Iran’s Green Revolution was nothing if not a visually powerful demonstration of hope. Faces radiating from behind green scarves, victory signs wrapped in green ribbons and green posters with slogans calling forth a better Iran dominated – for a short period – even all channels of the international media circuitry, let alone the Persian-language and Iranian-related virtual space. Against this avalanche of political and social hopes and aspirations projected by protestors, the government launched a strategy of doubt. In response to the post-revolutionary Iranian state’s promotion of the social embodiment of piety and ideological fervor in the sanctioned public sphere, the protestors countered green, the color of Islam, and slogans reminiscent of 1979. They did not do so in order to call back the revolution, but in order to counter power with the language of power – Islam and revolution. By mobilizing hope as the main affect in their networks and demonstrations, the protestors mounted a counterpublic that ‘transformed the space of public life itself’ (Michael Warner, 2005). Based on years of online and some ethnographic research, my paper will examine the strategies that the government employed – both online and offline, discursively and symbolically – to plant doubt among the general public about the very existence of these actors as well as their true motives. It will examine its campaign of shadow sites and hacktivism to discredit and demotivate the leaders and supporters of the Green Revolution, and the large counterpublic that the movement had mobilized. It will highlight the ways in which the government targeted the bodies of activists as sites of delegitimization, mainly through tactics of humiliation. Its successful attempts led to an atmosphere of pervasive depression that found reflection in works of cultural production circulated online and offline. It will conclude with reflections about the last-minute re-mobilization of hope among this counterpublic leading up to the election of current President Hassan Rouhani.

My paper examines the actor ‘Adil Imam as a symbol mobilized in contentious politics during Egypt’s Revolution, between the overthrow of Mubarak in 2011 and the demise of Muhammad Morsy’s presidency in 2013. During this period political fortunes and alliances shifted wildly. Key symbols appeared to have been shattered, their fragments reassembled by political bricoleurs in new combinations and for unfamiliar purposes. ‘Adil Imam, a dominant commercial media star (in cinema, television and the theatre) during the 1970s and 1980s, remains a potent force in cinema and television today. Early in 2011 I found Imam disgraced in a graffito in the lower-class neighbourhood of Bulaq Abu-‘Ila and denounced in revolutionary blacklists as a Mubarak-regime collaborator in Tahrir Square. Nonetheless by July 2013 he was a prominent as ever, appearing triumphantly as the star of al-‘Arraf (the oracle), a popular Ramadan dramatic serial that functioned as an allegory of Mubarakian paternalism. How do we understand these starkly different symbolic mobilizations of ‘Adil Imam? Because Imam’s legacy is disputed, his image can be productive in contentious political performances. I approach him in several ways. First I examine Imam ethnographically as a symbol for people who never wavered in their support for him or the politics he represented by the time of the Revolution. The ethnographic component of the paper draws mostly on the experience of living in Cairo during the first two years of the Revolution; I have known some of my informants for up to three decades. Secondly, I analyse the articulation of Imam-as-a-symbol spatially, relating the significance of where discourse about him emerged in actual urban space (on a wall in Bulaq, in Tahrir Square demonstrations), with virtual representation of the city in Imam’s performances. Finally, the revolution-era significance of Imam crystalizes in the historical-literary context of his performance oeuvre. Whatever people (or publics) make of Imam in the context of the Revolution emerges through the ways they draw on his legacy; the “performance of Imam-as-a-symbol” by people draws on the history of Imam as a performer. More generally the symbolic use of Imam illustrates the way people draw on personal media archives constructed from public culture for political and other social performances. A symbolic bricolage can only be understood by reference to sedimented cultural resources that shift, but not necessarily as rapidly or dramatically as the political alliances of a revolutionary situation may lead us to believe.

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have been at the forefront of analyses of the unfolding uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa since 2010. As the so-called “Arab Spring” enters its third year, with so many of the conflicts and grievances yet unresolved and too many revolutionary aspirations unrealized, it is especially important to consider the ways that ICTs contribute to how the uprisings will be remembered. Very little scholarship has explored the role of pervasive digital mediation in creating the texts of these revolutions, writing their histories in bytes as well as blood. This paper examines the challenges of curating a digital memory of the Arab uprisings across several countries with vastly different media ecologies: Egypt, Syria, and Bahrain. It looks at several specific “archival” projects dedicated to preserving revolutionary digital artifacts and raises a number of interrelated questions. In the information age, who writes the history of revolution? How is an increasingly active and mediated counter-revolution coming to occupy and re-appropriate digital spaces and practices? ICT use in the Middle East has rendered public space and political activism legible in new ways, and the spaces and practices of mediation themselves have become sites of contention, resistance, and counter-revolutionary retaliations. While protesters are being pushed off the streets, they are also being “deleted” from virtual platforms through the efforts of organized groups like the Syrian Electronic Army and by collective digital violence on the part of individuals, such as feloul, “remnants” of the regime in Egypt. This paper suggests that case studies of counter-revolutionary mediations demonstrate the significance of place to digital mediations, so often described as transcending space and time. The myth of infinite virtual mobility enabled by ICTs gives way to a similarly misguided myth about the infinite preservation of digital content. The last three years have revealed a powerful politics of deletion that is transforming the digital textuality of the Arab uprisings online. In these spaces, the counter-revolutionary politics “offline” are converging with the content rules and constraints of digital platforms (like Facebook and Twitter) “online” to actively reconfigure and renegotiate the living digital histories of the uprisings. This paper examines the implications of pervasive digital mediation for reading the revolutions and argues that while the ongoing revolutions are being synchronously disputed online and offline, we must also reflectively consider how the multi-media digital “texts” of the revolutions are being produced, curated, remembered, and forgotten.

Since the outbreak of the Syrian uprising in March 2011 and the ensuing attempt to quell it, internet users have been responding to the uprising and its sounds. These sounds, either through music supporting the regime or the opposition, or mediated through recordings of the noises of modern warfare, affected listeners and often engendered publics and counterpublics. These publics and counterpublics formed around the sounds of post-Arab Spring Syria, formed as fomenters of, not just reactors to increasing violence. Drawing on a range of works from Charles Hirschkind's "Ethical Soundscape" to Steve Goodman's "Sonic Warfare," this paper seeks to engage with the complex soundscape that has emerged online, and the publics and counterpublics formed by affective sounds in conjunction with the militarization of the Syrian uprising. It is argued that through recorded sound, students of the uprising can decipher networks of ethical and aesthetic values, and literally hear the cacophony of the conflict. For instance, Salafi Islamist counterpublics emerged against the mainstream publics of traditional Syrian and Arab music listeners. They brought to the soundscape a cappella songs called anashid (nashid, sing), which were shaped by Islamic ethics (forbidding women's voices and instrumental accompaniment). Then a hybrid genre emerged with songs recorded and uploaded to YouTube both with and without music, and often using colloquial Arabic to emphasize the local Syrian-ness of the target audience. A discourse formed within the oppositional factions whereby patriotic Syrian publics found themselves subverted by transnational Salafi counterpublics. Moreover, soundtracks have been produced for Salafi military propaganda videos where the anashid are nearly drowned out by sounds of warfare, assaulting the listener and forcing her or him to make the choice to cower or brave the fray, flee or run to the fight. So by broadening the sample to include a range of online content from music videos to noise-based soundtracks, we see counterpublics forming in opposition to publics, as the limits of previously acceptable sounds are stretched, rejected, or simply made obsolete through human suffering. New sounds disseminated and listened to by publics and counterpublics during the evolution of the Syrian conflict are then not just artifacts but also weapons in the arsenal of warfare.