Bøker av Nezar AlSayyad

"The relationship between the city and cinema is formidable. The images and sounds of the city found in movies are perhaps the only experience that many people will have of cities they may never visit. Films influence the way we construct images of the world, and accordingly, in many instances, how we operate within it. Cinematic Cairo offers a history of Cairo's urban modernity using film as the primary source of exploration, and cinematic space as both an analytical tool and a medium of critique. Cairo has provided rich subject material for the Egyptian film industry since the inception of the art form at the end of the nineteenth century. The "reel" city-imagined, perceived, and experienced-provides the spatial domain that mirrors change and allows for an interrogation of the "real" city as it encountered modernity over the course of a century. Bringing together chapters by architects and art and literary historians, this volume explores this parallel and convergent relationship through two sections. The first uses films from the 1930s to the end of the twentieth century to illustrate the development of a modern Cairo and its modern subjects. The second section is focused on tracing the transformation of the cinematic city under conditions of neoliberalism, religious fundamentalism, and gender tensions. The result is a comprehensive narrative of the urban modernity of one of the most important cities in the Arab world and Global South."--

Challenging the common assumption that hybrid peoples create hybrid places and hybrid places house hybrid people, this book suggests that hybrid environments do not always accommodate pluralistic tendencies or multicultural practices.

Nezar AlSayyad narrates the many Cairos that have existed through time, offering a panorama unmatched in temporal and geographic scope, through an in-depth examination of the city's architecture and urban form. His narration illuminates how there can be "no one history of the city, but rather multiple, contested, and often invented histories."

Examines the extraordinary characteristics of Islamic urbanism and the process by which cities and towns were absorbed and physically transformed by Islam.

Exploring the relationship between cities and their cinematic portrayals in over a century of film, this book shows how notions of society inform and are influenced by the images we have come to know on screen.