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The Aesthetics of Scandal: Exhibitionism as Engagement in New Arabic Writing
Abstract
The digital revolution has ushered in modes of exhibitionism and voyeurism that are reshaping social interactions and undermining traditional power structures in the Arab world. With Oprah-like TV shows and such Internet sites as Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter, people are increasingly putting their lives on display. This exhibitionism blurs the distinction between private and public, and the social and the political, exacerbating the desire to see and be seen. This desire, however, could not be separated from a new political activism that exploits exhibitionism and voyeurism to critique power. Through images and videos of violation of human rights like police beatings in Egypt, captured by hand-held devices and circulated online, a voyeurism vis-?-vis practices of power mirrors the exhibitionism and voyeurism that is redefining the social. No longer restricted to ideological narratives of opposition to power, this new activism is taking shape as a result of an intolerance of the private, the secretive, the opaque, the inaccessible (as in lack of Internet access), and of all the attributes of authoritarian regimes and oppressive social structures. In this paper I argue that while a form of fadH (exposing; fadiha, scandal) operates as a multi-centered engagement with the political in the activist blogger community, for instance, it also characterizes a new literary genre, in which the author is redefined as a rapporteur, exposing his or her social milieu. The economy of exhibitionism and voyeurism is best represented in Rajaa Alsanea's Girls of Riyadh, where the narrator-author casts her weekly revelations as a form of social critique and anchors fadH as the task of the new author. From Alsanea's scandalous chronicle, I turn to Khaled Khamisi's candid camera-like Taxi and argue that the appropriation of the maqama genre in this new work stages the narratives of Cairo's cabdrivers as a fadH of social and political realities. In these two examples, fadH characterizes a new critique of power at the intersection of literature and politics, virtuality and print, and the private and the public, redefining in this way the role of literature through a new form of engagement.
Discipline
Literature
Geographic Area
All Middle East
Sub Area
Media