Tag: Conference

This paper turns to the Egyptian television series, Awalem Khafeya (“Hidden Worlds”), for the way that it retraces, reperforms, and recodes moments of state anxiety. It focuses on the show’s adaptation of a real concert by Lebanese band, Mashrou Leila, in Egypt in September of 2018, where a crackdown ensued after several people were arrested after images of concertgoers raising the rainbow flag in solidarity with the band’s openly queer lead singer spread online. It examines the way that the show portrays an anxiety and suspicion, but also fascination with new media. It compares this musalsal, or Arabic-language television drama, with the performances of the Hell House, or the evangelical church's alternative to the secular Haunted House, which similarly acts out scenes of “sin” to lead audiences to salvation. Each may be thought of as melodramas of invisible coercion, depicting a desire to render coercion visible. This paper considers the way that suspicion operates in secular state-building, naturalizing state practices but also betraying a pleasure in mimetic performances. It considers the implications for this kind of programming in the Egyptian and Saudi Arabian contexts, where the musalsal aired.

Heather Jaber is a doctoral candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania where she is also a doctoral fellow at the Center for Advanced Research for Global Communications (CARGC). She also holds an M.A. in media studies from the American University of Beirut (AUB). As a doctoral candidate, she analyzes moral panics in the Arab world, focusing on the role of particular emotions and affects in the study of geopolitics and popular culture. She draws on religious studies and theories of affect to understand the economies of pleasure and shame which power practices of exposure. She is interested in practices of exposure and the way that spectators are pulled into national spectacles which channel, amplify, and transform publicly felt emotions and affects. She has published work in Critical Studies in Media Communication, The International Journal of Communication (IJoC), and Kohl: A Journal for Body and Gender Research.

Following the influence of a team of producer-DJs based in the West Bank city of Ramallah, in this paper, I trace the emergence of new sounds, lyrical styles, collaborations, and technological innovation in Palestinian trap music. At a remove from, but clearly borrowing from both hip hop and electronic dance music, trap promises different affective models for being with others. My own research on trap in Palestine intervenes in conversations about Arab media, music and technology, cosmopolitan affect, liberatory concert culture, and subcultural aesthetics.

This essay looks to the role of auto-tune in the production of different vocal textures in trap in Ramallah. In this reading, I am guided by the double meaning in Arabic of sot as both voice and sound. My analysis challenges conventional readings of agency as voice, using notions of delay, reverb, and tracking to offer alternative readings of subjectivity as modeled in recent recordings. I also consider the recent visual production offered by the BLTM record label in collaboration with Burberry; the role of Boiler Room in Palestine; and the overlap with other music and visual art production to consider the intraregional reverberations of the “sound” of Ramallah as a way of gesturing towards the growth and future development of the genre.

*“Sot Ramallah” is the title of Palestinian rapper, DJ, and musician Haykal’s final track on his debut EP Kasser El Ard (2019).

Dr. Rayya El Zein is a cultural ethnographer and scholar of performance and media in the Middle East and diasporas. Her multi-sited research focuses on the embodied aesthetics of live performances and activist practices, while exploring the cultural politics of contemporary media debates. Her interdisciplinary work rethinks representations of Arab and Muslim youth and proposes different models of subjectivity and agency attuned to lived experiences in the contemporary Middle East.

For the last decade, Iranian tv and cinema has been filled with themes of infiltration, espionage, terrorism, corruption and the complex and sophisticated ways that Iranian intelligence services disrupt these nefarious plots against Iran. While a direct connection between such cultural productions and security and intelligence services is not always explicitly revealed, it is clear that these shows are presenting arguments specifically in favor of state security apparatuses.  Two television serials--the popular Gondo, which began broadcasting in June 2019, and Khane Amn (Safe House) which wrapped up its first season in fall 2020-- provide clear examples of how Iranian popular entertainment has become a central site for providing “national security” justifications for domestic and international policies. Directed at a domestic Iranian audience, this programming constructs a very particular relationship between the audience members as unsuspecting civilians unaware of the constant plots that threaten them and the intelligence services as protectors who valiantly and thanklessly keep Iranian civilians safe.

Dr. Niki Akhavan is an assistant professor of media studies at the Catholic University of America. Her research interests include new media and transnational political and cultural production; international cinema and national identity; state sponsored and oppositional propaganda; documentary and social change; post-colonial and critical theory; Iranian cultural studies. She is the author of Electronic Iran: The Cultural Politics of an Online Evolution (Rutgers, 2013).

Driven by an ambitious geopolitical agenda, the AKP seeks to promote Turkey in a positive light, especially among Global South audiences and Muslim diaspora in the West. To this end, it uses a number of global communication initiatives. Among them is TRT World, Turkey’s first 24/7 English language news channel. TRT World’s editorial line is associated with the empowerment of non-Western voices and presentation of alternative perspectives to “hegemonic” news organizations. The channel claims to bring a “humanitarian perspective” to international news by foregrounding the voices and stories of “underreported and underprivileged others.”

One such story is that of Muslim suffering. In documentaries, online news videos and philanthropic campaigns, TRT World tackles topics such as Islamophobia in Europe, the refugee crisis, Gaza blockade, Srebrenica massacre and other “injustices” inflicted upon Muslims. Though seemingly commendable, these texts reduce complex socio-political phenomena to questions of good vs. bad, moral vs. immoral, and hide the AKP’s geopolitical agenda behind a so-called postcolonial critique of the West.

Turkey’s ruling AKP government and its leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan have successfully deployed socio-cultural and religious binaries in domestic politics for the past 19 years. More recently, they have begun to re-tool these binaries (victim vs. perpetrator, good vs. evil, justice vs. injustice) on the international plane to ignite awareness of Muslim suffering and leverage Turkey as the benevolent leader of ummah. It is no coincidence that the instrumentalization of Muslim identity politics is occurring at a time when Turkey, under the leadership of Erdogan, is challenging the West and making claims to great power status.

Dr. Bilge Yesil is an Associate Professor of Media Culture at the College of Staten Island, and Faculty of Middle Eastern Studies at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her research interest is in global media and communication with a particular focus on Turkey and the Middle East; global internet policies, online surveillance and censorship. She is the author of Video Surveillance: Power and Privacy in Everyday Life and Media in New Turkey: The Origins of an Authoritarian Neoliberal State. She is also a co-editor of the forthcoming Handbook of Media and Culture in the Middle East.

The emergence of Islamic television in the Arab Middle East is usually explained as part of a Saudi media empire fueled by neoliberal petro-dollars. This article, by contrast, takes seriously the role ideas played along-side changing political economies in the origins of the world’s first Islamic television channel, Iqraa. Focusing on the intellectual and institutional career of “Islamic media” (al-i’lām al-Islāmī) as a category from the late sixties onwards in Egypt, I argue that Islamic television is part of a broader decolonization struggle involving the modern discipline of mass communication. Pioneering Arab communication scholars mounted a quest for epistemic emancipation in which the question of how to mediate Islam became inextricable from the question of what made media Islamic. Drawing on historical and ethnographic research, I show how the idea of Islamic media involved a radical reconceptualization of the Qur’an as mass communication from God and of Islam as a mediatic religion. This positing of an intimate affinity between Islam and media provoked secular skepticism and religious criticism that continue to this day. I conclude by reflecting on how the intellectual history of Islamic media challenges dominant framings of epistemological decolonization as a question of interrogating oppressive universalisms in favor of liberatory pluralisms.

Dr. Yasmin Moll is an anthropologist of religion and media with a focus on the Middle East. Her upcoming book explores Islamic television channels in the revolutionary Egypt of the 2011 uprising. Her recent journal articles have focused on subtitling on Islamic television as a form of critique (Public Culture), on what debates over new forms of Islamic media reveal about shifting theological evaluations of the religious and the secular (Cultural Anthropology), and on how the conceptual history of Islamic media provincializes Euro-American decolonizing projects (International Journal of Middle East Studies). Her research and writing has been supported by numerous grants and fellowships, including from the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Fulbright Commission, the Henry Luce Foundation and the American Council on Learned Societies. 

What political future can be glimpsed in the media productions of the “Islamic State.”? A systematic textual and semiotic analysis of IS’s videos, books, pamphlets, and
infographics, particularly Dabiq, Rumiyah, and An-Naba’, reveals that fire is one of the most prevalent symbolic trope in the profusion of IS imagery and literature. In this paper I ask: Why is fire central to IS vision of itself and its enemies? How does IS deploy fire symbolism in its meaning-making practices? What kind of politics does the extensive deployment of fire augur for the Arab world and beyond?

Though fire is a ubiquitous motif in IS speeches, chants, sermons, videos and publications, in this paper I draw on my analysis of six primary texts: four video (Flames of War, What Are You Waiting For?, Healing the Chests of the Believers,)
and three textual sources (the inaugural issue of Dabiq, an article, in the 7th issue of Dabiq titled “The Burning of the Murtadd Pilot,” about the immolation of Kasasbeh, and an article in Rumiyyah, Dabiq’s successor, titled “The Flames of
Justice,” which discusses the merits of using fire to punish unbelievers.

I conclude that fire fuses life and death, belief with battlefield, primal stirrings and advanced gadgetry, and thus helps Islamic State forge a dualistic identity: a celebrated self, pitted against a reviled other that must be incinerated. In this, I argue, IS is a harbinger of what the philosopher Michael Marder calls the age of pyropolitics (politics of fire), which constitutes a chaotic and destructive reversal of enlightenment and modern values from the nation-state to notions of progress and justice, auguring a scorched earth politics of extreme identities locked in a life-or-death battle.

Dr. Marwan M. Kraidy is Dean and CEO of Northwestern University in Qatar, the Anthony Shadid Chair in Global Media, Politics and Culture at Northwestern, and Contributing Editor at Current History. Previously he was the Founding Director of the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication, Annenberg School, University of Pennsylvania, where he was also Anthony Shadid Chair and Associate Dean for Administration. His major works are Hybridity, or the Cultural Logic of Globalization (Temple, 2005), Reality Television and Arab Politics: Contention in Public Life (Cambridge, 2010), and The Naked Blogger of Cairo: Creative Insurgency in the Arab World (Harvard, 2016), which received four major prizes. He has received Guggenheim, NEH and ACLS fellowships. This project was funded by a 2016 Andrew Carnegie Fellowship from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. He tweets @MKraidy

This article historically traces some of Egypt’s early private radio stations, which operated from the late-1920s until May 1934 when they were all forcefully shutdown by the Egyptian government. It Sheds more light on this important early period in Egyptian media history and highlights the role of many unacknowledged early radio pioneers. More importantly, the article analyzes the early forced transition to government-controlled radio, and the impact this sudden shift must have had on the owners, producers and listeners of these stations, as well as the broader implications on Egypt’s media landscape. This top-down forced transition from media-capitalism to what I call media-etatism, started with radio in the 1930s, and later on under Nasser, expanded to print and other media, exemplifying state control of media in Egypt for at least an entire generation.

Dr. Ziad Fahmy is a Professor of Modern Middle East History at Cornell University’s department of Near Eastern Studies. Professor Fahmy is the author of Street Sounds: Listening to Everyday Life in Modern Egypt (Stanford University Press, 2020), and Ordinary Egyptians: Creating the Modern Nation through Popular Culture (Stanford University Press, 2011). He is currently writing his third book, tentatively titled, Broadcasting Identity: Radio and the Making of Modern Egypt, 1925-1952. His articles have appeared in Comparative Studies in Society and History, the International Journal of Middle East Studies, History Compass, and in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. His research has been ‎supported by the Fulbright-Hays Commission, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Research Center in Egypt.

Most scholarship of filmmaking in the Arab world follows a national cinema approach.  Yet a significant amount of the movies produced in the region are international projects, their arrival sometimes motivated by the need for particular, narratively-determined backdrops, and frequently in order to take advantage of various competitive labour, infrastructure or tax affordances, as well as ease of transit and local logistical expertise.  

Offshored Bollywood, Chinese and Hollywood projects (such as Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Independence Day: Resurgence) are now regularly, if partially, routed through the United Arab Emirates, a country with no appreciable national industry of its own, and often without regular viewers even noticing.  Film portions shot here avail themselves of the country’s robust logistics industry and accommodating contract-based migrant labour legislation.  

To meet the needs of such productions, a specially crafted worker subjectivity adapted to transnationalized conventions and languages of filmmaking becomes crucial to lubricate seamless flows between geographically and culturally atomized sites.  In so many ways, the glue that binds a big budget movie derives from standardized modes of practice and means of comportment, which commence with how film professionals are trained.  The UAE hopes to prepare larger numbers of these sorts of creative workers and, to aid this mission, has welcomed branch campuses of multiple foreign universities to its shores, providing substantial financial support for, for example, NYU Abu Dhabi.  The bulk of these universities’ students are migrants, many wishing to stay on after graduation, not as citizens, but as workers on temporary contracts, including those facilitated by these offshored movies.  To what extent does the English-medium liberal arts private university education on offer on such campuses emerge as a complicit cog in the mechanics of cinema’s global supply chain, encouraging conformity to this sector’s needs for hierarchized diversity, entrepreneurship, and flexible uncertainty?

Dr. Kay Dickinson's research is dedicated to thinking through how various media function amid and in resistance to the machinations of transnational global capital. In particular, her recent mongraphs, Arab Cinema Travels: Transnational Syria, Palestine, Dubai and Beyond (British Film Institute Press, 2016) and Arab Film and Video Manifestos (Palgrave, 2018) involve themselves in examples, practices and analytical modes from the Arab world. Her articles on popular, experimental and revolutionary Arab media have appeared in Screen, Camera Obscura, Framework and Cinema Journal, she is the co-editor of two anthologies on these topics and has contributed to two film festivals in the West Bank. Competitive fellowships for this research have taken her to Cornell University, as well as to Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates. In 2019, she was the Distinguished Visiting Professor at MICA (Mudra Institute of Communications) in Ahmedabad, India.  At present, she is working towards a monograph entitled Supply Chain Cinema, Supply Chain Education.  

A constant concern for labour practices, histories and rights inflects Kay’s work. Her first monograph, Off Key: When Film and Music Won’t Work Together (Oxford University Press, 2008), sought to understand the film and music industries’ traditions of production, representation, dissemination and consumption in line with the broader employment landscapes of so-called post-Fordism and the rise of the creative economy culture. Supply Chain Cinema, Supply Chain Education, her current project, focuses on off-shored film production within free zones that is facilitated through the principles of logistics.

Nevertheless, these measures appeared to be insufficient, and in the end, he decided to leave the media sector altogether in the face of multiple tax-related charges and lawsuits that the Ministry of Finance launched. Ownership changes led to further monopolization of the media sector in Turkey and the emergence of the popular term "yandas medya – the government-controlled media,"; while it is estimated that thousands of journalists and reporters lost their jobs in the process. This paper aims to show what mechanisms and tools are employed in creating the AKP-controlled media, which totally changed the media environment in Turkey. The second aim is to show the struggles of the independent media outlets for survival in the face of financial and political pressures from the government and the rising trend of YouTube journalism, trying to penetrate the AKP's control over the mass-media.

In the last two decades, Turkey witnessed a rapid wave of ownership change of its mainstream media groups. The largest three media groups that controlled many television channels and newspapers, Sabah-ATV, Dogan Media, and Cukurova, changed hands. In these transfers, government intervention played a significant role as both media groups were purchased by pro-Justice and Development Party (AKP) businessmen and through credits with very advantageous terms provided by the government-owned banks. Aydin Dogan, the previous owner of the Dogan Media Group, which includes the CNN-affiliated CNN-Turk TV channel in addition to other media outlets, tried to appease the AKP government by introducing censorship and sacking the journalists who took an anti-AKP stance in his media outlets because of the instructions he received from the JDP leadership.

Dr. Nihat Celik is a lecturer School of Public Affairs, San Diego State University. He received his PhD from Kadir Has University in 2015 with a dissertation titled “The Intentions and Capabilities of Turkey as a Regional Power: A Structural Realist Analysis (2002-2014).” He worked as a research assistant at the same university and held a visiting researcher position at Coventry University. His research areas include Turkish foreign policy, diplomatic history of the Ottoman Empire, foreign policy analysis, bureaucracy, and nonprofit organizations. His publications have appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as Turkish Studies, and Geopolitics.

Dr. Adel Iskandar is an Assistant Professor of Global Communication at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver/Burnaby, Canada. He is the author, co-author, and editor of several works including "Egypt In Flux: Essays on an Unfinished Revolution" (AUCP/OUP); "Al-Jazeera: The Story of the Network that is Rattling Governments and Redefining Modern Journalism" (Basic Books); "Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representation" (University of California Press); "Mediating the Arab Uprisings" (Tadween Publishing); and "Media Evolution on the Eve of the Arab Spring" (Palgrave Macmillan). Iskandar's work deals with media, identity and politics; and he has lectured extensively on these topics at universities worldwide. His forthcoming publications are two monographs, one addressing the political role of memes and digital satire and the other about contemporary forms of imperial transculturalism. Iskandar's engaged participatory research includes supporting knowledge production through scholarly digital publishing such as "Jadaliyya" and academic podcasting such as "Status." His community research agenda involves showcasing local grassroots participatory creative production by communities in the Middle East to confront the rise of extremism. Iskandar's work also involves the autobiographical documentation and self-representation of Syrian newcomer women in the Lower Mainland illustrates their ingenuity in the face adversity. Prior to his arrival at SFU, Iskandar taught at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies and the Communication, Culture, and Technology Program at Georgetown University, in Washington, DC.