Arab Revolutions Art Culture

Catalog description

While the start of Arab protests in 2010\11 fascinated external and internal observers for their timing, intensity, and creativity, the cultural contents of those revolutions have hardly been analyzed. For academics, scholars, and journalists protests in the Arab world were received as merely a political process that intended to bring down the political regime by the famous slogan “Al-shaab Yurid Isqat al-Nizam” [The people want to overthrow the regime]. A quick look at the literature on the Arab protests illustrates that approaching such political event through a cultural lens may lead to various interpretations with multiple challenges and complexities, such as closed fieldwork and limited data. While political and social scholars have endeavored to explain the surprising revolutions in 2011 and afterwards, only a few scholars have analyzed their cultural contents. In doing so, one may view a revolution not only as a political act, but also as a revolution in language itself. Indeed, Arab revolutions have been characterized by their innovative, creative, and outstanding performances to subvert authoritarian regimes. This revolution of language can be seen in the mobility of the revolutionary language in different countries. Through this process of language mobility, improvement, and transformations, new innovative layers were added to the new borrowed slogan, song, banner once they enter a new culture. Moreover, activism and revolutionary acts are not reduced to those who were active in the revolutionary field. However, art that includes paintings, music, films have been salient in contributing from outside and inside of the Arab revolution countries. Studying Culture and Art in their revolutionary milieu requires approaching them with a revolutionary set of methods and theories. This is due to the difficulties of reaching the fieldwork, and even the danger that a…