Overview

Sensuous Cinema: The Body in Contemporary Maghrebi Film examines a cluster of recent films that feature Maghrebi(-French) people and position corporeality as a site through which subjectivity and self-other relations are constituted and experienced. These films are set in and between the countries of the Maghreb, France and, to a lesser degree, Switzerland, and often adopt a sensual aesthetic that prioritizes embodied knowledge, the interrelation of the senses and the material realities of emotional experience. However, despite the importance of the body in these films, no study to date has taken corporeality as its primary point of concern. This new addition to the Thinking Cinema series interweaves corporeal phenomenology with theological and feminist scholarship on the body from the Maghreb and the Middle East to examine how Maghrebi(-French) people of different genders, ethnicities, sexualities, ages and classes have been represented corporeally in contemporary Maghrebi and French cinemas. Via detailed textual and phenomenological analyses of films such as Red Satin (Amari 2002), Exiles (Gatlif 2004), Couscous (Kechiche 2007) and Salvation Army (Taïa 2014), Kaya Hayon Davies conveys the pivotal role that corporeality plays in articulating identity and the emotions in these films.

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9781501362156

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Reviews

Kaya Davies Hayon offers a compelling and nuanced reading of contemporary Maghrebi films focusing on corporeal desire as they challenge the sociopolitical and cultural normative practices of Maghrebi societies. * Valerie K. Orlando, Professor, French and Francophone Literatures and Cultures, University of Maryland, College Park, USA, and author most recently of: The Algerian New Novel: The Poetics of a Modern Nation, 1950-1979 (2017) and New African Cinema (2017) * Sensuous Cinema is an original, thoughtful account of the role of the body and 'embodied subjectivities' in contemporary Maghrebi and Maghrebi-French filmmaking. Davies Hayon productively draws on a range of critical traditions, such as the cinematic haptic, phenomenology, queer theory, and Western and Muslim feminism to offer a careful and sensitive analysis of a number of under-examined works. This book is a valuable contribution to the study of recent North African filmmakers and filmmaking practices, and will be of interest to scholars and students of film studies, French and Francophone visual culture, postcolonial studies, and gender and sexuality. * Maria Flood, Lecturer in Film Studies, Keele University, UK * Sensuous Cinema provides novel insight into corporeality as a defining concern of recent films about characters of Maghrebi heritage, and unearths fascinating connections between conceptions of embodied subjectivity from different regions of the world. In these ways, this carefully researched and astutely argued book makes a distinctive and powerful contribution to the contemporary debate over how films explore the significance of bodies. * Libby Saxton, Senior Lecturer in Film Studies, Queen Mary University of London, UK *

Author Information

Kaya Davies Hayon is an Assistant Professor in French and Francophone Studies in the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Nottingham, UK.

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