Читать книгу Historical Dictionary of Middle Eastern Cinema - Terri Ginsberg - Страница 12

This volume covers a broadly defined Middle East, as explained in the preface. Its reach has not been expanded to Central Asia, despite the relationship between Tajik and Persian and the Turkic languages that predominate in most of the other former Soviet republics. These countries maintain strong links to Russia, and their diasporic and exile communities are predominantly resident there. Afghanistan, an entry about which has been included, marks a special case, in that it has been incorporated into American conceptions of the Middle East by post–11 September 2001 discourse. In addition, parts of Afghanistan, especially the area around Herat in the west, have for long periods been part of historic Persia. We include an entry on the country, however, partially because of the involvement of Iranian filmmakers who, in working there, have tried to help reestablish cinema since the fall of the Taliban. At the other geographical extreme, we have drawn an imaginary line under the disputed territory of Western Sahara and do not include an entry on the largely Arab Muslim country of Mauritania—although we do have one on Abderrahmane Sissako because of his importance to the theorization of global neoliberalism, migration, and Islam. For similar reasons, our coverage does not extend to Chad in central Africa, although we include in the second edition of this volume an entry on the largely Arab country of Sudan in East Africa, where the very first stirrings of a revival in the cinema are only just occurring. This is not meant to imply that the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa are entirely distinct culturally or politically—as demonstrated by the pan-African production conditions referred to in the entry on Ousmane Sembene’s Camp de Thiaroye (1987). Finally, because their cinemas are still so little developed, neither Libya, another country embroiled in civil struggle so that possibilities for film production are severely circumscribed, nor the Gulf state of Oman have been given entries. This still leaves a plethora of engaging material in the compelling, interlinked, but distinctive entries on the cinemas of Algeria, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey, and the diasporic and exilic cinemas associated with them, and on the increasing if uneven production in Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE.