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Year:1998 Time:255
pages Written
by:Viola
Shafik Language:English
Combing detailed narrative history
with thought-provoking analysis, this study provides
extensive coverage of cinema in the Arab World, tracing the
industry's development from colonial times to the present. It
analyzes the ambiguous relationship with commercial western
cinema, and the effect of Egyptian market dominance in the
region.
Covering North African, Syrian, Palestinian, Iraqi, and
Lebanese cinema, Arab Cinema traces the
influence on the medium of local and regional art forms and
shows how indigenous and external factors have combined in a
dynamic process of 'cultural repackaging.
Karmi, a doctor and
founding member of the British political group Palestine
Action, relates her quest for cultural identity after her
"fragile... and misfit Arab family" leaves Jerusalem for
England during the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.
Ironically, they resettle in a Jewish neighborhood in London;
Karmi, aged nine, quickly begins to assimilate-becoming an
avid reader of English literature and befriending Jewish
neighbors-despite her mother's insistence on traditional
Palestinian culinary customs, dating mores and family codes.
Over the next two decades, events in the Middle East make
their non-Arab neighbors increasingly hostile and her Jewish
friends' pro-Israel fervor grows; after the Palestinian
terrorist hijackings of the 1970s, some acquaintances refuse
to speak to her. Karmi becomes an impassioned pro-Palestinian
activist, and in 1977 she begins practicing medicine in a
Palestinian refugee camp in South Lebanon-and finds that her
Western upbringing and habits make her even less welcome there
than she was in England. Karmi writes engagingly, weaving
Palestinian political and social history through her personal
recollections and giving the age-old émigré‚ dilemmas a timely
twist. Though her account is inevitably one-sided regarding
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the book's straightforward
tone may appeal to politically minded readers looking for
insight into the Palestinian exile experience. 20 b&w photos,
3 maps.
Copyright 2002 Reed
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