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The Arab Revolutionary Decade in Pop Culture
Abstract
What does probing the engagement of the uprisings through pop culture reveal about the enduring story of the “Arab Revolutionary Decade”? While big Hollywood studio pictures and independent documentaries alike almost exclusively zeroed in on sensationalizing ISIL terror and sentimentalizing Syrian refugee war porn, pop culture interventions emanating from geographies of resistance offered divergent creative storytelling pathways and possibilities. The pop culture interventions I examine in this paper offer larger social commentaries about intersecting systems of domination. I engage popular visual culutres, iconic pictures of “women’s work” from below and the first season of Hulu series Ramy, to analyze the Arab Revolutionary storyworlds built through photography and filmmaking. Sudanese Woman Protest Chanter. Lebanese Kick queen. Queer Egyptian Flag-waver. These images proceeded the names of women who became emblems of revolution: Alaa Salah., Malak Alaywe, and Sarah Hergozy. The stop-action photos punctured social media ecosystems, were re-shared across borders and fiber optic systems, and transformed to digital art pieces with warp-speed virality. What story do these images, in the later years of the “Arab Revolution decade,” tell us about the political, economic, social forces that preceded them? And what is the state of women’s movement work after the intervention of globally circulated images and the imaginaries they carry? Are they fleeting, enduring, and/or a culmination of decades of women and gender labor? The spectacle of iconizing women in revolt harnesses a larger story and longer history of women’s movement work in the uprisings and challenging state repression I conclude with a case study on “The Before and After Life of the Egyptian Uprising in Hulu series Ramy.” Surfacing from a childhood confrontation with the devastating effects of neoliberal structural adjustment programs in a 9/11 flashback episode, we begin to see the building of a Ramy storyworld attuned to the historic political, economic, and social roots of revolution. In the last two episodes of season 1, we become witness to, through the lens of show creator Ramy Youssef’s storytelling and Jehane Noujaim’s directing their post-uprisings Egypt; an Egypt with youth burdened by persistent repression, financial insecurity, trauma of re-entrenched military authoritarian rule, a Sisi-ism animating Trumpism, and a glamorizing of revolution from Arab diasporic eyes. As a creative advisor on the first season of Ramy and writer on the second season, I offer a critical media studies analysis invigorated by a participant-observer positionality on the series.
Discipline
Media Arts
Geographic Area
Mashreq
North America
Sudan
Syria
Sub Area
None