The Naked Blogger Of Cairo

A Times Higher Education Book of the Year Uprisings spread like wildfire across the Arab world from 2010 to 2012, fueled by a desire for popular sovereignty. In Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, and elsewhere, protesters flooded the streets and the media, voicing dissent through slogans, graffiti, puppetry, videos, and satire that called for the overthrow of dictators and the regimes that sustained them. Investigating what drives people to risk everything to express themselves in rebellious art, The Naked Blogger of Cairo uncovers the creative insurgency at the heart of the Arab uprisings. “A deep dive into the cultural politics of the Arab uprisings...Kraidy’s sharp insights and rich descriptions of a new Arab generation’s irrepressible creative urges will amply reward the effort. Reading Kraidy’s accounts of the politically charted cultural gambits of wired Arab youth rekindles some of the seemingly lost spirit of the early days of the Arab uprisings and offers hope for the future.” —Marc Lynch, Washington Post “The Naked Blogger of Cairo is a superb and important work not just for scholars but for anyone who cares about the relationships between art, the body, and revolution.” —Hans Rollman, PopMatters

Across the Arab world, protesters voiced dissent through slogans, graffiti, puppetry, videos, and satire that called for the overthrow of dictatorial regimes. Investigating what drives people to risk everything to express themselves in rebellious art, Marwan M. Kraidy uncovers the creative insurgency at the heart of the Arab uprisings of 2010–2012.

This book analyzes how reality television fuelled heated polemics over cultural authenticity, gender relations, and political participation in the Middle East.

Why do citizens of states with strict surveillance care so little about their digital privacy? Why do Brazilians eschew geo-tagging on social media? What drives young Indians to friend “foreign” strangers on Facebook and give “missed calls” to people? Payal Arora answers these questions and many more about the internet’s next billion users.

The first book to offer a rigorous, sophisticated analysis of ISIS's rhetoric and why it is so persuasive ISIS wages war not only on the battlefield but also online and in the media. Through a close examination of the words and images ISIS uses, with particular attention to the "digital caliphate" on the web, Philippe-Joseph Salazar theorizes an aesthetic of ISIS and its self-presentation. As a philosopher and historian of ideas, well versed in both the Western and the Islamic traditions, Salazar posits an interpretation of Islam that places speech--the profession of faith--at the center of devotion and argues that evocation of the simple yet profound utterance of faith is what gives power to the rhetoric that ISIS and others employ. At the same time, Salazar contends that Western discourse has undergone a "rhetorical disarmament." To win the fight against ISIS and Islamic extremism, Western democracies, their media, politicians, and counterterrorism agencies must consider radically changing their approach to Islamic extremism.

Groundbreaking essays by female activists and scholars documenting women’s resistance before, during, and after the Arab Spring Images of women protesting in the Arab Spring, from Tahrir Square to the streets of Tunisia and Syria, have become emblematic of the political upheaval sweeping the Middle East and North Africa. In Women Rising, Rita Stephan and Mounira M. Charrad bring together a provocative group of scholars, activists, artists, and more, highlighting the first-hand experiences of these remarkable women. In this relevant and timely volume, Stephan and Charrad paint a picture of women’s political resistance in sixteen countries before, during, and since the Arab Spring protests first began in 2011. Contributors provide insight into a diverse range of perspectives across the entire movement, focusing on often-marginalized voices, including rural women, housewives, students, and artists. Women Rising offers an on-the-ground understanding of an important twenty-first century movement, telling the story of Arab women’s activism.

The Video Game Industry provides a platform for the research on the video game industry to draw a coherent and informative picture of this industry. Previously this has been done sparsely through conference papers, research articles, and popular science books. Although the study of this industry is still stigmatized as frivolous and ‘only’ game oriented, those who grew up with video games are changing things, especially research agendas, the acceptance of studies, and their interpretation. This book describes and defines video games as their own special medium. They are not pinball from which they grew, nor movies which they sometimes resemble. They are a unique form of entertainment based on meaningful interactions between individuals and machine across a growing sector of the population. The Video Game Industry provides a reference foundation for individuals seriously interested in the industry at the academic level. As a result, this book will serve as a reference in curricula associated with video game development for years to come.

This book is a collection of essays about democracy and relations between media and politics in Central and Eastern Europe, a topic which has been much discussed in a variety of publications and during international and national conferences. The papers analyze the models of media systems, journalistic autonomy and the state of media freedom.

Demonstrates the role of Beirut's postwar graffiti and street art in transforming the cityscape and animating resistance.

An important look at the hopeful rise and tragic defeat of the Egyptian Revolution of 2011 The Egyptian Revolution of 2011 began with immense hope, but was defeated in two and a half years, ushering in the most brutal and corrupt regime in modern Egyptian history. How was the passage from utmost euphoria into abject despair experienced, not only by those committed to revolutionary change, but also by people indifferent or even hostile to the revolution? In Martyrs and Tricksters, anthropologist and Cairo resident Walter Armbrust explores the revolution through the lens of liminality—initially a communal fellowship, where everything seemed possible, transformed into a devastating limbo with no exit. To make sense of events, Armbrust looks at the martyrs, trickster media personalities, public spaces, contested narratives, historical allusions, and factional struggles during this chaotic time. Armbrust shows that while martyrs became the primary symbols of mobilization, no one took seriously enough the emergence of political tricksters. Tricksters appeared in media—not the vaunted social media of a “Facebook revolution” but television—and they paved the way for the rise of Abd al-Fattah al-Sisi. In the end Egypt became a global political vanguard, but not in the way the revolutionaries intended. What initially appeared as the gateway to an age of revolution has transformed the world over into the age of the trickster. Delving into how Egyptians moved from unprecedented exhilaration to confusion and massacre, Martyrs and Tricksters is a powerful cultural biography of a tragic revolution.