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.

One of the recent surveys finds that “the region's largest demographic segment,” namely 200 million Arabs, are under 25 years of age. The young generation is in command of digital literacy and have adapted non-traditional forms of media. These media represent new writing and reading experiences which compel the critic to examine these literary sites and reevaluate questions of genre, reception, language, and authority. Blogging and tweeting political events have engendered another form of narration and retelling that could only be examined in a comparative framework along with new fiction. In this paper I will highlight the relationship between the political events in Egypt, Tunisia, and other Arab countries and the new writing in Arabia, which I will argue anticipated and performed youth rebellion and defiance. My paper addresses the following questions: To what extent can we think of twitter characters as fictional narrators who sometimes participate in the action and at others retell the event while observing it from a distance? What are the connections between characters on twitter and those found in new writing? In this paper, I’ll focus on a few characters on twitter including Mona Eltahawy, Zeinobia, iRevolt Roqayah, Ahmed Al Omran, Gsquare86 and Dima Khatib. Their tweets are bold, animated and occasionally outrageous. Some of them are semi anonymous, thereby offering them much mobility and freedom. During the violent moments in the recent uprisings, they were seeing, reporting, warning, and mobilizing readers. I argue that these practices render their tweets hyper-texts, situated between detective genres and slasher films, further blurring the distinction between fiction and new media reporting, twitter sites and new wri

The Interchangeable Dissent/Internet: What Theoretical Referents for Popular Revolutions? While popular revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt took by surprise policy architects, decision makers, intelligent service networks as transformative events that challenge the notorious ‘creative chaos’ doctrine, they also generate a flood of intellectual effort to explain their formation processes. While internet and dissent “guardians” are busy securing a steady realization and materialization of their goals, as the will of the whole people or nation, poets and intellectuals try to put the movement in context. As there is an agreement on the power of the internet and communication sphere (particularly al-Jazeera) in the dissemination of dissent and revolt against statist abuse and brutality, there is also an effort to legitimize the striding revolutionary discourse in the context of a national inventory where poetry and narrative play a significant role in consolidating national allegories. Recognizing the grand odes and designs masterminded by warlords and global capital, they see the new consciousness as preventive by nature and potentially subversive. The “genius of the people” is seen now in a genealogy of a “return of the soul” which Tawfiq al-Hakim claimed as impacting Nasir’s role as a heroic figure in a national epic. The emphasis is laid on “precious metal”, “essence,” and “struggle against fate.” Many intellectuals use such terms, while others conceive of revolts in a neo-Marxist framework wherein the political unconscious needs the right moment to generate the revolt of “the oppressed on the oppressor.” Others see workers’ discontent, strikes, and hundreds of protests and demonstrations as the background for revolt. They were only beyond the reach of the social media and satellite reporting. They were without voice, or, to go along with Spivak, they were the subalterns. It is only when given voice that they become part of the whole national scene. While the subaltern is no longer so with such a voice, there is also a poetic which has evolved, now disseminated and transformed from a slogan into a realpolitik. Songs, verse, sign and slogan complement the role of traditional media, but they work more effectively as a collective rallying demand and call that change over time in tune with the steadily rising momentum. Building on a common heritage, both old and new, the revolutionary poetic reintroduces a sense of nation/ness, which in turn undermines the “creative chaos” doctrine of fragmentation and loss.

In her Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Gayatri Spivak argues that there is a danger in assuming an inherently isomorphic relationship between new technologies or economies, and cultural forms and subjectivities on the other. This skepticism against a technologically determinist understanding is vitally important to understanding what exactly is new about the role of media in the uprisings of 2011. Not only have mass uprisings happened in the Arab world and these countries before, youth have also previously played an important role in their organization and mobilization. While there are crucial differences between Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, and other spaces of protest, this paper argues that what they have in common is a relatively new cultural logic of visibility. I situate the role of live broadcasting in shaping the forms the protests took, the use of social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter, and mobile devices. This paper will also seek to trace the political in two very distinct moments of mediation: how the uprisings are experienced outside of Egypt (especially in the Arab and Western media spheres), and the role of media in shaping the uprising. While these two moments are inextricably linked, they often conflated in problematic ways, especially the former being read in terms of the latter. This paper therefore reflects on the political by contextualizing the visibility of the spaces of protest, and the desire of watching and being watched.