Intertextuality in Tunisian Cinema: State, Allegory, and ‘Sexual Breathing Room’

Abstract

The repressive political climate in pre-revolutionary Tunisia often necessitated that artists issue their critiques in clandestine modes. In cinema productions, artists used allegory in order to touch on or evoke larger political issues. Owing to the politics surrounding the pursuit of funding, Tunisian artists were forced to censor themselves in order to secure patronage, and even then financial assistance was not assured. However, despite the sophisticated mechanisms crafted to mitigate the threat of cultural production, Tunisian filmmakers were able to address sex and sexuality in explicit plots and scenes. As cinematic allegories frequently took the body as a grotesque mode of representing the epistemological and the political, filmmakers were able, in some cases, to secure funding and pass censors while still covertly subverting the state, its policies, and/or the social structures upon which it depended. Interpreting the cinematic allegories in short and feature-length films through the lens of intertextuality, allegorical critique of the state emerges alongside the mantle of historical genealogies they built their films upon and in conversation with.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 4 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.