Reframing Home: Diasporic Hybridity, Spatial Aesthetics, and Affective Spectatorship in Arab-Canadian Cinema

Abstract

This dissertation argues that Arab-Canadian cinema constitutes a politically significant cultural formation that actively shapes, rather than merely reflects, the diasporic identities of Arab and Muslim communities in Canada. Analysing fictional and documentary works produced between the early 1990s and the mid-2020s - such as Ruba Nadda's Sabah (2005) and Cairo Time (2009), Bachir Bensaddek's Montréal la blanche (2016), Pierre Sidaoui's A Scent of Mint (2002), Nisreen Baker's Things Arab Men Say (2016), and Arab Women Say What?! (2023) among others - the study contends that these films generate representational spaces in which identity is negotiated and reimagined against Orientalist misrepresentation, post-9/11 racialisation, and the structural asymmetries concealed within Canadian multicultural discourse.

Three analytical frameworks structure the inquiry. The first draws on Bhabha's theory of hybridity and the third space, Brah's diaspora cartographies, and Anzaldúa's borderlands concept to examine diasporic identity as an embodied, processual negotiation expressed through spatial configurations, sensory aesthetics, and elemental metaphor. The second applies Crenshaw's intersectionality paradigm and critical race theory to analyse the interlocking operations of race, gender, religion, and class in the films' representations of Arab and Muslim femininity, masculine vulnerability, and the differential politics of mobility in Canadian urban space. The third builds on Hall's encoding/decoding model to investigate how filmmakers encode counter-narratives within institutionally legible genres, and how those narratives are decoded across the media ecologies that mediate their reception.

The study concludes that Arab-Canadian cinema refuses equally the consolations of nostalgic return and the demands of assimilationist integration, developing instead a formal vocabulary - generic hybridity, archival poetics, testimonial intimacy - commensurate with the complexity of diasporic experience and constitutive of an enduring intervention in the politics of representation in multicultural Canada.