ABSTRACT
This study highlights the connections between power, cultural products, resistance, and the artistic strategies through which that resistance is voiced in the Middle East. Exploring cultural displays of dissent in the form of literary works, films, and music, the collection uses the concept of 'cultural resistance' to describe the way culture and cultural creations are used to resist or even change the dominant political, social, economic, and cultural discourses and structures either consciously or unconsciously. The contributors do not claim that these cultural products constitute organized resistance movements, but rather that they reflect instances of defiance that stem from their peculiar contexts. If culture can be used to consolidate and perpetuate power relations in societies, it can also be used as the site of resistance to oppression in its various forms: gender, class, ethnicity, and sexuality, subverting existing dominant social and political hegemonies in the Middle East.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part 1|106 pages
Literature and the Seeds of Dissent
chapter 6|21 pages
Iranian Drama and the Aesthetics of Gender Relations and Religiosity
part 2|85 pages
Cinema between Creativity and Censorship
chapter 8|15 pages
Reviving the Palestine Narrative on Film
chapter 10|17 pages
Gender, Family and Home(land) in Contemporary Turkish Cinema
part 3|74 pages
Musical Interventions