Description
Supervisors: Prof. dr. Rob van der Laarse and Prof. dr. Ihab SaloulFilm is a word that is the same in every language, but it is also the opportunity for a nation state to create a unique national identity, a collective memory for consumption at home and abroad, like the American Western did for the US and the films of Sergei Eisenstein did for the former USSR. Focusing on the United Arab Emirates (UAE), this research explores how film and visual media can create, disturb or enforce a collective memory and heritage in a rapidly changing, relatively young nation state seeking international status in business, tourism and geopolitics while unifying its citizenry, who make up only 10% of the population. The 10-year window of this study begins in 2008, when the UAE government began to invest heavily in developing a film industry, and ends in 2018, when most of these early film initiatives had disappeared. It is also the time frame during which the UAE intensified its move onto the world stage and navigated a potentially catastrophic financial crisis and the turbulent times of the Arab Spring. At the same time, not coincidentally, this was a decade when heritage became a buzzword in the UAE, a national memory boom era in a landscape that has very little in the way of heritage landmarks that date back even to the founding of the nation in 1971. Within this time frame and these issues, this dissertation assesses how visual media stabilizes or destabilizes the national heritage and identity narrative in a country in which modernity moves fast enough that today’s skyline often looks different tomorrow.
| Period | 16 Dec 2020 |
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| Examinee | Alia Yunis |
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| Degree of Recognition | International |