An exploration of Ana Lily Amirpour’s genre-defying film A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is often referred to as the “first Iranian vampire spaghetti western”. Released in 2014, it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and was American-Iranian filmmaker Ana Lily Amirpour’s feature film debut. It tells the story of a vampire, referred to…
Continue ReadingAuthor: mena
Progressive Politics in the Autonomous Administration?
Sinéad Barry A look at the Kurdish-led region of northeast of Syria and its supposed conformity to democratic values Ten years after the outbreak of civil war, the northeast of Syria (NES) has built an autonomous region on the periphery of the Assad controlled territories. The area is led by Kurds, loyal to the radical…
Continue Reading
Hydro-Hegemony in the Upper Nile Basin
Lucy Annabella Banisch The Shifting Power Relations between Egypt, Ethiopia, and Sudan within the Past Decade The Nile is the longest transboundary river in the world, passing through eleven states inhabited by roughly 535 million people. It is fed by two tributaries, the White Nile and the Blue Nile, originating in the Ethiopian highlands and…
Continue Reading
Postcolonial Voices
Constance Quinlan Fantasia, An Algerian Cavalcade by Assia Djebar Postcolonialism can be understood as “a multifaceted and open process of interrogation and critique […] a process, a way of thinking through critical strategies [between self and other]” (Hiddleston, 2009, p.4). Assia Djebar’s Fantasia is emblematic of this task. Her “literature forms a site of experimentation,…
Continue Reading
‘Mediterraneanism’ as Colonialism
The extent to which Mediterranean ideas influenced French and Spanish imperial experiments in North Africa can be seen, not in the ways that they converge, but indeed in the manner to which they diverge and adapt according to each coloniser’s agenda.
Continue ReadingThe Biopolitics of Sex
Today biopower is everywhere. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, biopolitical infrastructure has framed our existence, even dictated it. We depend on our politicians and our world leaders to incorporate critical aspects of human biology, including contagion, into their political agendas in order to keep society alive. Nevertheless, biopolitical motives are not always directly employed in a positive alliance with human welfare.
Continue ReadingOrientalism in Irish Theatre
This essay will examine an orientalist playbill announcing the performance of the Christmas Pantomime Sinbad the Sailor at the Gaiety Theatre in 1892. I
Continue Reading
The Egg
The Egg stands in the heart of Martyrs’ Square, Beirut. It looks incongruous, almost like a big, ugly concrete whale, supplanted amidst the buzz and chaos of Lebanon’s capital city. Originally designed as a cinema, The Egg was supposed to be the crowing glory of architect Joseph Philippe Karam’s “Beirut City Centre” shopping centre and office space. Unfortunately, its construction was halted by the Lebanese Civil War and for decades it lay derelict.
Continue ReadingKafala, ‘sportwashing’, and the Qatar World Cup
With less than 18 months to go until the tournament, will anyone stand up to the Qatari state’s human rights abuses?
Continue ReadingPinkwashing Israel
Since the first Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897, propaganda and the “fight against misunderstanding” has been a crucial part of Zionism, feeding into the activities of the state of Israel since its foundation almost half a century later (Kouts, 2016).
Continue Reading