Middle East Research and Information Project

Critical Coverage of the Middle East Since 1971

Sign In Sign Up

Garay Menicucci

Garay Menicucci is associate director of the Office of International Students and Scholars at the University of California-Santa Barbara.

MER Article

Europe and the Political Economy of Arab Cinema

TEXTS REVIEWED: Roy Armes, Postcolonial Images: Studies in North African Film (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2005). Kevin Dwyer, Beyond Casablanca: M. A. Tazi and the Adventure of Moroccan Cinema (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004).

Garay Menicucci • 4 min read

MER Article

Hanna Batatu

Along with his many students, friends, colleagues and relatives, MERIP mourns the death of Hanna Batatu. He died at the age of 74 on June 24, 2000 at Winsted, Connecticut after a struggle with cancer. Batatu, a former MERIP contributing editor, was also the dissertation adviser and long-time colleag

Garay Menicucci • 3 min read

MER Article

Unlocking the Arab Celluloid Closet

Images of same-sex love and sexual dissidence from the heterosexual norm have long been portrayed in literature, theater and cinema in the Arab world. While the explicit depiction of homosexual acts in film has been the subject of strict censorship, cinematic references to gays and lesbians abound,

Garay Menicucci • 17 min read

MER Article

The Privatization of Russian Middle East Studies

The Institute for Oriental Studies in Moscow, once headed by the current Russian foreign minister, Yevgenii Primakov, [1] used to be the premier research establishment for modem history and Soviet policy making concerning the Arab world, Africa and Asia. Like other state-funded academic institutions

Garay Menicucci • 7 min read

MER Article

Bezness

Nouri Bouzid, Bezness (1992). What happens when a poor Arab country with a high birth rate, an enormous youth population and endemic unemployment bases a significant part of its development strategy on attracting European tourism? In Nouri Bouzid’s film, Bezness, the Tunisian coastal town of Souss

Garay Menicucci • 5 min read

MER Article

New Soviet Thinking on the Middle East

Grigorii Grigorevich Kosach teaches at the Academy of Social Sciences in Moscow. Some of his works translated into English include The Comintern and the East (Moscow, 1981), and “Formation of Communist Movements in Egypt, Syria and Lebanon in the 1920s and 1930s, ” in The Revolutionary Process in th

Garay Menicucci • 6 min read