ARB 350 - Arab Revolutions Art Culture

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 scholar might face if fieldwork is conducted. This course offers different approaches, methods, and theories to study the cultural forms of Arab revolutions and their subversive strategies to oppose authoritarian regimes in the MENA region. We will engage in case studies of Syria, Tunisia, Egypt, Sudan, Algeria, and Bahrain.

The course consists of different case studies for the above-mentioned countries and includes examples of graffiti, slogans, banners, songs, demonstration performances, films, texts, and social media. In addition to the case studies that the course delves in, further materials online from different revolutions will be available to students who will then develop their own assignments and presentations during the course. While the central focus will be Syria during the course, we will always be making comparisons with the revolutions in the rest of the Arab world after 2010.

 

Prerequisites & Notes
ARB 201