This panel examines the spatial dimensions in the politics of representation in the context of the "Arab Spring." It considers physical, discursive, and imagined spaces that have emerged since the uprisings began in 2011.
Looking at news media and popular culture, the authors investigate how different narratives of political and social change are mediated: In news, in dance, in song. But also how these narratives emerge in particular places, how they travel, and how they open up new spaces of expression.
While the first two papers focus on the discursive construction of imagined common spaces in the service of political narratives, the other two consider the role of music performances in forging alternative physical spaces for contentious political expression.
The first paper examines the spatial and temporal tensions that led to the diffusion of the "Arab Spring" narrative across Arab media in the beginning of 2011. It explores how significant differences between Arab countries were collapsed into a single journalistic narrative of the "Arab Spring Revolutions." The author questions how this spatial flattening contributed to the 'domino effect' aspect of the uprisings.
The second paper also examines media representations of the Arab uprisings, this time focusing on the American news media's use of the spatial narratives of the "Arab Spring" in their coverage of the Occupy movement in the U.S. The author explores, in particular, how "Tahrir Square" became a potent frame of reference in the discourse around the Occupy movement in 2011.
The third paper examines the circulation of Amazighi language songs about the Libyan revolution as they moved from Belgrade, to refugee camps in Tunisia, and into Western parts of Libya during the 2011 uprising. Exploring the spatial dynamics of music performance as affective transmitters, the author sheds light on the non-commercialized and often illicit movement of recorded music in the context of widespread protest and revolution.
The final paper considers the radical possibility of the Arab hip hop music scene. It focuses on its role in opening up a politically charged but anti-sectarian space in Beirut since the beginning of the Arab uprisings in the early 2011. The author explores what is politically engaging and electric about these performances while also examining the physical construction of this leisure space in Beirut through readings of performance venues.
Together, these papers explore how different media construct physical and discursive spaces that either reinforce or subvert hegemonic political narratives.
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Ms. Sara Mourad
On July 13, 2011, visitors of the Adbusters magazine website were greeted with the #OCCUPYWALLSTREET Twitter hash tag and a message that read: “Are you ready for a Tahrir moment?” This was a public call to flood into Manhattan’s financial district on September 17, setting up tents, kitchens, and barricades. As the editors of the anti-consumerist magazine who launched the movement put it, this was a “Tahrir moment on Wall Street."
This paper examines how "Tahrir Square" became a potent frame of reference in both media and activist discourses around the Occupy movement in the U.S. It does so through a discourse analysis of approximately 40 news articles from the American mainstream press collected between the months of October and November of 2011.
Findings suggest that the media used two recurrent discursive frames, what I refer to as “This is Tahrir” and “This is not Tahrir,” to make sense of the Occupy movement. I begin with a close examination of these frames and then discuss how they helped challenge two predominant tropes in understandings and representations of modern social movements: Historicism and Eurocentrism.
In both frames, there is an attempt to compare the Occupy movement to the Arab Spring – measuring it against what took place in Cairo’s largest public square. I argue that this was a rhetorical tool -used by opponents and proponents of the Occupy- to evaluate its authenticity, legitimacy, and significance.
Ultimately, the use of “Tahrir” as a spatial frame may signal two crucial points: First, a shift in the assumed directionality of political change and development, from the West to the rest, which reframes the Arab world as a locus of political agency. Second, the emergence of “Tahrir” as a metonymy not only for the Egyptian revolution, but for the Arab uprisings in general. The paper concludes by examining the implications of both these shifts and a reflection on whether, two years on, they still hold.
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This paper explores movement, affect, and the space-shaping potentialities of the sonic through the work and reception of Dania Ben Sassi, a singer who became famous in Libya in 2011 after she recorded a series of songs in Tamazight (an indigenous language violently repressed during the Gaddafi era) dedicated to the February Revolution. Ben Sassi, who was not a professional singer prior to the revolution, recorded her first song in her hometown of Belgrade, Serbia. Her father, a Libyan political exile, carried that recording to Libyan refugee camps in Djerba, Tunisia, where it quickly gained popularity. The song soon traveled into the western part of Libya, at that time still under Gaddafi control, and circulated among Imazighen (Berbers) participating in the fight to overthrow the government.
Through an examination of Ben Sassi’s music and it’s spread, this paper employs the concept of choreography to talk about movement of two sorts: the dual, multi-directional movement of Libyan refugees and diasporic “returners,” and the non-commercialized and often illicit movement of recorded music, both in the context of widespread protest, civil war, and revolution. In so doing, it explores power via shifting dynamics around contested identities, choreography’s dialogic relationship to improvisation, frameworks of collaboration, and the choreographic function of constructing meaning through reference. It considers the way that the discursive practices of overlapping nationalisms shape physical and imagined spaces in North Africa and in diaspora. It engages with scholarship on kinesthesia by attending to music performances, which I argue operated as affective transmitters throughout the revolution, linking individual experiences of altered possibility to the shared.
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Dr. Omar Al-Ghazzi
This paper examines the spatial and temporal tensions that led to the diffusion of the “Arab Spring” narrative across Arab countries in the beginning of the year 2011. It focuses on the significance of anti-colonial metaphors and on the centrality of the political agency of the “new Arab generation” in news media discourse. Through conducting a textual analysis of more than 50 Arab press articles and opinion pieces, published between 15 January and 15 April 2011, the paper interrogates the ways that news media enabled actors in different Arab spaces and contexts to construct, have access to, and claim a single Arab memory narrative.
My paper contends that in their coverage of the Arab uprisings of 2011, Arab media, despite their diverse political leanings, constructed a coherent collective Arab memory of anti-colonial struggle and solidified imaginations of common Arab generations. These temporal imaginations about the past struggles of an age cohort served as the main pillars of the “Arab Spring” narrative – made accessible to the youths of countries as diverse as Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, and Syria. This broad and simplistic narrative strengthened the link between the different uprisings and contributed to shaping their outcomes across spaces. The paper argues that the way Arab media focused on nostalgic depictions of the region’s anti-colonial history and constructed a new generational identity contributed to shaping popular understandings of the protests and their outcomes. The core of the paper’s argument is that the significant differences between Arab countries’ histories and current political systems and contexts were collapsed into a single journalistic narrative of the “Arab Spring Revolution,” which focused on anti-colonial symbolism and the idea of a “new Arab generation” and that this temporal and spatial flattening contributed to the ‘domino effect’ aspect of the uprisings across several countries in a remarkably short period of time.
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Rayya El Zein
This paper investigates the burgeoning scene of Arabic hip hop as political art in Beirut since roughly 2011. I situate the growth of this artistic expression within that city’s recent history as a “host” cosmopolitan space, home to various demographic flows and stasis and read the growing political enthusiasm around and within the subculture of hip hop materially within specific venues and spaces in Hamra, Ashrafieh, Bourj el Hammoud, and downtown Beirut. In so doing, I articulate an analysis of hip hop culture that is significantly rooted in the spatial dynamics and embodied affect of consuming live performances, a factor often overlooked in linguistic readings of rap lyrics or visual readings of tagging (graffiti) culture. In approaching performances of rap in Arabic in these venues, I also consider the choreography between MCs – often arranged as international and/or interdiasporic artistic collaborations between two or more artists – and their audiences. This look at movement and choreography of the live event is significantly distinct from the examination occasionally included in hip hop studies that looks at “break dancing” –often assumed to be the most significant embodied aspect of hip hop culture.
My spatial, embodied, but most of all, material readings of recent hip hop in Beirut significantly diverge from much Anglophone literature on hip hop culture in the “developing world” or of popular culture in the Arab world in that I do not consider these performances to make up a uniform wave of resistant creative expression in Beirut and its environs. While I do argue that the significant growth of energy and enthusiasm around hip hop in Beirut in the past few years constitutes the veritable explosion of a new politico-aesthetic subculture, I use these material readings to argue that the new trend opens up the space for diversion, dissension, disagreement, and debate.
