Unfixed Itineraries: Film and Visual Culture from Arab Worlds

Omnia El Shakry
History
UC Davis

Peter Limbrick
Film & Digital Media
UC Santa Cruz

The two-day conference, comprised of a scholarly symposium that also welcomed creative artists and their work, intervened in several dialogues around Arab film and visual culture. Addressing a series of questions surrounding the theme of itineraries, scholars focused on the production and circulation of Arab visual cultures across multiple temporal and spatial boundaries, rethinking both the form and content of critical visual production. Rather than reify the category of “Arab,” however, the goal focused on staging a conference of film and visual culture from the Arabic-speaking world presenting a terrain  at once multifaceted and plural, as our title suggests. Thus, the conference centered on the idea of “unfixed itineraries,” aiming to continually break the sureties often attached to questions of identity, region, politics, history, religion, or language. In large part, participants refused the gesture–all too common in many scholarly and popular forums–to immediately fix Arab visual culture within the realm of the political and the historical, as if it were simply symptomatic of larger, super-structural forces. The refusal of such reductiveness, allowed interlocutors to draw out the much more complex itineraries by which Arab visual culture is produced and the multiple trajectories (aesthetic, formal, transnational, multilingual, and political) within which it is made, experienced, pondered, and discussed.