Through a selection of case studies, this session aims to explore the identity formation role and the affective response to things belonging to “Arabia” (broadly conceived). Historically, representations of Arabia have been multifaceted and at times quite at odds with the real place. At one end stand relatively accurate representations of Arabia by Western travelers or traders who came in direct contact with the people of the Arabian Peninsula and by the local populations who developed their own sets of identity markers and symbolic representations. At the other end are representations that emphasize Arabia’s riches, magic, sensuality, and exoticism, a fabulous Arabia that has had a lasting impact on the Western imaginary and whose identity has been internalized by the local populations today. This “imaginative geography,” as Said describes it, has been fueled by an extremely productive thread of Orientalist literature and, more recently, by cinematic productions that have consolidated the extraordinariness of the place. This session aims to highlight both these representations by exploring the affective connection between "ideas, values, and objects” (Ahmed, 2009) and engaging in a highly topical conversation about how things associated with “Arabia” helped preserve memory, participated in imperialist refashionings of the place, and/or served as shorthand for wish-fulfillment.

In her paper, Papagianni focuses on the affective responses that things prompt in Hamama, a 2010 film by Nojoom Alghanem, one of the most acclaimed filmmakers in the UAE. By using the lenses of affect and thing theory, she examines the film’s nostalgic turn to the material world of the Bedouin pre-oil past, as made evident in the staging of things―from landscape to vessels to medicines to rugs―, which offers a much needed local perspective meant to counteract both the Orientalizing gaze of the West and the annihilating forces of globalization. As the author argues, Alghanem’s focus on material things brings forth the past as a lived experience, thus reconstructing it affectively. The film, then, becomes a medium of localization as these “cine-things” elicit sensory and gestural attention, that is, an affective response both from the main character and the camera narrator, thus making the recovery of the Emirati past possible.

Approaching the issue of memory from a more politically inflected perspective, Kristen Skjonsby explores the dynamic engagement of Isaa Shamsuddin, the main protagonist of Ishtiyaq Shukri’s novel The Silent Minaret, with “Lawrence of Arabia” and the Arabian desert. In her view, Isaa and Lawrence’s relationship is entirely determined by the desert as a material object―a meeting point rich with historical, political, ecological, and, of course, Orientalist implications. Skjonsby explores the ways in which the desert is a legible site of difference between the West and the Middle East within the imperial imagination, arguing that the narrator challenges these boundaries by reclaiming Lawrence as a puppet of imperial discourse. By doing so, Shukri’s novel provides anti-Orientalist renderings of the desert as a physical point of origin that circumvents imperial narratives, challenging its representations as a locus of creative identity fashioning.

Finally, Jennie MacDonald focuses in her paper on imaginary representations of “Arabia” emerging from the translation of the Arabian Nights Entertainments at the beginning of the 18^th century. By examining productions such as John O'Keeffe's 1788 play Aladdin, or the Wonderful Lamp, the 1826 Drury Lane opera with the same title, and later pantomime and toy theatre versions of the Romantic era, MacDonald highlights their use of material elements, such as the magic ring and lamp, which celebrate the intangible concepts of love, curiosity, and wonder, offering an imaginative concept of the Arabian culture of the time. In the cultural transmission of Aladdin’s story, its central object, Aladdin’s wonderful lamp, with its power of wish-fulfillment, has played a key role in promoting the exotic and magical image of an interculturalized “Arabia” that draws upon disparate aesthetics and cultural practices and had little to do with a specific, geographically-identifiable place.

These three papers will thus offer a multifaceted and nuanced view of the role played by material objects, both real and imaginary, in shaping the cultural identity of “Arabia.” They will be followed by a Q&A session that will allow the audience to engage with the speakers and further explore issues of interest for their own research, thus broadening and enriching this very topical conversation.