Middle East/Africa Regional Summer Course!

CMCL-C 422: Performance, Culture, and Power in the Middle East and North Africa

Class Number: 13318 (Summer Session I)

MTuWTh, 10:20 AM-11:00 AM, C2 100

Fulfills College S&H Requirement

Fulfills College Culture Studies Requirement (Global Civilizations & Cultures)

Instructor: Jane Goodman

E-Mail: janegood@indiana.edu

Office: C2 227

Phone: 855-3232

This is an especially important moment in global history to develop a more nuanced understanding of Middle Eastern societies. In this course, we will explore the complex relationships between cultural values, power relations, and communicative practices among various populations of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).  Taking an ethnographic perspective, we view performance not only in terms of a formal display for an audience but also as the range of events and practices through which cultural values are negotiated and social relations are organized.  In other words, Moroccan marketplace talk, Bedouin women’s love poetry, or the listening practices of young male consumers of Algerian rai (world beat) music will be as important to our inquiry as the staged concerts of a national Egyptian star.  As we ask what it is that people are up to when they engage in communicative practices, we will also problematize what “communicative practice” entails and how it has been variously theorized. In moving from what scholars of performance have called the interaction order (face-to-face communication) to global media, we will necessarily be engaging with a range of theoretical models, drawn from fields including anthropology, performance studies, and cultural studies. 

The focus of the course is on how communicative practice is organized in the societies of the MENA rather than on how these societies are represented by Western media. At the same time, we acknowledge that the authors (mostly Western) whose works we will be reading have their own positionality with regards to the locations of their research, and we will also attend to their representational practices and politics.

The course format features structured discussions, minilectures, small group work, and video and audio presentations.