Arab Animated Cartoons: Mediating and Negotiating Notions of Identities

Abstract

This thesis is the first critical critical study of animated cartoon production in the Arab world. From the 1930s until the recent spread of online animations, animated cartoon production in the Arab world was the privilege of individuals and institutions with strong links to academic, media and political elites. These elites had maintained both direct and indirect authority over production in a number of ways, including funding, regulation and censorship expressed through television channels. Therefore, Arab animated cartoons became a legitimate target of well-defined cultural policies and, in some cases, even of political and religious agendas. As cultural and media texts, Arab animated cartoons have been deeply engaged in the making and remaking of religious and political identities. By reviewing and reconstructing the history of animation production in Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, the Palestinian Territories, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, and the United Arab Emirates, this thesis shows how rival notions of “national,” “pan-Arab” and “Islamic” identities are advocated and fused by Arab animated cartoons. Using theories of production studies, this thesis explores Arab cultural and media productions in their broader political and social context, and show how animation production in a particular country has been linked to and integrated into local, regional and even global cultural and media production industries. This research also adds a non-Western perspective to the study of identity issues as presented in Arab cultural and media texts. It answers how political, religious and social discourses over identity are reflected in the texts of a particular animated cartoon. Analyzing over forty important animated productions, this dissertation explores how the symbolic function of language, the visual characteristics and, also, the narratives themselves articulate the identities of the productions as texts. This textual analysis largely incorporates political and cultural analysis in order to decode the references that construct the notions of identities. Using theories on hybridity, this thesis also analyzes how different animation genres (such as sitcom animation) hybridize to reflect local identities, and investigate how particular productions moved beyond hybridization, creating unique Arab animated cartoon genres.