Journal of Contemporary Iraq & the Arab World - Current Issue

This article explores how visible constructions and perceptions of sovereignty in the motion pictures of the United States Information Agency (USIA) factored into the dynamics of US Cold War foreign policy amidst the rise of the Non-Aligned Movement. Specifically, it focuses on agency films about and circulating within the Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) region – such as the locally produced Iraq al-Youm newsreels (c.1956–58). By mapping the different policy contexts of the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations onto the USIA films’ aesthetics and themes, the article illustrates continuities in the United States’s attempts to expressively leverage images and evocations of sovereignty to sell and consolidate its policy interests in the region.

The article provides a critical review of the film Girls to Buy (Dziewczyny z Dubaju) (2021) by Maria Sadowska in the context of the Polish Dubai-gate scandal and the discourse of the sex trade and trafficking. The intersection of gender, ethnicity and class guides this inquiry into the ways in which both the conservative Polish nationalist agenda and the neo-liberal opposition to such an agenda rely on the phobic Orientalist tropes that configure the Arab world as the main culprit and the ‘face’ of the kleptocratic capitalism.

Despite and perhaps because of Joseph Massad’s scathing critique of the ‘Gay International’, and of Israeli ‘pinkwashing’ efforts, scholarly theorization of sexuality in Arab cinema has been minimal. Within this context, upon which this article elaborates, I offer recommendations for scholarly movement forward in the area of Arab film sexualities, by analysing the intellectual limitations of extant allegorical and auteurist approaches to the subject, and in turn suggest conceptual means towards a more substantive film analytic praxis. In so doing, I draw from critiques of Massad’s position as well as of the pinkwashing agenda, both of which have emerged from and around an interdisciplinary array of texts focusing on homonationalism, homonormativity and homocapitalism; while critiquing the concomitant fact that the majority of such texts marginalize or absent Arab same sexualities and Middle Eastern cultures generally, insofar as they retain an unproblematized transnationalist orientation.

Chris Lippard’s analysis of displacement and refusal in the Tunisian film, The Last of Us (Akher wahad fina), rearticulates the cinematic quest for an aesthetic means by which to express the refusal of migrant positionality. Taking a rhetorically performative approach, he suggests both the possibilities and pitfalls inherent in different forms of displacement, including disappearance and disassembly, as a means of refuting postcolonial categories and conceptions of migration. The film offers an opportunity for considering alternative aesthetics within the contemporary depiction of migration, and one for questioning the tropes of migration narratives in an imagined decolonized space where modernity and commoditization have not taken hold and an alternative migration journey is thus depicted: one that differently incorporates the experience of being other(ed) with which migration narratives have constantly to engage, though also one that, in its separation from national and transnational networks, risks a retreat into immanence.