rights and perpetrator traumas in Waltz with Bashir Conclusion. Multitudinous memory: Revolutions and post-cinematic cultural memory

About the Author :
Kamran Rastegar is Associate Professor of Arabic Literature and Culture at Tufts University.

Review :
"A significant contribution to postcolonial scholarship, trauma studies, and cinema studies, Rastegar's book is likely to become a major text in the field. Highly recommended." --CHOICE "While providing an expansive framework to read trauma production in twentieth-century cinema of the Middle East, Surviving Images looks to the future by pointing to the emergence of a new era of trauma production, one that will enchant us yet destabilize the very foundation of cinematic practices." --Humanities and Social Sciences Online