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The enormous task of preserving the world's heritage in the face of war, natural disaster, vandalism, neglect, and technical obsolescence. The monuments—movable, immovable, tangible, and intangible—of the world's shared cultural heritage are at risk. War, terrorism, natural disaster, vandalism, and neglect make the work of preservation a greater challenge than it has been since World War II. In The Monumental Challenge of Preservation Michèle Cloonan makes the case that, at this critical juncture, we must consider preservation in the broadest possible contexts. Preservation requires the efforts of an increasing number of stakeholders. In order to explore the cultural, political, technol...
Resolving International Conflict rethinks the dynamics of conflict escalation and continuation by engaging with research from the wide range of subfields in this area. The book suggests a new framework for understanding conflict as a particular form of situation, interaction and tension. It shows how conflicts are shaped by varied dynamics relating to emotion, securitization, incentives, digital technology and violence; even attempts at monitoring, resolving or remembering conflicts may end up contributing to their escalation or continuation. Split into two sections, the first part focuses on the question of why and how conflicts escalate, while the second part analyses the continuation of c...
Following the stories of two dozen refugees from Syria and Afghanistan in 2015, Citizens and Refugees argues that we need to include the histories of these countries, notably the Syrian Revolution, into narratives of the refugee crisis. The book thus challenges a framing of the crisis that usually begins only with the moment of people fleeing. The stories it tells show refugees as citizens with a political voice engaged in struggles for participation and democracy, rather than as people in need of rescuing and integrating into new societies. It equally examines the much-celebrated German welcoming culture of 2015, arguing that it silenced political voices of those fleeing to Germany. Based o...
Since 2011, the art of the Arab uprisings has been the subject of much scholarly and popular attention. Yet the role of artists, writers and filmmakers themselves as social actors working under extraordinary conditions has been relatively neglected. Drawing on critical readings of Bourdieu's Field Theory, this book explores the production of culture in Arab social spaces in 'crisis'. In ten case studies, contributors examine a wide range of countries and conflicts, from Algeria to the Arab countries of the Gulf. They discuss among other things the impact of Western public diplomacy organisations on the arts scene in post-revolutionary Cairo and the consequences of dwindling state support for literary production in Yemen. Providing a valuable source of empirical data for researchers, the book breaks new ground in adapting Bourdieu's theory to the particularities of cultural production in the Middle East and North Africa.
Addressing the question of how neoliberal ideology has served to conflate the radical left with extremism, this book examines how the Arab left has asserted itself in the context of authoritarianism and Islamic extremism during and after the Arab uprisings. It examines how the Arab cultural left has offered a critique of the signifying practices of political hegemonies in the region and argues that though creative expression as constituted in the very language of the Arab uprisings, it has put forward its own alternatives Using a wide array of texts and sources, both Arab and non-Arab, the opening chapters of the book identify how ethical and radical values pertaining to sociality are co-opt...
Mobile, smartphone and pocket filmmaking is a global phenomenon with distinctive festivals, filmmakers and creatives that are defining an original film form. Smartphone Filmmaking: Theory and Practice explores diverse approaches towards smartphone filmmaking and interviews an overview of the international smartphone filmmaking community. Interviews with smartphone filmmakers, entrepreneurs, creative technologists, storytellers, educators and smartphone film festival directors provide a source of inspiration and insights for professionals, emerging filmmakers and rookies who would like to join this creative community. While not every story might be appropriate to be realized with a mobile dev...
Every time gardens welcomed us, we said to them, Aleppo is our aim and you are merely the route.' Al-Mutanabbi Aleppo lies in ruins. Its streets are plunged in darkness, most of its population has fled. But this was once a vibrant world city, where Muslims, Christians and Jews lived and traded together in peace. Few places are as ancient and diverse as Aleppo – one of the oldest, continuously inhabited cities in the world – successively ruled by the Assyrian, Persian, Greek, Roman, Arab, Ottoman and French empires. Under the Ottomans, it became the empire's third largest city, after Constantinople and Cairo. It owed its wealth to its position at the end of the Silk Road, at a crossroads ...
At the Arab Spring's hopeful start, Alia Malek returned to Damascus to reclaim her grandmother's apartment, which had been lost to her family since Hafez al-Assad came to power in 1970. Its loss was central to her parent's decision to make their lives in America. In chronicling the people who lived in the Tahaan building, past and present, Alia portrays the Syrians-the Muslims, Christians, Jews, Armenians, and Kurds-who worked, loved, and suffered in close quarters, mirroring the political shifts in their country. Restoring her family's home as the country comes apart, she learns how to speak the coded language of oppression that exists in a dictatorship, while privately confronting her own fears about Syria's future. The Home That Was Our Country is a deeply researched, personal journey that shines a delicate but piercing light on Syrian history, society, and politics. Teeming with insights, the narrative weaves acute political analysis with a century of intimate family history, ultimately delivering an unforgettable portrait of the Syria that is being erased.
This Edinburgh Companion seeks to develop a postcolonial framework for addressing the Middle East. The first collection of essays on this subject, it assembles some of the world's foremost postcolonialists to explore the critical, theoretical and disciplinary possibilities that inquiry into this region opens for postcolonial studies. Throughout its twenty-four chapters, its focus is on literary and cultural critique. It draws on texts and contexts from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries as case studies, and deploys the concept of 'post/colonial modernity' to reveal the enduring impact of colonial and imperial power on the shaping of the region. And it covers a wide and s...
In recent years, the Arab world and Iran have been afflicted by cataclysmic events, among them brutal state crackdowns of revolutions. Yet, filmmakers have persisted in their desire to tell their stories, against the odds, in creative acts that attest to their imagination, courage and resilience. In this book, Shohini Chaudhuri examines a broad range of films made during the tumultuous period since 2009, ranging from internationally award-winning festival favourites, such as For Sama (2019), Capernaum (2018) and Taxi Tehran (2015), to lesser-known films from the region. While freedom of expression is often understood through the lens of state censorship, she reveals the different types of ob...