Television serials and their production worlds offer a unique vantage point from which to study social and political life in the Middle East. Dramas also merit consideration for their aesthetic qualities and formal innovations. Yet social media has overshadowed professionally-produced fictional TV in the study of Middle Eastern popular culture over the past two decades. The 2011 anti-regime uprisings and their aftermaths have shifted scholarly interest to social networking services like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram. User-generated content has displaced television in academic literature, but not in in the Middle East itself, where TV drama forms a key platform for sociopolitical commentary. TV dramas regularly treat a range of topical issues; their creators serve as public intellectuals and opinion shapers. Multi-media convergence has intensified, rather than undermined, serial television’s reach and relevance. For example, the Internet offers a virtual, year-round simulation of Ramadan—the longstanding drama broadcast season in Arabic-language media. Digital technologies breathe new life into long-form television, as audiences watch serials through streaming and video sharing services, and debate them on social media. Fan cultures thrive on networking sites. Professional television creators harness these platforms to promote their works and—sometime from sites of exile—communicate with each other and their publics. Viewers produce and post mashups, spoofs, critiques, and homages to TV serials and their makers. The authoritarian entrenchments that have followed the 2011 uprisings have exacerbated constraints on journalistic and academic freedom, augmenting fictional television’s significance. Drawn from intensive, multi-year and multi-sited fieldwork among Arab TV drama makers, and internet ethnography on audiences, this presentation demonstrates the continued—indeed increasing—value of fictional media for understanding contemporary political and social transformations.

In my contribution to this panel, I will examine how Egyptian public figures under Anwar Sadat (r. 1970-1981) and, later, Hosni Mubarak (r. 1981-2011), actively harnessed the state-controlled Egyptian press to promote and popularize family planning as a solution to overpopulation. As I will demonstrate through a close reading of political cartoons in national periodicals, however, the same state-controlled medium also undermined these top-down efforts by making a mockery of family planning, in effect transforming overpopulation, a major problem, into a “comedic crisis,” something to be remedied, on the one hand, and ridiculed, on the other. In charting the making of this comedic crisis in Egypt, this talk will break new ground in discussions of media, popular culture, and archives in Middle East studies by complicating the idea of state-controlled media, demonstrating the power of popular culture to enhance existing histories, and presenting the kinds of alternative narratives that may be crafted by historians in the absence of national archives. I will begin by exploring how state employees, social service workers, and journalists collectively extolled the merits of family planning and encouraged citizens to actively embrace it in popular periodicals, before shifting to the drawings of several illustrators who directly undercut this media campaign by publicly lampooning family planning. As will become clear, gravity and levity collided in the case of Egypt’s population politics, a history of which raises broader questions regarding the study of popular culture and its potential to radically enrich the writing of Middle East history.

In 2003, aiming to understand the scope of Egypt’s cassette industry, I set out to systematically map the network of popular music production and consumption in Egypt since the 1970s. Who produced music media? How many copies were sold or broadcast? Where, when, and to whom? I sought hard, comprehensive data: statistics, lists, taxonomies, and maps. This quantitative study, initially intended as a baseline to more in-depth interpretive, ethnographic research, soon became an all-consuming exercise entailing teamwork and considerable frustration, albeit not entirely without fruit. Unlike libraries or newspaper archives, popular culture archives are mostly informal – not designated for research, viewed as too lowbrow, too economically or politically sensitive, or too personal to warrant scholarship. They are thus often overseen by guardians who (for different reasons) treat researchers with suspicion, particularly when they are foreigners. However, in retrospect the many micro-struggles along this decade-long journey around Cairo—from offices of the Ministry of Culture (the Production Sector; the Censor for Artistic Works; the Opera) to those of the Egyptian Radio and Television Union (e.g. Radio, SonoCairo), from small cassette shop owners (including a survey of some 25 Greater Cairo neighborhoods), to record labels (international, regional, national, local) and unlicensed distributors; from intellectual property rights organizations, local (SACERAU) and global (IFPI), to Egypt’s Chamber of Commerce; from fan clubs to private collectors--turned out to harbor considerable ethnographic value. I meticulously recorded stories of my travails in ethnographic fieldnotes, including reflections on relationships to archival actors and materials, and it is this data, more than the collected materials themselves, that form the core of my paper. Practically speaking, an ethnography of informal archive access is instructive. More importantly, the agent-level interactions of a foreigner and Egypt’s information guardians (whether they be bureaucrats or broadcasters, record company employees or shop owners) shed light upon the larger cultural, social, economic and political systems in which they are all embedded, and upon one’s relationship—as a foreign researcher and de facto representative of foreign cultures and polities--to those systems. Deploying an autoethnographic strategy, in conjunction with Actor-Network Theory (ANT) as a heuristic connecting the social and the material, and observing Latour’s injunction to “trudge like an ant”, I recount this decade-long journey (2003 to 2013) and what can be gleaned from it, methodologically and socioculturally, towards enhancing our understanding of popular culture and the Middle East.

Not much consideration has been paid to the vast changes taking place in what might be considered the archive of popular music from North Africa, and Algeria in particular. While some important online projects have been developed by state actors, most notably the work of Gallica, the digital library of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, a vast and constantly expanding amount of material has also been made available by amateurs (fans, collectors, devotees). These can be found variously on YouTube, SoundCloud, FaceBook, discogs.com, podcasts and other outlets. On YouTube, for instance, one can discover posts of rare recordings, sometimes illustrated by personal snapshots and photos of record jackets, as well as informed commentary and discussion, videos of live performance, recordings of TV interviews with artists, and so on. I’m unaware of any systematic effort to collect and permanently archive this material. Due to rapid changes in how popular music is reproduced, there is also the phenomenon of a “vanishing” archives of music and video cassettes, vinyl recordings, Scopitones (16 mm. film played on a kind of jukebox) and more recently, CDs. Such items (or the latest versions) were once ubiquitous in the marketplace, and have now mostly disappeared, and much has been discarded and rubbished. These are all invaluable sources for a more complex understanding of the significance of popular music of North Africa and its connection to broader economic, cultural and political issues, and we should be concerned, as scholars, about how such archives might be collected and preserved. I will highlight a few cases of how this music might matter, including discussing how an investigation of popular vinyl recordings by Algerian artists, banned by the French colonial security forces during the war of liberation, might expand our understanding of the cultural dimensions of the Algerian struggle.