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9780814339374

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Reviews

I can't say enough about this splendid anthology, whose uniformity of excellence among the essays and range of cinemas and films discussed will greatly add to the cinematic canon and be the first place to turn in any future works on the cinemas of this region.--David Desser emeritus professor of cinema studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign The essays in the volume trace humor from Plato and Aristotle to Kant, Santayana, and Freud. As Rahman notes, politics may be predominant, but cinema shows art as life. . . . This is a groundbreaking study for those serious about film.-- (04/01/2015) Film students will benefit from the academic rigor and thoroughness of these informed essays. Film buffs will enjoy the validation of comedy as a vital social critique and the exposure to films which might have escaped their notice before reading Humor in Middle Eastern Cinema.-- (01/01/2015) If you have been paying attention to the news from the Middle East for the past several decades, you probably haven't thought much about humor as an attribute of this region, which has been wracked by uprisings, rebellions, revolutions, crack-downs, occupations, ethnic and religious cleansings, and imperialist wars. However, the editors of Humor in Middle Eastern Cinema have successfully put together a thoughtful anthology that clearly makes that association.--Hamid Naficy professor of radio-television-film, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani Professor in Communication and author of A Social History of Iranian Cinema Readers may be surprised to learn how important humor is to the cultures of the Middle East. Gayatri Devi and Najat Rahman have put together a collection of essays that demonstrate it, making a popular film tradition visible to us and showing at the same time why sometimes we need to take humor seriously. The essays of Humor in Middle Eastern Cinema chart a path through a neglected subject.--Michael Beard University of North Dakota

Author Information

Gayatri Devi is assistant professor of English at Lock Haven University, Pennsylvania. Najat Rahman is an associate professor of comparative literature at the University of Montreal. She is author of Literary Disinheritance: The Writing of Home in the Works of Mahmoud Darwish and Assia Djebar. She is co-editor of Exile’s Poet, Mahmoud Darwish: Critical Essays.

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