"As the revolutions across the Arab world that came to a head in 2011 devolved into civil war and military coup, representation and history acquired a renewed and contested urgency. The capacities of the internet have enabled sharing and archiving in an unprecedented fashion. Yet, at the same time, ... these facilities institute a globally dispersed reinforcement and recalibration of power, turning memory and knowledge into commodified and copyrighted goods. In The Arab Archive: Mediated Memories and Digital Flows, activists, artists, filmmakers, producers, and scholars examine which images of struggle have been created, bought, sold, repurposed, denounced, and expunged. As a whole, these cultural productions constitute an archive whose formats are as diverse as digital repositories looked after by activists, found footage art documentaries, Facebook archive pages, art exhibits, doctoral research projects, and ‘controversial’ or ‘violent’ protest videos that are abruptly removed from YouTube at the click of a mouse by sub-contracted employees thousands of kilometers from where they were uploaded. The Arab Archive investigates the local, regional, and international forces that determine what materials, and therefore which pasts, we can access and remember, and, conversely, which pasts get erased and forgotten." (Back cover) more

"Starting with the inventive traditions of Arabic travelogues, the text traces the manifold pathways that converge in the cinemas of Syria, Palestine and Dubai. Syrian production bursts out of long-held practices of studying abroad, this time in the film schools of the Eastern Bloc. Palestinian movi ... es react to international assumptions about the Holy Land, informed by pilgrimage accounts – ironizing the supposed freedoms of the road movie. Dubai launches its fledgling industry off the back of centuries' worth of trade route management, logistics expertise and labour migration." (Back cover) more