Performance and pageantry have always been part of monarchy and modes of governance. Today they have become part of new media and transnational networks creating new possibilities for monarchal credibility and legitimacy that previously may not have been needed and/or possible. Historically many nation-states have transformed from monarchy to the republic or the presidential systems of governance. The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan is one of several counties in the world today that has a constitutional monarchy in which the King is considered the head of the state. Unpacking how a nationalist project is achieved through monarchal spectacle within a neoliberal context using digital media is the focus of this presentation. Specifically, I am interested in Queen Rania’s use of Internet-based social media forums such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc. in negotiating a modern image of Jordan and reinventing imaginings of Jordan as an open society. Since 2008, Queen Rania has been actively launching interactive and collaborative campaigns on-line calling on Internet users to participate in global conversation by sending her their own video and text responses. This paper addresses how Queen Rania capitalizes on different performative strategies to invoke spectacle in order to legitimatize her position as Queen from the perspective of neoliberals, advocates of democracy, the international community as well as supporters of development and aid agencies. I argue that spectacle is not only essential to the success of Queen Rania’s campaigns but in extension may actually constitute a means through which monarchy guarantees its survival and sovereignty in a 21st century neoliberal world. To garner global and regional support for her humanitarian initiatives, her performances suggest a fusion between two seemingly very desperate ideologies – monarchy and democracy, nationalism and globalism – embodied in the monarchal subject herself. The role of spectacle in this context is one that greatly lacks an explanation within the logics of monarchy, nationalism, neoliberalism and it is therefore, the core focus of this paper.

Over the last ten years, despite the explosion in the use of the internet as a global sounding board and means of mass communication and dissemination of information that connects and informs individuals world wide, less attention has been paid to the internet as a valid source in scholarly circles. This paper hopes to fill this gap by looking at selective samples of internet websites and chat rooms found in English that voice Muslim perceptions and interpretations of Islamic jihad and da'wa from a more popular political perspective post 9/11. These perceptions and interpretations will be summarized for the audience and. Not only the quantity of websites but also the quality of selective samples of short discussions found on these websites seem to reflect two trends. First, there is an explosive growing desire among Muslims or users of these websites to definitively understand what Islamic jihad and da'wa (and the relationship between the two) mean for Muslims in the twenty-first century as a consequence of and in spite of jihadist terrorist activity. And secondly, in addition to traditional interpretations of these terms through reference to the Qur'an, Sunna of the Prophet Muhammad, and hadith found on some of these websites, Muslims living in diaspora communities are getting answers to questions of interpretation that appear more grounded or intellectually satisfying than answers they would receive from traditional Sheiks, whether these perceptions/interpretations of jihad and da'wa are serious or humorous. This researcher concludes, therefore, that the accessibility and the “chat” nature of the internet—as the medium for the call to Islam or simple clarification and reinterpretation of Islamic jihad and da'wa for Muslims and non-Muslims alike-- is as important as the content itself.

In the 2011 Egyptian revolt against President Hosni Mubarak, mass media quickly assumed huge importance to people both inside and outside Egypt — not only as a means of direct communication, but as a means of articulating political stances and forging alliances as well. This frequently happened through the medium of television, not least because the internet grid was shut down for much of the first week of the protests. Lacking any other mass-media platform, Egyptians often used appearances on television (either planned interviews or chance encounters with roaming television reporters) to declare their political sentiments. Among the millions of Egyptians articulating their own understanding of the changing political realities were a number of high-profile figures in popular mass media, especially cinema and pop music. These figures, who were previously accustomed to offering only anodyne political statements (if they said anything at all on the subject), found themselves under close scrutiny as they aligned themselves with either the protesters or the regime. The support that many actors and singers voiced for the regime, as well as the general paucity of celebrities who spoke out in favor of the protesters, triggered immediate reprobation from fans and media watchers in both public and private. Much of the popular reaction to these statements focused on unmet expectations: fans had expected certain actors and singers to side with the protesters, based on specific elements of their careers and public profiles. This paper, based on both ethnographic data from Cairo during the revolt and subsequent media analysis, will focus on the content of both statements and responses, in an effort to analyze what calculations people made about each figure’s political leanings, and what those figures themselves hoped to achieve by speaking out. In addition, this paper will pose some anthropological questions about how people’s statements for or against the regime will affect scholarly analysis of prominent media figures who have cultivated politicized public images, especially the actors Adel Imam and Amr Waked and the singers Mohamed Mounir and Tamer Hosny.

This paper analyzes the al-Jazeera Arabic channel’s use of montages (i.e., discrete series of images and short video sequences set to music) as narrative objects that were deployed to create visual and aural narratives for transnational political action over the course of the recent revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt. Building on Bourdieu’s theory of language and symbolic power, this paper will argue that al-Jazeera’s juxtaposition of montages from the Tunisian revolution with similarly structured montages of the Egyptian revolution before the resignation of Mubarak created powerful suggestions of transnational parallels between Tunisia and Egypt. It is for this reason that the title of this paper interrogates whether we must treat these events as separate instances or, rather, as manifestations of one broader political movement. What are the narratives of transnational solidarity, in the post-Arab nationalist age, that emerge from these media images? These montages invariably concluded with the al-Jazeera icon accompanied by its “continuous coverage” slogan (al-taghtiya al-mustamira) and thus underscore the channel’s self-aware proclamation of its role, first, in selecting and deploying the iconic images of these events as they took place and, second, in broadcasting - and thus participating in - the revolution(s) across the world. This paper will conclude by investigating this dimension of the al-Jazeera channel, providing a brief history of the channel’s formation and its relationship to the Qatari state, and attempt to push beyond the channel’s celebratory rhetoric to interrogate the complex implications of this uniquely transnational media network’s relationship to traditional state politics in the region.