Reorienting the Middle East: Film and Digital Media Where the Persian Gulf, Arabian Sea, and Indian Ocean Meet

Stories of desert landscapes, cutting-edge production facilities, and lavish festivals often dominate narratives about film and digital media on the Arabian Peninsula. However, there is a more complicated history that reflects long-standing interconnections between the Persian Gulf, Arabian Sea, and Indian Ocean. Just as these waters are fluid spaces, so too is the flow of film and digital media between cultures in East Africa, Europe, North Africa, South Asia, Southwest Asia, and Southeast Asia.

Reorienting the Middle East examines past and contemporary aspects of film and digital media in the Gulf that might not otherwise be apparent in dominant frameworks. Contributors consider oil companies that brought film exhibition to this area in the 1930s, the first Indian film produced on the Arabian Peninsula in the late 1970s, blackness in Iranian films, the role of Western funding in reshaping stories, Dubai’s emergence in global film production, uses of online platforms for performance art, the development of film festivals and cinemas, and short films made by citizens and migrants that turn a lens on racism, sexism, national identity, and other rarely discussed social issues.

Reorienting the Middle East offers new methods to analyze the often-neglected littoral spaces between nation-states and regions and to understand the role of film and digital media in shaping dialogue between area studies and film and media studies. Readers will find new pathways to rethink the limitations of dominant categories and frameworks in both fields.

Dale Hudson is Associate Professor of Film and New Media at New York University Abu Dhabi. He is author of Vampires, Race, and Transnational Hollywoods and (with Patricia R. Zimmermann) of Thinking Through Digital Media: Transnational Environments and Locative Places. Alia Yunis is Visiting Associate Professor of Film and Heritage Studies at New York University Abu Dhabi. She is author of The Night Counter: A Novel and cofounder of the Zayed University Middle East Film Festival. Her feature documentary, The Golden Harvest (2019), debuted at Thessaloniki International Film Festival and won Best of Fest at the Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival.