Comic books “serve actually as a release for collective aggression. The magazines are put together by white men for little white men,” wrote the philosopher Frantz Fanon of European comics consumed in the colonies (Black Skin, White Masks, 1967). Since the mid-twentieth century, Middle East comic artists have taken on a similar role by composing graphic narratives for local audiences. Drawing upon Fanon’s analysis of the “native intellectual” in the post-colonial period, this paper will argue that independent Egyptian illustrators turned to nationalist causes in the 1960s as a continuation of liberation movements. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that Arabic children’s comics were popular during the 1952 Free Officers’ Revolt in Egypt: children’s publications were an excellent teaching aid for patriarchal ideas, Arab traditions and local culture. All periodicals were nationalized during the 1967 war with Israel, and children’s publications worked for the pan-Arab cause; in 1968 issues of the locally produced Arabic “Miki” (Mouse, the Disney character) magazine, top cartoonists such as Bahgat Osman ran politically charged strips beside translated stories of Disney favorites. Such graphic narratives provide case studies of illustrated propaganda. Today, as Egypt faces a litany of internal and external conflicts, some of the same magazines produce flattering spreads about President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi alongside tributes to the war heroes and state-approved histories of the January 2011 revolution. Through archival research and interviews with artist and publishers, this paper will consider the continuity between 1960s children’s comics and contemporary examples. It will conclude by showing how pro-government children’s comics of the post-2013 period represent counterrevolutionary forces, which is why so few independent cartoonists have joined the staffs of such publications. It will be the first paper to closely read editions of the children’s magazine “Samir” from the 2014 president election and examine how its comics and features construct nationalist narratives for little Egyptian men.

In 1970, Sultan Qaboos bin Sa’id al-Sa’id took power in poverty-ridden Oman and began a rapid development program that radically transformed every Omani’s life. The historical details of the nahda, or “renaissance,” as it is referred to in Oman, are well-documented and analyzed in secondary sources. This paper, however, seeks not to understand the empirical reality of what occurred, but rather how Omani youth today understand their history and how this influences their attitude toward the future of their country in uncertain times. The conclusions of this study are based on twenty in-person interviews with young Omanis living in Muscat. Existing literature focusing specifically on Omani youth perceptions of this period is extremely sparse, despite it being, arguably, the foundation of national identity for a country with a youth-majority population. Moreover, writing on the Omani nahda has emphasized exactly those elements about which many Omanis are ignorant or apathetic: the details of the coup, military operations, the structure of the state, et cetera. Considerations of the future in a region beset by sectarian violence as their sultan dies and their oil supply dwindles take priority over historical details for Omanis, and scholarship would ideally reflect that reality. Young Omanis’ conception of the nahda has certainly been shaped by nationalistic government rhetoric which valorizes Qaboos individually, aided by restrictions on information and social taboos around political discussion. However, this paper will resist the assumption that young people in Oman are conditioned to center their national identity entirely on one person. On the contrary, the internationally-oriented and opinionated Muscati youth I interviewed synthesize information from their social milieu to reach the nuanced conclusion that Qaboos is simply an exceptional case in a long history of legitimate and respected rulers of the Omani people. Beyond their history classes and royal speeches, they draw on familial memory, WhatsApp, European libraries and foreign classmates to find what matters to them about their nation. Often, their interest eventually lies less in Qaboos himself and his creation of Oman than in how he represents a people that ostensibly preceded him by many thousands of years. By allowing the definition of “Omani” to be distinct from one individual, Omanis consider his nearing death with the cautious confidence of a patriotic, yet critically thinking populace.

Cultural expressions such as art and music were central elements of the Arab spring. One of the most interesting and least noted of these expressions is independent adult comics. Having emerged as a phenomenon shortly before the uprisings – and enduring in the bleak post-revolutionary atmosphere today – they express a defiant, confrontational sense of youthfulness that was at the core of the revolutionary spirit. Today, independent adult comics are found from Morocco in the West to Iraq in the East. This paper investigates how these comics ‘reclaim youthfulness’ in a hostile environment characterized by the resurgence of the authoritarian, patriarchal state. The sarcasm and irony in adult comics as well as their graphic and textual playfulness put them at loggerheads with a political and social order that demands submission and obedience. What is striking today is that independent comics from Morocco to Iraq share these characteristics, as festivals, workshops and social media facilitate contact and mutual inspiration between writers and artists. I argue that the geographic dispersion of this phenomenon and the solidarity between comics creators from all parts of the Arab world show that we are dealing with a pan-Arab phenomenon: a youthful claim to be heard and recognized that persists despite the political crackdowns in a number of countries after 2011. The last part of the presentation discusses how the new adult comics relate to Asef Bayat’s concept of ‘social nonmovements’ that express the grievances and aspirations of the youthful, urban subaltern. The paper relies on textual and semiotic analysis of comics from Lebanon, Egypt and Morocco, and I present a number of detailed illustrations. I focus on three independent comic magazines that published between six and sixteen issues since 2007 and still exist: The Lebanese Samandal, the Egyptian Tuk-Tuk and the Moroccan Skefkef. In addition to the textual analysis of these comics I draw on interviews with comics creators as well as field work in Egypt and Lebanon from 2012-2017.

This presentation will be based on my dissertation project titled “Crafting the Self in the Shadow of the Turkish State: The Formation of Yurtsever Subjecthood in the 1990s,” which analyzes the building of the Kurdish youth movement in the 1990s. The revolutionary Kurdish youth movement in the 1990s called themselves yurtsever. Yurtsever literally means patriot, but it has a larger connotation that blends identification as a supporter of the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) with a revolutionary sense of the self. Yurtsever identity crystallized in the 1990s, when a new form of colonial relation was constituted in Turkey’s Kurdish areas. While Kurdish subjects appeared as a threat to be eliminated for national security and the continuity of state power, the PKK called on them for political resistance to reclaim control over their lives. A new form of subjectivity emerged in the 1990s, and Kurdish youth, alongside Kurdish women, have been one of the main carriers of this subjectivity. Yurtsever subjectivity was a reclaim of dignity, a sense of belonging, and a mobilization for recognition in the ethnicised and militarized space of the Turkish state. For my project, I conducted field work in Diyarbakir between January 2015 and January 2016, which combined in depth and semi-structured interviews, archival research, as well as auto-ethnography. I examined the formation of revolutionary subjects in Ziya Gökalp High School, a preeminent state school that turned out to be one of the main centers of yurtsever youth mobilization during the 1990s. This presentation specifically deals with three important findings of my field research: 1) In the youth mobilization of the 1990s there was no a priori political subjects who participated in a political activity as a result of their rational decisions. Yurtsever subject was formed as a process of political transformation in a historically specific moment. 2) For the yurtsever youth, to be a revolutionary was a craft work and they were organized with the idea of self-making for the revolution. 3) Friendship played a crucial role in the formation of the yurtsever subject as being a ground of self-making and as a tie for solidarity against the physical and symbolic violence of the Turkish state. My work approaches the formation of revolutionary subjects in the Kurdish youth movement as a process of the political, the creation of a new space for those who have been previously excluded Ranciere (2001), and proposes friendship as a political concept.

This paper draws on three years of ethnographic research among groups of low-income men and women in the downtown areas (pa'in-e shahr) of Tehran and the province of Mazandaran to examine how social status is constituted among these youth. In showing how the youth in this study maneuver between being young and poor within Iran’s current economic climate, I argue that these young people accumulate status gains that are strategically manageable and valuable for them, and that enable them to improve their life chances within structural conditions of economic hardship. In examining the strategies that these youth employ to gain subjectively meaningful shifts in status, this study questions traditional definitions of status that privilege occupational prestige at the expense of looking at the short-distance status shifts that arise as a result of gains made in the informal labor market, in one's social networks and in one’s cultural capital. Indeed, a focus on these marginal, but subjectively meaningful socioeconomic "wins" in the pa'in-e shahr areas of Iran provides a more discriminating analysis of youth poverty and mobility in the Islamic Republic that takes into account the multitude of micro-movements that some youth make in their everyday lives and that are perceived and experienced as deeply important by both the youth and their communities. Thus, what analysts often construe as the seeming persistence of socioeconomic exclusion among the poor in Iran may in fact be rationalized by the poor themselves as a slow and grinding, but upward march so long as they achieve outcomes that are valuable to them and that yield relative gratification.