Linkspam, Egypt Etc.

[ajnabieh]

So you may possibly have heard there is a revolution going on in Egypt?

Yeah, this has not made writing my literature review section of my dissertation any easier. Sometimes, the world is just more interesting that my work.

I spent all of yesterday going through my open tabs that I had saved "to blog about." I closed a lot of them because they're out of date. That still left me with the following ten links...and then I don't post this, and my to-link pile grows...I'm just going to throw this up here and see what happens.



Women of the Egyptian Revolution. I first saw this on Facebook, but now it's made it to Sawt al-Niswa (The Voice of Women), a feminist website affiliated with Nasawiya, a feminist group in Lebanon.

Tunisie : l'héroïsme ordinaire des femmes from Le Monde. This is a slideshow with an audiotrack that autoplays upon going to the website, so kill your sound if you don't want to hear it. My listening French has gotten rusty, so it's a smidge faster than I can fully follow on a single listen, and there isn't a transcript, but it begins by talking about how Tunisian women are different from others in the region: near-equal rates of girls and boys in school, as well as Tunisia's excellent personal status law, which is probably the most pro-woman legal code in the region. (It still has tons of problems, like every legal code ever; but it's progressive for the region, by a lot.) It then goes on to talk about how women joined in the streets to support democracy, liberty, and dignity.

Collected position papers of women in Egypt, Tunisia (and the uprising countries to follow). Posted on Nasawiya; English and Arabic texts by feminists and feminist groups. The two Arabic texts are, first, a column by Nawal ElSaadawi, and, second, a bayan (pamphlet) from the Association Tunisienne des femmes democrates. I'll try to work on an English translation for that one, but I'm away from my dictionaries at the moment, so no promises--but it's called "Statement in Support of Social Justice."





Kufiyas in the Egyptian Intifada - Ted Swedenberg comments on the way the kufiya, a Palestinian (and occasionally Jordanian) garment, is making an appearance in Egypt. Key quote: "What do they signify? Solidarity with Palestinians? The influence of Western hipster fashion? A resurgence of secular pan-Arab identity, that several observers have noted? I think it's all three, and probably others that I can't think of right now."

The Poetry of Revolt.. A lovely essay that kass linked me to, talking about the way poetry is made during revolutionary moments, and what functions it serves.





The Colorless Revolution. Notes written by an American (I think) political science graduate student who was in Cairo when things started going down; these are hir notes written while still in the country, posted now that ze's out of it and has access to the internet. Insightful commentary. I'm also thinking of it because I know folks in a similar position; I hadn't heard from either when I read this, and it was, oddly, a relief, even though this isn't someone I know (I think). (One's evacuated, and the other is staying right now, but is in contact with folks, so we at least know ze's OK.)

President Obama: Here is Your Game Changer. One of about a bazillion similar columns that American political scientists have written about US foreign policy and Egypt. I like this version for sentimental reasons: Ellen Lust was my undergraduate advisor, and Amaney Jamal does really great work in Arab-American studies as well as good work on political behavior in the Middle East.

Gimme Shelter - Prosecuting Hosni Mubarak. One of my biggest questions at the moment is what sort of end game happens: procedurally, once Mubarak is out, who comes to power, and what happens? This is the other side of that: what happens to Mubarak himself?

The Right-Wing Nut's Guide to Egypt. Gawker has an amazing compendium of things said by right-wing folks about Egypt. It is infuriating. Also, if my students wrote half of those sentences they would get squiggly lines under them and notations like "This sentence is unclear, and I have trouble following it."

The "Anderson Cooper Effect" on American TV Reporting from Cairo. A surprisingly hopeful article about what it means that mainstream American TV news has sent people to Cairo: the violence against protesters yesterday was read, not incorrectly, as state violence, not rioting. There is something to be said that first-hand experience, even from folks without much experience in the specifics of the place or the context of it, can't be denied.



And I'm putting this above the cut, because I think (?) I have readers involved in fakenews fandom: Does anybody know where I can get screencaps of Christiane Aman-purr from last night's Colbert? Because I need that icon like yesterday. (For those who don't watch it: he had a cat try to predict the outcome of the Egyptian revolution, a la that octupus that predicted the World Cup. It went like you would think asking a cat to do something on national TV went.)

Comments

[jae]

Thanks for the links!

I have a journalism question for you, though, which is sort of off-topic, but only sort of. It boils down to this: what is the U.S.'s obsession with Egypt in particular? I mean, not to discount at all what's going on in Egypt, but from what I can tell from all of the non-U.S. (and primarily European) news sources I read, what's going on in Egypt isn't just going on in Egypt, and if you call it an "Egyptian" revolution, you're missing the most important part of the picture. I mean, if you get only U.S. news about this, you're bound to think that the Egyptian people started marching on the streets out of the blue, powered by Twitter.

The Dutch and German news I get, on the other hand, started with Tunisia long before the U.S. media were talking about any of this, and then they talking about Egypt and Tunisia, and now they're talking about Egypt and Tunisia and Jordan and Yemen, and they're tying in how the Albania and Belarus protests are trying to capitalize on the movements in the Middle East too. I can't express just HOW different the coverage is, seriously, it's like night and day.

On the NPR show "On the Media" (which I listen to on podcast), one of the only places I heard anything about Tunisia in English before the Egypt stuff started happening, they had a Middle Eastern expert in to talk about why nobody was talking about what was going on there. And he said something like: "to an American audience, the only relevant country when it comes to Middle Eastern Arab democracy is Egypt." And sure enough, when it was Egypt, the U.S. started showing an interest.

I tried to engage a journalist friend about this and she bristled at the accusation and refused to talk to me about it. But it's there, man--I'm not imagining this. The Egypt Obsession, to the exclusion of everything else that's going on. What the hell is it about, do you think?

-J

[ajnabieh]

A couple of things:

1) While obviously there's stuff happening all over, and there are important example effects happening, I don't think it's wrong to talk about each of these rounds of protest as happening within national borders. So there is an "Egyptian revolution," as well as a coordinated series of protests in Jordan, as well as strong anti-government demonstrations in Yemen, as well as continued unrest in Tunisia as the country works out what sort of transition its likely to have. (And I don't follow E. Europe, so I can't comment on what's happening there.) Part of the reason I use different words for all of these different contexts is that folks in different countries are asking for different things: the Jordanian demonstrations are much more "normal politics" (I like this one on that), for instance, and putting a pin in what's happening in Yemen is not simple. I wouldn't want the transnational context to overwhelm the specificity of each round of protest.

2) The OTM interviewee sounds pretty right-on that Egypt is The Country for Middle East reporting in a lot of ways. Some of this is that it's an obvious regional leader; it's big, dense, has existed as a single-governed unit a lot longer than a lot of Middle Eastern countries (most of which are 20th century inventions), and has also historically been the source of political ideologies that transform the region. Both pan-Arabism and Islamism in the forms in which they had/have the biggest impact on the region are both Egyptian creations. There's also the fact that Egypt's crucial to American interests in the region (the peace treaty with Israel, shipping through the Suez, yadda yadda). And let's not discount the fact that Americans are likely to know the name and roughly where it is (OK, unless that Fox News graphic with Egypt put on Iraq on the map making the rounds on Facebook is real, which I'm really hoping it isn't).

3. The other thing is honestly a combination of the drama of what's going on and the fact that it's now self-reproducing: once people started covering Egypt (and most Western media outlets already have reporters there, unlike Yemen, or even Jordan), EVERYBODY had to cover Egypt. And, I mean, now somebody's punched Anderson Cooper: IT'S ON.

So that's my assessment, which is pretty off-the-cuff. There are good reasons, and crap reasons mixed up in it, which is pretty much how things happen in covering politics, IMHO...

[jae]

I get what you're saying about not wanting the transnational context to overwhelm the specificity of each round of protest, but that's not really what I was saying. What I was saying was that if you were only looking at U.S. news, it would be very easy to think that the protests were only happening in Egypt in the first place! And this isn't going on in the other countries' news I'm following--they're talking a lot about Egypt (and not exclusively about the transnational context; they really are talking a lot about Egypt), but they're also talking about the other protests in other Middle Eastern countries too.

-J