Television discourse and the cultural politics of rural transformation in Jordan: Memory, rurality, and dispossession in Umm Al-Karoum

This article examines the Jordanian television serial Umm al-Karoum (Jordan Television, Citation1999), a 15-episode drama produced in 1999 but set during the social and economic transformations of rural Jordan in the 1970s and 1980s. Rather than treating the serial as rural evidence, nostalgic drama, or media object alone, it asks how broadcast drama produces meanings of land, migration, modernity, and loss. Methodologically, the study uses qualitative critical-multimodal discourse analysis informed by mediated discourse analysis. The full serial was viewed sequentially, after which recurrent scene clusters were purposively identified according to their repeated engagement with land, home, migration, urban aspiration, silence, and domestic change. These clusters were then close-read across verbal, visual, spatial, affective, and serial dimensions. The analysis shows that rural dispossession becomes intelligible through five processes: constructing the village as a moral world; recoding land sale as prudence; turning silence into communicative absence; representing the city as a hierarchy of value; and using serial repetition to archive domestic thinning. The article argues that the serial dramatizes how one future becomes speakable while another becomes difficult to defend, theorizing mediated rurality as representation, memory, power, and everyday common sense within Jordanian cultural studies and mediated discourse research.