This panel examines the formation of contested national political imaginaries through three distinct geopolitical and media sites of memorialization in the Middle Eastern and North African region: Algerian film and television, non-state documentary in Egypt, and proto-national cinema in Lebanon. Following traces of extant and non-extant films, as well as the hopes, disillusionment, and renewed possibilities that these films convey, the panel proposes to look at film histories through instances of friction, wherein desires for the recognition of national belonging and gender roles never quite fit hegemonic definitions and linear chronologies.

The three papers weave a shared historiographic inquiry. They ask: How can we register the contradictory efforts for recognition that make up marginalised national and gendered histories of film? While referring to longer timespans, the panel detects a concentration within the “long sixties”—a period of political optimism and sustained struggle that Jacques Rancière called “a time of historical faith”—and charts the transformation of post-colonial and post-revolutionary national infrastructures and representational regimes through the shifts brought about by neoliberal reform. Animated by a common theoretical and methodological assumption, this panel argues that understanding the prehistory and afterlives of striving for recognition in the post-colony requires non-linear approaches that attend to ruptures, invisibilities and multiplicities.

Contributions by Viviane Saglier, Cecilia Valenti and Philip Widmann. Respondent: Nikolaus Perneczky

18 June 2026, 11:20–13:00

NECS Conference 2026: In/Visible
Université Paul Valéry
Azalaïs de Portiragnes, 34090 Montpellier