Moroccan Director Moumen Smihi (b.1945): Arab Modernities and Cinema

FAIN: HB-232107-16

Peter Limbrick
Regents of the University of California, Santa Cruz (Santa Cruz, CA 95064-1077)

Research and writing leading to publication of a book on the films of Moroccan director Moumen Smihi (b. 1945) and the history of colonialism in the Arab world.

This project investigates films by Moroccan director Moumen Smihi to better understand the relationship between Arab cinema and the historical experiences of colonialism and modernity. In addressing Smihi's rich images and narratives of colonial encounter, the project analyzes the ways that Euro-American critical discourses have struggled to understand the relationship of Arab cultural production to a modernity that is often conceived as exclusively Euro-American. Using Smihi's films as a lens, my book rethinks those relationships, stressing long histories of mutual influence and exchange that destabilize accounts of Arab modernisms as derivative products of cultural borrowing or colonial imposition. Smihi's cinema offers a compelling vision of the way that cinema, a quintessentially modern technology, has animated relationships between Arab and non-Arab worlds, thus transforming the way we think about the axes of history, colonialism, nationalism, and modernity across the Middle East.

Associated Products

Arab Modernism as World Cinema: The Films of Moumen Smihi (Book)
Title: Arab Modernism as World Cinema: The Films of Moumen Smihi
Author: Peter Limbrick
Abstract: Arab Modernism as World Cinema explores the radically beautiful films of Moroccan filmmaker Moumen Smihi, demonstrating the importance of Moroccan and Arab film cultures in histories of world cinema. Addressing the legacy of the Nahda or “Arab Renaissance” of the nineteenth and early twentieth century—when Arab writers and artists reenergized Arab culture by engaging with other languages and societies—Peter Limbrick argues that Smihi’s films take up the spirit of the Nahda for a new age. Examining Smihi’s oeuvre, which enacts an exchange of images and ideas between Arab and non-Arab cultures, Limbrick rethinks the relation of Arab cinema to modernism and further engages debates about the use of modernist forms by filmmakers in the Global South. This original study offers new routes for thinking about world cinema and modernism in the Middle East and North Africa, and about Arab cinema in the world.
Year: 2020
Primary URL: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520330573/arab-modernism-as-world-cinema
Primary URL Description: UC Press website.
Access Model: Hardcover, paperback, eBook
Publisher: University of California Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780520330573
Copy sent to NEH?: No

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