The politics of space: The spatial mani-festations of representing Middle Eastern politics in American and Egyptian cinemas

Abstract

This article analyses the different ways contemporary American and Egyptian films construct and understand space in the context of Middle Eastern politics. The article contrasts Hollywood’s relationship with space as one about mastery, mirroring America’s ‘from-above’ approach to Middle Eastern politics, with the Egyptian films’ more intimate portrayal of space, where conflicts are more localized and closer to home. Space is explored as both a physical and a mental/imagined/lived entity. In its analysis of issues like the representation of Islamic fundamentalism in the films and its spatial manifestations, the article demonstrates that political space is not a matter of core versus periphery, where ‘we’ reside within a space and ‘they’ outside it, but rather that old boundaries have been erased while new ones have been (re)drawn.