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Digital Activism: Arabic Literature and the New Political
Abstract
Postcolonial theory’s critique of the political in the Arab world has systematically dismissed a new generation of middle class men and women, with access to technology and conversant with Western popular culture as being complicit with colonial discourses and practices. This generation is often cast as consumarist and apolitical in the traditional or ideological sense, i.e., as failing to resist Western cultural hegemony and discursive practices. In this context, the postcolonial epistemological and political binaries have excluded the possibility of an uprising that would succeed in mobilizing people from across the social and political spectrum as we have witnessed in the cases of Tunisa and Egypt. This new tech-savvy generation, like the student movement in Europe during in 1968, drew to its ranks workers, disenfranchised ethnic and religious groups, women and men, young and old. The postcolonial emphasis on locating and denouncing modes of complicity with all that is associated with the West, from facebook to gay rights, thus points to a fundamental epistemological failure that has now permanently undermined its theoretical framework and political relevance. This paper investigates the emergence of digitally mediated subjectivities in the Arab world by examining new structures of activism taking shape at the intersection of the virtual and the material, the novel and the blog. Focusing on a series of authors and activists (Wael Abbas, Bradley Manning, Raja’ Alsanea, and Ghada Abdel Aal), this paper explores the notion of fadH (exposing) and fadiha (scandal) as a new cultural and theoretical paradigm for political practices and discourse in the Arab world and beyond. Reading this model in media developments from the 1990s onward, the paper explores the political implication of these new practices, akin to bricolage, and examine their intertwinement with social habits linked to browsing and surfing the internet on the one hand, and with forms of leaking classified information and embarrassing and denouncing structures of power both in the Arab world and the West, on the other. This theorizing of fadH reveals a new form of political activism in which the role of writing and of literature more specifically is redefined. Furthermore, this exploration of fadH ties in these new literary and political practices of resistance with traditional forms of critique of power in Arab culture, literature, and film.
Discipline
Literature
Geographic Area
All Middle East
Sub Area
Media