Leaks, Hacks, and Scandals by Tarek El-Ariss

Leaks, Hacks, and Scandals by Tarek El-Ariss

How digital media are transforming Arab culture, literature, and politics

In recent years, Arab activists have confronted authoritarian regimes both on the street and online, leaking videos and exposing atrocities, and demanding political rights. Tarek El-Ariss situates these critiques of power within a pervasive culture of scandal and leaks and shows how cultural production and political change in the contemporary Arab world are enabled by digital technology yet emerge from traditional cultural models.

Focusing on a new generation of activists and authors from Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula, El-Ariss connects WikiLeaks to The Arabian Nights, Twitter to mystical revelation, cyberattacks to pre-Islamic tribal raids, and digital activism to the affective scene-making of Arab popular culture. He shifts the epistemological and historical frameworks from the postcolonial condition to the digital condition and shows how new media challenge the novel as the traditional vehicle for political consciousness and intellectual debate.

Theorizing the rise of “the leaking subject” who reveals, contests, and writes through chaotic yet highly political means, El-Ariss investigates the digital consciousness, virality, and affective forms of knowledge that jolt and inform the public and that draw readers in to the unfolding fiction of scandal.

Leaks, Hacks, and Scandals maps the changing landscape of Arab modernity, or Nahda, in the digital age and traces how concepts such as the nation, community, power, the intellectual, the author, and the novel are hacked and recoded through new modes of confrontation, circulation, and dissent.

"Shortlisted for the ASAP Book Prize, Association for the Arts of the Present"
"A bold effort to redefine Arab literary and cultural studies in the contexts of social media and the digital information age. . . . provocative and ultimately sublime."---Joel Gordon, Critical Inquiry

Tarek El-Ariss is professor and chair of Middle Eastern studies at Dartmouth College. He is the author of Trials of Arab Modernity: Literary Affects and the New Political and the editor of The Arab Renaissance: A Bilingual Anthology of the Nahda.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780691181936
ISBN 10	0691181934
Title	Leaks, Hacks, and Scandals
Author	Tarek El-Ariss
Series	Translation Transnation
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Princeton University Press
Year published	2018-12-04
Number of pages	240
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.