Fall 2021
fall 2021 class Schedule
fall 2021 course descriptions
MENA 390-6-20 / RTVF 351-0-20: MENA Cinema after the Arab Spring
This course will screen and analyze dramatic documentaries and narrative fiction films from Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, and Yemen that were made in the decade that followed the beginning of the Arab Spring, 2011-2020. By analyzing the selected films for their political and societal context, students will gain perspective into the events that led to the Arab Spring and the complex set of consequences that followed and continue to reverberate throughout the world. Students will interact with some of the filmmakers of the screened films to gain insight into their personal reasons for making their films.
MENA 390-6-21 / RTVF 351-0-21: Arab Women Filmmakers
This course will screen and analyze dramatic documentaries and narrative fiction films made by Arab women filmmakers from North Africa, the Levant and Gulf regions. Consideration of the female gaze and Orientalism will be integral to understanding the aesthetics and themes of each film. Students will interact with some of the filmmakers of the screened films to gain insight into their challenges, directorial choices and singular cinematic vision. Required readings will be provided on Canvas.
MENA 410-0-20: Analytic Categories, Discipline Creation, and the Politics of Constituting the MENA field
What is the Middle East? What is the Middle East and North Africa? This course interrogates how scholars and institutions have constituted the MENA field in ways infused with academic, national, and international politics at various points in time – from the post-WWII creation of area studies, to the critique of area studies, to the current moment of rethinking both the creation and the critique. We will examine how various notions of “region” – e.g., geographic, environmental, sociocultural, and geopolitical – are both created and challenged through shifting analytic categories. We will also explore the similarities and differences between disciplines in terms of how they constitute and approach the issue of region. In the latter section of the course, we will explore how the region has come under renewed attention in work on transborder, translocal, and transnational circuits, and what distinguishes this new work from earlier kinds of area studies – both theoretically and empirically. Overall, we will inquire what analytic purchase the idea of the region has had, what scholars are responding to by elevating the region analytically, and what spatial practices they showcase as constitutive of region formation.