Papers by Salam Al-Mahadin
Journal of African Cultural Studies
Adopting an Affective-Discursive approach, this article explores the visual and textual represent... more Adopting an Affective-Discursive approach, this article explores the visual and textual representations of Somali Pirates in the Danish Film A Hijacking, which is based on true events. I argue that the lack of subtitles for exchanges in the Somali language, camera treatment of the pirates, and the juxtaposition between sound and editing techniques used to capture the pirate and the western crew, have resulted in a screen production that not only masks the complexities of the piracy enterprise but also marginalizes Somali pirates and their truths, portraying them as little better than savages. This irreducibility between image and text will also be a key point of departure for examining the figure of the pirate as an affective/abjective/monstrous construction, rather than simply a discursive/textual one.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Palgrave Macmillan Journals is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Feminist Review.
In this paper I examine the historical and political contingencies which have produced the city o... more In this paper I examine the historical and political contingencies which have produced the city of Petra and the Bedouin as national signifiers in Jordan. The invention of a collective national memory and a utilitarian national identity are inseparable from the power-relations that operate in national contexts. Both Petra and the Bedouin have become symbols of Jordanian national identity in response to crises of legitimacy faced by the Monarchical Establishment in Jordan. Identity construction in Jordan has been based on strategies of inclusion and exclusion , re-inscribing histories, producing new forms of knowledge on groups and sites, and great fluidity and flexibility in response to political ruptures and contingencies. This paper will situate Petra and Bedouins within those contexts to contribute to a better critical understanding of the fluctuating and shifting constructions of Jordanian national identity. This paper is a critical reflection on identity construction in Jordan as it pertains to the construction of the Bedouin and Petra as national signifiers. The problemat-ics of legitimacy will underpin the claim that these two signifiers were produced and propagated in response to politico-historical contingencies that threatened the Hashemite monarchical regime's survival and legitimacy in Jordan. The paper draws on Michel Foucault's understandings of genealogy, power relations and knowledge in the construction of regimes of truth and subjectivity. Foucault's framework will inform my inquiry into the problematics of identity construction within the Jorda-nian context and the conditions of knowledge, discontinuities and ruptures which have produced the Bedouin and Petra as the two national signifiers par excellence. Both Petra and the Bedouin testify to Homi Bhabha's (1994) formulation of cultural
This article discusses the sexually transgressive female on Arab satellite channels. The analysis... more This article discusses the sexually transgressive female on Arab satellite channels. The analysis, restricted to two very controversial drama series broadcast during the holy month of Ramadan 2010, focuses on the stratagems by which female roles on satellite channels are seeking to be sexually delivered from, to borrow a term from Heidegger, the 'average everydayness' of women's status as downtrodden secondclass citizens. The conflation between the actress/role in the first series, Zahra 1 wa Azwajuha al-Khamsa/Zahra and Her Five Husbands, which tackles the issue of unpremeditated polyandry, created a zone of discomfort that shattered the fantasy the kitschy actress was supposed to cater for. The ensuing anxiety and trauma suspends the fetishization of the actress in a moment when she transgresses, albeit symbolically and unwittingly, into the hitherto male domain of polygamy. The second series, Ma Malakat Aymanukum/What your Right Hand Possesses 2 , resorts to the overarching metaphor of women as slaves and concubines, as evidenced by the title, to present a portrait of epistemic, socio-religious and political violence against women, who fight back to reclaim their bodies and identities from slavery. Although the two series could not be more different in terms of their structure, quality of production and dramatic 173 Salam Al-Mahadin impact, they were met with equal criticism for their perceived breach of religious and social mores and boundaries.
In the aftermath of 9/11, the academia witnessed a surge in the number of studies dealing with Is... more In the aftermath of 9/11, the academia witnessed a surge in the number of studies dealing with Islamophobia, the representations of Muslims in Western media and complex realities created by such (mis)representations. This article hopes to contribute to such scholarly efforts by examining the demonisation of Islam through the fashioning of celebrity Muslim 'hate preachers' (i.e. Abu-Hamza, Abu-Qatada and Omar Bakri) in British tabloids (i.e. The Sun and the Daily Mail ). Drawing upon insights from Serge Moscovici's theory of social representations, the article aims to diverge from the traditional approaches of content and discourse analysis to shed light on the nexus between forms of social thinking and the unique portrayal of these preachers in tabloids.
The social semiotics of hijab: negotiating the body politics of veiled women abSTracT Hijab and o... more The social semiotics of hijab: negotiating the body politics of veiled women abSTracT Hijab and other forms of Islamic head cover have become indelibly associated with notions of inequality and repression in the minds of many non-Muslims. This article queries the meanings and functions of hijab within both Muslim and non-Muslim contexts. It begins by exploring hijab as a transcendental signifier and the epistemological challenges it poses to the gaze. The discussion shifts to focus on the social semiotics of hijab in Arab/Muslim contexts and the myriad fashions and signifieds associated with hijab before situating the hjiab within the western context of the society of enjoyment. The article concludes that the repressive hypothesis associated with hijab is too reductionist to explain the complex and multiple meanings attached to it.
The Merriam-Webster online dictionary 1 offers the following list of compound nouns when the word... more The Merriam-Webster online dictionary 1 offers the following list of compound nouns when the word woman is keyed in: fancy woman, kept woman, old woman. The first two are provided with the following synonyms: harlot, blowen, courtesan, emimondaine, demimonde, demirep, hetaera, kept woman, paphian, whore. "Old woman" is listed with the following synonyms: mother, ma, mam, mama (or mamma), mammy, mater, mom, mommy, mummy, old lady.
a pharaoh and multiple deities: Writing the female self in arab drama series abStract This articl... more a pharaoh and multiple deities: Writing the female self in arab drama series abStract This article examines the referential aesthetics of constructing the self by some prominent actresses in Egyptian television drama series (musalsal). More specifically, it explores how the self is mediated through the roles these actresses assume, the doubling back of the role on the self and the final conflation between the two. Oscillating between the self as a spectacle (a fetishized object of visual pleasure) and the self as transgressor (the female as a monster or femme fatale), these constellations of selfhood should prompt us to query whether it is at all possible to conceive of an Egyptian female role not rooted in a patriarchal symbolic order or an androcentric fantasy. What these Egyptian actresses dramatically/visually seem to be demanding is to be seen and perceived as the same as the roles they are playing, a coherent self that both underlies/defines and unifies the role with the actress playing it. This article will demonstrate that such conflations have often led to disempowered gender formulations on the screen in the case of Egyptian drama series. Conversely, the absence of the cult of the superstar actress/actor in Syrian drama has allowed for more positive portrayals of women, not necessarily by banishing the female as a spectacle or transgressor, but by problematizing those elements within the textual politics of the script.
This article has its origins in a more ambitious project tackling instances of screen dialogues t... more This article has its origins in a more ambitious project tackling instances of screen dialogues that remain unsubtitled, rendering them incomprehensible to viewers from foreign linguistic communities. Palestinian director Elia Suleiman's The Time that Remains (2009) was intended to take up a modest section of a few paragraphs elaborating on the function of tarab songs in mediating the affective-discursive modalities of the film, but the narrative resisted the oppressive -and deeply regulated -confinements of a representational analysis. Rather than receding to the background, the songs seemed to insert themselves along ruptures transcending the pure discursivity of the soundtrack, giving rise to a question that forms the thrust of the article: what affective-discursive function do these songs serve and how much meaning is lost by failing to subtitle them for the benefit of non-Arab audience? Drawing upon insights from affective-discursive theories, Deleuzian approaches to cinema and Heideggerian insights into the nature of understanding, what follows is an investigation of the relationship between cinema and translation, specifically how subtitles merit examination as a unique form of praxis. I shall argue that songs and some objects in films interpellate viewers on both representational and nonrepresentational planes of meaning-construction that often gets lost in audio-visual translation.
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Papers by Salam Al-Mahadin