Francophone African Women Documentary Filmmakers is groundbreaking edited collection which explores the contributions of Francophone African women to the field of documentary filmmaking. Rich in its scope and critical vision it constitutes a timely contribution to cutting-edge scholarly debates on African cinemas. Featuring 10 chapters from prominent film scholars, it explores the distinctive documentary work and contributions of Francophone African women filmmakers since the 1960s. It focuses documentaries by North African and Sub-Saharan women filmmakers, including the pioneering work of Safi Faye in Kaddu Beykat, Rama Thiaw's The Revolution Will Not be Televised, Katy Lena Ndiaye's Le Cercle des noyes and En attendant les hommes, Dalila Ennadre's Fama: Heroism Without Glory and Leila Kitani's Nos lieux interdits. Shunned from costly fictional- 35mm-filmmaking, Francophone African Women Documentary Filmmakers examines how these women engaged and experimented with documentary filmmaking in personal, evocative ways that countered the officially sanctioned, nationalist practice of show and teach/promote.

Francophone African Women Documentary Filmmakers is groundbreaking edited collection which explores the contributions of Francophone African women to the field of documentary filmmaking. Rich in its scope and critical vision it constitutes a timely contribution to cutting-edge scholarly debates on African cinemas. Featuring 10 chapters from prominent film scholars, it explores the distinctive documentary work and contributions of Francophone African women filmmakers since the 1960s. It focuses documentaries by North African and Sub-Saharan women filmmakers, including the pioneering work of Safi Faye in Kaddu Beykat, Rama Thiaw's The Revolution Will Not be Televised, Katy Lena Ndiaye's Le Cercle des noyes and En attendant les hommes, Dalila Ennadre's Fama: Heroism Without Glory and Leila Kitani's Nos lieux interdits. Shunned from costly fictional- 35mm-filmmaking, Francophone African Women Documentary Filmmakers examines how these women engaged and experimented with documentary filmmaking in personal, evocative ways that countered the officially sanctioned, nationalist practice of show and teach/promote.

Exploring films made in Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria from 1985 to 2009, Suzanne Gauch illustrates how late post-independence and early twenty-first century North African cinema prefigured many of the transformations in perception and relation that stunned both participants and onlookers during the remarkable uprisings of the 2011 Arab Spring. Through multifaceted examinations of key films by nine filmmakers-Farida Benlyazid, Mohamed Chouikh, Nacer Khemir, Nabil Ayouch, Lyes Salem, Nadia El Fani, Tariq Teguia, Faouzi Bensaidi, and Nejib Belkadhi-Gauch delineates the shifting relation of politics to film in the era of neoliberal globalization. Each work, she argues, taps the power inherent in cinema to destabilize patterns of perception and judgment while taking film's role as popular entertainment in new directions. Highlighting how each film taps into the mobility at the core of cinema to break through the boundaries that have long circumscribed filmmaking from North Africa, Gauch shows how this cinema continues to forge and reflect unexpected trajectories for itself and its audiences.

Situated in the fields of contemporary literary and cultural studies, the ten essays collected in Generations of Dissent shed light on the artistic creativity, cultural production, intellectual movements, and acts of political dissidence across the Middle East and North Africa. Born of the contributors' research on dissidence and state co-option in a variety of artistic and creative fields, the volume's core themes reflect the notion that the recent Arab uprisings did not appear in a cultural, political, or historical vacuum. Rather than focus on how protestors "finally" broke the walls of fear created by authoritarian regimes in the region, these essays show that the uprisings were rooted in multiple generations and various acts of resistance decades prior to 2010-11. Firat and Taleghani's volume maps the complicated trajectories of artistic and creative dissent across time and space, showing how artists have challenged institutions and governments over the past six decades.

Exploring films made in Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria from 1985 to 2009, Suzanne Gauch illustrates how late post-independence and early twenty-first century North African cinema prefigured many of the transformations in perception and relation that stunned both participants and onlookers during the remarkable uprisings of the 2011 Arab Spring. Through multifaceted examinations of key films by nine filmmakers-Farida Benlyazid, Mohamed Chouikh, Nacer Khemir, Nabil Ayouch, Lyes Salem, Nadia El Fani, Tariq Teguia, Faouzi Bensaidi, and Nejib Belkadhi-Gauch delineates the shifting relation of politics to film in the era of neoliberal globalization. Each work, she argues, taps the power inherent in cinema to destabilize patterns of perception and judgment while taking film's role as popular entertainment in new directions. Highlighting how each film taps into the mobility at the core of cinema to break through the boundaries that have long circumscribed filmmaking from North Africa, Gauch shows how this cinema continues to forge and reflect unexpected trajectories for itself and its audiences.

Shahrazad, the legendary fictional storyteller who spun the tales of the 1,001 Arabian Nights, has long been rendered as a silent exotic beauty by Western film and fiction adaptations. Now, she talks back to present a new image of Muslim women. In "Liberating Shahrazad," Suzanne Gauch analyzes how postcolonial writers and filmmakers from Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia have reclaimed the storyteller in order to portray Muslim women in ways that highlight their power to shape their own destinies. Gauch looks at Maghrebian works that incorporate Shahrazad's storytelling techniques into unexpected and unforeseen narratives. Highlighting the fluid nature of storytelling, Gauch demonstrates how these new depictions of Shahrazad--from artists such as Moufida Tlatli, Fatima Mernissi, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Assia Djebar, Leila Sebbar--navigate the demands of a global marketplace, even as they reshape the stories told about the Islamic world. In the face of both rising fundamentalism and proliferating Western media representations of Arab and Muslim women as silent, exploited, and uneducated victims, Gauch establishes how contemporary works of literature and film revive the voice of a long-silenced Shahrazad--and, ultimately, overthrow oppressive images of Muslim women. Suzanne Gauch is assistant professor of English and women's studies at Temple University.