Arab Subcultures: Transformations in Theory and Practice

by Tarik Sabry, Layal Ftouni

Overview

What is 'Arab' about Arab subcultures? This is the first book to set out to delineate different ways of studying and theorising Arab subcultural groups and practices, including film, graffiti, music, live art performances, Arab techies and youth cultures. Contributors tackle a number of questions including: How is the study of Arab subcultures to be theorised? How are we to analyse such creative processes in a new worldliness characterised by trans-temporality and trans-subjectivity? Arab Subcultures effectively opens up a critical and interdisciplinary dialogue about Arab subcultures with different fields of enquiry, including anthropology, philosophy, art criticism and cultural studies, at the heart of which lies the key intellectual task of re-imagining the uneasy relation between aesthetics and politics in the age of revolutions.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781780769035
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	01/30/2017
Series:	Library of Modern Middle East Studies
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.35(w) x 8.58(h) x 0.82(d)

About the Author

Tarik Sabry is Reader in media and communication theory at the University of Westminster. He is author of Cultural Encounters in the Arab World: On Media, the Modern and the Everyday (2010) and editor of Arab Cultural Studies: Mapping the Field (2012), both from I.B.Tauris. He is also co-founder and co-Editor of The Middle East Jourbanal of Culture and Communication.Layal Ftouni is a writer, research candidate and visiting lecturer at the University of Westminster and SOAS, University of London. Her publications include 'Rethinking Gender Studies: Towards an Arab Feminist Epistemology' in Arab Cultural Studies: Mapping the Field.

Table of Contents

List of Figures vii

Acknowledgements viii

Introduction: Arab Subcultures and the Paradox of Cultural Translation Tarik Sabry Layal Ftouni 1

Chapter 1 Hatha al-Shibl min dhak al-Asad: Would-be Arab Youth Studies and the Revival of 'Subculture' Ramy Aly 18

Chapter 2 Hacking Rites: Recoding the Political in Contemporary Cultural Practices Torek El-Ariss 44

Chapter 3 Just a Bunch of (Arab) Geeks? How a 'Techie' Elite Shaped a Digital Culture in the Arab Region and Contributed to the Making of the Arab Uprisings Donatella Della Ratta Angusto Valeriani 62

Chapter 4 Resisting 'Resistance': On Political Feeling in Arabic Rap Concerts Rayya El Zein 87

Interlude Performative Interventions in Public Space: An Interview with Dictaphone Group Layal Ftouni 113

Chapter 5 Cosmopolitans, Nationalists and Fundamentalists in the Modern Middle East Sami Zubaida 126

Chapter 6 Mediated Imagination, Class and Cairo's Young Cosmopolitans Heba El Sayed 152

Chapter 7 Screening Everyday Violence: Youth, Globalisation and Subcultural Aesthetics in Moroccan Cinema Jamal Bahmad 177

Chapter 8 Visualising the (In)visible: The Queer Body and the Revolving Doors of the Lebanese Queer Subculture Nisrine Mansour 196

Chapter 9 Web-based Identity Discourse from the Maghreb: The Case of Mithly.net, 2010-11 Justin McGuinness 222

Notes on Contributors 254

Index 258