Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

“We have driven Cuba inch by inch into alliance with the Soviet,’ Norman Mailer wrote, ‘as deliberately and insanely as a man setting out to cuckold himself.’ Castro never wanted to be beholden to the Soviets. He had downplayed the role of the local Communist Party (Partido Socialista Popular) in preparing the ground for his own revolution. But there were only so many options for a single-crop economy of seven million people ninety miles from the Florida coast.”  Fidel Castro and the Making of the 1960s

  A History of Arab Feminism (a 2015 documentary) A liberal perspective. A whole essay could be written as a critique of the documentary. Here some of my thoughts on it: Very informative, although I disagree with the approach and the omissions. “Feminism” is not one. But it is obvious in this documentary that “liberal” feminism, i.e. the feminism of the “free market” Western capitalism, is the reference and criteria. “Liberal feminism” includes sexualisation of the body and commodification of women, exploitation of women as cheap labour, although that has a contradictory aspect, for it helps women join the labour force and gain some rights. It is also obvious in the documentary that the “liberation” of Tunisian women did originally and mostly came from above, not through a radical movement. But the documentary wanted to say that it came through both. The documentary has some inaccuracies in the English translation. Example: تونس دولة مدنية must be translated “Tunisia is a civic state,

The great visionary of Arab cinema