Walid El Hamamsy

This book explores the body and the production process of popular culture in, and on, the Middle East and North Africa, Turkey, and Iran in the first decade of the 21st century, and up to the current historical moment. Essays consider gender, racial, political, and cultural issues in film, cartoons, music, dance, photo-tattoos, graphic novels, fiction, and advertisements. Contributors to the volume span an array of specializations ranging across literary, postcolonial, gender, media, and Middle Eastern studies and contextualize their views within a larger historical and political moment, analyzing the emergence of a popular expression in the Middle East and North Africa region in recent years, and drawing conclusions pertaining to the direction of popular culture within a geopolitical context. The importance of this book lies in presenting a fresh perspective on popular culture, combining media that are not often combined and offering a topical examination of recent popular production, aiming to counter stereotypical representations of Islamophobia and otherness by bringing together the perspectives of scholars from different cultural backgrounds and disciplines. The collection shows that popular culture can effect changes and alter perceptions and stereotypes, constituting an area where people of different ethnicities, genders, and orientations can find common grounds for expression and connection.

This article examines the use of digital media in the 2011 Egyptian revolution (25 January–11 February), termed by many analysts and commentators a “Facebook revolution”, “Twitter revolution”, “digital revolution” or “electronic revolution”. Such appellations highlight the role of the youth who organized and mobilized for the revolution and the essential role played by digital media. Disengaging from the controversial debate over whether Egypt’s revolution was instigated by social media or simply used them for its purposes, the article demonstrates the uncontestable role that social networks, text messages, and satellite news channels played as a tool of control and manipulation, on the one hand, and a mode of resistance, on the other. Delineating some key reasons why the Egyptian revolution came to be associated with digital media, the article shows the government’s reaction to the threat posed by such media through analysis of a key moment on the night of 27 and 28 January 2011, when the Egyptian government decided to cut off all Internet and smart phone connections. Through a detailed chronology of the development of events during that period of blockage, the article analyzes the government’s decision along two axes: manipulation through blockage and manipulation through propaganda and brainwashing. It concludes by showing how the government’s attempts to sabotage the revolution came in the end to be used subversively by the protestors as means of resistance. It injected the revolution with more momentum, and in fact inadvertently led to its success.

This article deals with two epistolary novels: Alice Walker's The Color Purple and Hanan al-Shaykh's Beirut Blues, showing the similarities between the two works from the formal/structural point of view as well as pointing out the function of the letter form and its symbolic significance in each. It tackles the confessional nature of the letters and the way they help the two protagonists in achieving a better understanding of their positions, even though the letters written by both protagonists are for the most part one-sided, and do not receive responses as in regular correspondence.