There has been a good deal of recent interest in the outdoor written landscape of Lebanon. Studies on civil war posters (Maasri 2009), graffiti (Saleh 2009), and political and commercial advertisements (Chemaly 2009, Schmitt 2009) have proliferated in conjunction with a growing number of well informed blogs by graphic designers and artists interested in the shifting word-writ-large on outdoor surfaces in the country. While this trend indicates a broader analytic interest in the study of semiotics, it seems to also connote the fact that, in a country with more newspapers than any other in the Arab region (Rugh 2004) and a historically high literacy rate, there is a salience to the written word that ranges from the private domain out to the public landscape. Literacy activities, such as outdoor sign production and their resulting artifacts, such as billboard ads and graffiti, take the local activity of inscription into the public realm. This aspect of mediation requires attention to the notion of the public sphere in which disembodied language can be viewed as a means for political legitimization (Gal and Woolard 2001). In this paper, I take a diachronic and ethnographic look at the political rhetoric of the Lebanese political leader, General Michel Aoun, and his evolving party, the Free Patriotic Movement (FPM). Specifically, I will focus on graffiti of the FPM in 2005 and discuss its resonances with the earlier political rhetoric of Aoun during the civil war and his Paris exile, at a time when he was in a conflictual relationship with the state. In addition, I will also look at his later ad campaigns from 2008-2009 to see how some semiotic elements have been extended from this earlier time into the more recently professionally polished party image and eventual reincorporation with the state. Through the examination of linguistic strategies, such as the use of reported speech and digraphia, I argue that these textual artifacts contain the residue of contested ideologies of modernization, nationhood, and belonging. Language then, provides a medium through which political identity is formed, shaped and revised in the face of conflict

Since the 2010–2011 Tunisian revolution triggered protests across the Middle East and North Africa, parody accounts focusing on the Arab world have proliferated on Twitter. Drawing on shared cultural and linguistic knowledge, creators of these accounts animate fictitious public speech of Arab (and sometimes Western) leaders as a form of political satire and critique. This paper focuses on one exemplary account, @SheikhKhalifaPM, parodying the Prime Minister of Bahrain, Khalifa bin Salman Al Khalifa. Despite the 2011 suppression of physical protests in Bahrain, a robust contestation of institutionalized power structures has continued online; this particular account is highly active and participates in multiple linguistic environments. Drawing on texts in Arabic and English, I examine the participation framework this account inhabits and the production format it navigates; in this context I track its interactions with other Bahrain-focused accounts, international parody accounts, journalists, activists, and politicians, as well as an assortment of personal accounts. Through this analysis, I develop an approach to parodic genres specific to Twitter and the larger environment of the internet, showing 1. How the account employs different forms of recontextualization to challenge institutional power; and 2. How affordances of this social media platform—including ease of machine translation, design of retweets, conjunction with visual media, and what Androutsopoulos has recently termed “emergent heteroglossia”—influence participants’ perceptions of relation and meaning.

Under now-besieged President Bashar al-Asad, Syria’s closed and isolated economy took a neoliberal turn, opening to global markets, permitting private investment and creating professional, managerial positions for ambitious young Syrians. At the same time, regime reduced subsidies and prices for basic commodities soared. The economic changes reverberated in Syrian society as well; well-positioned and well-educated urban Syrians earned larger salaries in new private sector positions while most other Syrians found life increasingly difficult and expensive. Privileged Syrians also joined newly permitted civic associations dedicated to volunteerism and entrepreneurship. In these new neoliberal positions of wealth and prestige, elite Syrians coalesced as a discrete social group and defined themselves against the majority of Syrian society. Elite Syrians increasingly relied on a serious of linguistic and discursive practices to erect social boundaries and provide moral justification for the exclusion of non-elite Syrians. In particular, elite Syrians used English terminology and phrases to indicate their elite status and their capacity for adapting to Syria’s new economic reality. This created new kinds of socio-economic class stratification as Syrians who could perform these linguistic practices moved into increasingly elite circles and Syrians who could not were considered morally deficient and unwilling to adapt to the new economy. Based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Damascus, Syria from 2007 until 2009, this presentation will explore the specific linguistic and discursive strategies used by elite Syrians to engender class stratification and to exacerbate class conflict. It will argue that economic and linguistic disadvantages work together to further alienate Syrians of different socio-economic statuses.

In the decades before 2011, public circulation of written texts was a political act, but not just because of the supportive or subversive content. The form of writing itself was a graphic inscription of contentious ideologies about authority, morality, and modernity (Mitchell 1988, Flagg 2004). Moroccan state language policy from the 1950s onward empowered the historical ideologies that writing was reserved for standardized language forms, Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) or French, both to facilitate literacy as well as embody and disseminate a rational orientation. Writing a news article, sign, law, public speech or textbook for the widest possible viewership privileged MSA, since that was the language variety the state imbued with public authority, visibility, and identity. The act of writing Arabic in these publicly approved forms framed oneself as aligning with a standard language ideology and the meanings associated with it, despite the persistent presence of written genres, such as plays, pamphlets, proverb collections, amulets, internet chats, mobile phone texts, advertising signs and short dialect dialogues within novels in which Moroccan writers employed a mix of local varieties (MSA, regional Arabics, and Tamazight varieties) with a variety of orthographies (Kapchan 1996, Aguadé 2006). To write in Morocco was to graphically represent bundled associations with literacy, progress, rationality, public institutions, as well as the complicated tensions between European and Muslim identity aesthetics. In the early 2000s, several groups began publishing periodicals and adult literacy pamphlets using Moroccan Arabics in a modified MSA script (collectively known as darija) with the explicit aim of challenging the centripetal force of state language policies. Some furthered state goals but in the contested form of written darija while others employed darija to challenge state policies. In this presentation, I explore how these actors contributed to the contentious reform politics of this decade by clothing Moroccan Arabics with overt and indirect resistance pressure through the moral authority of script. In particular, I focus on the language and media ideologies espoused by periodical writers that promoted state projects such as adult literacy (khabar bladna) and contested officials behaviors and actions (nishan) using written Moroccan Arabic.