Race & Society

Mediterranea & Al-Sit

Mediterranea

Film Synopsis:
The film depicts the Africans’ interaction with Italians, and their lives as migrant workers, which includes friendships and animosities, boredom, and temptation.

Content Warning: violence, gore, profanity, alcohol and drugs consumption, smoking, frightening & intense scenes, sex & nudity, PG 18+

Al-Sit

Film Synopsis:
In a cotton-farming village in Sudan, 15-year-old Nafisa has a crush on Babiker, but her parents have arranged her marriage to Nadir, a young Sudanese businessman living abroad. Nafisa’s grandmother Al-Sit, the powerful village matriarch, has her own plans for Nafisa’s future. But can Nafisa choose for herself?

Content: Short film, in Arabic with English subtitles

The screening followed a community discussion facilitated by Professor Trish Kahle.

Trish Kahle is an Assistant Professor of history at Georgetown University Qatar. Her work focuses on history of energy, work, and politics in the modern United States and the world. Currently, she is working on her first book, which traces the emergence of energy citizenship—a form of national belonging defined by the rights and obligations of energy production, distribution, and consumption—from the coal mining workplace in the modern United States. A second project examines the role of utility companies in defining what counts as “energy work” by organizing both individuals and communities into energy producers and energy consumers. Her research has appeared in Labor, the Journal of Energy History/ Revue d’Histoire de l’Énergie, and American Quarterly. Support for my work has come from the Mellon Foundation, the Jefferson Scholars Foundation at the University of Virginia, the American Society for Environmental History, the Western Association of Women Historians, the Labor and Working-Class History Association, the Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society, the University of Chicago, and several research libraries.