How has cultural production from the Middle East responded to two simultaneous and contradictory trends: growing ease of global mobility brought about by advances in transportation and communication technologies, and increasingly odious restrictions on movement imposed by repressive regimes, civil war, and military occupations in the Arab world?
This book draws on conceptions of space, borders, and mobility from fields such as cultural studies, geography, and anthropology to analyze instances in which movement is arrested, interrupted, or detoured in literature and film from Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon, and Egypt. Each chapter revolves around a particular type or space of (im)mobility, such as airports, underground tunnels, and cross-border infiltration. In many of these cases, the juxtaposition of the possibility of movement that is available to some but not others, or was once available but now is denied, acts as a catalyst for imagining forms of dissent and resistance to repression, ways to circumvent and subvert imposed immobility, and speculative visions of the future.