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Modes of cultural resistance post-Arab Spring: humor, music and the making of a new digital identity

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Modes of cultural resistance post-Arab Spring: humor, music and the making of a new digital identity

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Content EMBARGOED-not for circulation

MODES OF CULTURAL RESISTANCE POST-ARAB SPRING:

HUMOR, MUSIC AND THE MAKING OF A NEW DIGITAL IDENTITY

by

Yomna Elsayed

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(COMMUNICATION)

August 2018

Copyright 2018 Yomna Elsayed

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2 TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES ......................................................................................................... p.4
ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................................... p.5
INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................... p.6
Agency between movements and daily life ................................................................. p.7
The politics of cultural resistance .............................................................................. p.15
Participation in cultural resistance ............................................................................. p.22
Negotiation in cultural resistance............................................................................... p.24
Online spaces of experience....................................................................................... p.31
Theoritical Contingencies .......................................................................................... p.34
Research questions ..................................................................................................... p.39
Methods...................................................................................................................... p.39
Conclusion ................................................................................................................. p.41
CHAPTER 1: Subversive humor in online videos of Arab Youth… ............................ p.44
Satire and censorship in Arab countries..................................................................... p.46
Authority, identity and cultural resistance ................................................................. p.48
Method ....................................................................................................................... p.52
Findings and analysis ................................................................................................. p.55
Managing Authenticity between Politics and Economics ......................................... p.70
Conclusion ................................................................................................................. p.72
CHAPTER 2: Online protest songs and the affective side of social movements .......... p.75
Protest songs and collective action ............................................................................ p.76
RAP, chorus and the different dimensions of rhetoric ............................................... p.78
Methods...................................................................................................................... p.81
Documenting and Negotiating Emotions ................................................................... p.83
“The Square” as Identity ............................................................................................ p.98
Authenticity between artistic and revolutionary quality .......................................... p.116
Conclusion ............................................................................................................... p.118
CHAPTER 3: Developing the anti-fan: Negotiation and particiaption in post-spring
digital spaces ........................................................................................................... p.122
Fandom in 20
th
century Egypt .................................................................................. p.124
Anti-fandom ............................................................................................................. p.126
Nostalgia and disenchantment ................................................................................. p.129
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3 Memes and remix videos: Tools of the Anti-fan ..................................................... p.133
Methods.................................................................................................................... p.135
Findings and analysis ............................................................................................... p.137
Anti-fandom and the search for the authentic .......................................................... p.160
Fans or followers...................................................................................................... p.161
Conclusion ............................................................................................................... p.164
CHAPTER 4: Post-spring and the forming of new revolutionary sensibilities ........... p.169
Revolution as rupture ............................................................................................... p.171
Negotiating the past ................................................................................................. p.173
Forging the future .................................................................................................... p.176
Authenticity: Then and now..................................................................................... p.179
Conclusion ............................................................................................................... p.181
REFERENCES ............................................................................................................ p.184
APPENDIX ................................................................................................................. p.204
Chapter 1 list of referenced videos .......................................................................... p.204
Chapter 2 list of referenced songs ............................................................................ p.207
Chapter 3 selected list of creative Facebook pages ................................................. p.210

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4
LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1 A frame from Ultras White Knights' "Sun of Freedom" ................................................ 94
Figure 2 Cairokee’s Amir Eid in "Some are dancing... some are dying" ..................................... 97
Figure 3 Some memory objects used by "Oh the Square" .......................................................... 100
Figure 4 Hany Adel then and now .............................................................................................. 118
Figure 5 Amr Khaled Parody ...................................................................................................... 139
Figure 6 Mohammed Khamis in his video “Confessions after 30” ............................................ 140
Figure 7 Friday of the Land Meme ............................................................................................. 141
Figure 8 Stills from YouTube Remix "Qutuz Never Dies" ........................................................ 143
Figure 9 "Youth of the Nile" Remix by Hashkobly .................................................................... 145
Figure 10 Hashkobly Remix Tip Video ...................................................................................... 150
Figure 11 Lock Screen with Sisi's Picture .................................................................................. 151
Figure 12 Two Dubsmash posts after announcement of 2017 Emergency Laws ....................... 152
Figure 13 Meme: Arrangement from the Outside and the Inside ............................................... 153
Figure 14 ..................................................................................................................................... 156
Figure 15 Waleed Khairy Meme ................................................................................................. 157
Figure 16, Figure 17 .................................................................................................................... 157
Figure 18 Examples of memes/comics for “We Need to Talk” 2017 campaign ........................ 170
Figure A.1 Asa7be Logo ……………………………………………………………………… 210

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5 ABSTRACT

While the Arab Spring uprisings came with promise of democracy and social justice, five years
later, Egyptian and Arab populations are pondering whether things turned out for the worse.
State crackdowns on public expressions of dissent have dramatically intensified especially
following the military takeover in Egypt, July 3
rd
2013. In the past five years, freedom of
expression and peaceful protests were met with unprecedented violence as per Amnesty
International report (2016). Hence, in absence of open channels for political expression, can we
confidently claim that resistance has practically disappeared, that the energy fueling the uprisings
has nearly dissipated? Or has it transformed, manifesting itself in different cultural forms and
degrees of intensity? I argue that under contexts of oppression, and in the absence of democratic
channels, the political energies of the Arab Spring have transformed to manifest in creative
resistance at the unsupervised ambiguous spaces of arts and culture. Combining online textual
analysis with in-depth interviews and a focus group, I trace expressions of resistance in the
spaces of Egyptian and Arab youth’ online content of humor, music and creative arts. The
transcripts examined, though publicly visible, are nonetheless hidden in their symbolic meaning,
artful connotations and playful nature. This study will enhance our understanding of political
participation by examining its affordances and limitations in the undertheorized context of Arab
authoritarian regimes.

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6 INTRODUCTION

On June 18
th
2010, hundreds of young Egyptians dressed in black T-shirts silently faced
the Mediterranean Sea; with Qurans and bibles in hand, they turned their backs to the Alexandria
Corniche Street in a silent protest. They were protesting the death of Khaled Said, the young
Egyptian activist fatally beaten by Egyptian police; they called their protest “The Silent Stand”.
In an earlier Facebook post, Wael Ghonim (2012) wrote, “turn your back to the street. . . do not
debate or argue with anyone… this way no one can claim we did anything wrong… we want the
media to document Egyptian youth standing along 3 or 4 kilometers of the corniche” (p. 71).
This was perhaps one of the first symbolic protests organized by the famous Facebook page We
Are All Khaled Said. Ghonim believed that open confrontations with police forces at a time of
fear would demoralize average depoliticized Egyptians from joining future protests; he,
therefore, sought to break down their fears in small symbolic actions organized through his
Facebook page. Five years later, following the Arab Spring uprising, a military take-over and
violent state-crackdowns on Raba’a and Nahda Squares, a similar scene is enacted, yet this time
by the April 6
th
youth activists. Protesters, however, would have to go to the desert to protest the
cancellation of their Cairo conference and celebrate their 7
th
anniversary (Mostafa, 2015); the
democratic front group leader Sherif el-Roubi commented, that the press conference held in the
desert is “a message to the current regime that ‘no one can stop’” the voice of the youth (Aswat
Masriya, 2015).
Politics, in Western democratic thought, revolves around the open practice of material
voting and rallies. But if we were to merely observe the open practices of politics, especially
following the Egyptian military takeover in 2013 and its violent crackdown on opposition and
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7 protest action, are we to conclude that agency has disappeared? If being a movement rests on a
“sustained notion of interactions” (Tilly, 1984) among “networks of … individuals, groups or
associations” (Diani and Bison. 2004), how are we to make sense of politics and social change in
a context where “sustained notion[s] of interaction” are almost always interrupted by state
intervention, “public demonstrations of support” are outlawed if not violently dispersed, and the
opponent is the network, while actors are considerably isolated? In such contexts, the cultural
and political are so intertwined that it might be more productive to examine them in tandem
rather than separately, and to ask: what is agency and what forms does it assume in authoritarian
contexts where cultural resistance is one of the very few (if not only) possible strand(s) of
politics allowed to exist (by virtue of being categorized by despotic regimes as nonpolitical)?
Agency between Movements and Daily Life
Individual and Collective Agency
Agency is a widely undertheorized concept in both social movements and cultural
studies; sometimes it is used synonymously with resistance, at other times it is highly dependent
on the structure of political opportunities. Aldon Morris (1992) argued that the current social
movement theories continue to slight the role of human agency in social movements. Emirbayer
and Mische (1998) argued that the term agency itself reflects this lack of study where it has
maintained an elusive vagueness that seldom inspired systematic analyses “despite the long list
of terms with which it has been associated: selfhood, motivation, will, purposiveness,
intentionality, choice, initiative, freedom and creativity” (p. 962). The role of cultural agency,
argued Morris (1992) has been particularly slighted by treatments that put too much weight on
causal factors while glossing over the deeper cultural and emotional processes closely tied to
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8 collective action. Therefore, theorists such as Morris (1992) and Emirbayer and Mische (1998)
called for placing human agency at the center of movement analysis.
Agency as Emancipation?
However, as researchers of social movements and cultural theory, our positionality can
influence what examples we choose to highlight, and what light we choose to interpret those
results in, no matter how objective or distanced our language might be. Furthermore, more often
than not, scholars themselves are part of these social movements’ constituencies and hence have
stakes in their success or failure. Conceptualizations of agency were not immune from such
biases as Talal Asad (2000) and Saba Mahmoud (2005) argued. In his discussion of agency and
pain, Asad, a post-colonial theorist and anthropologist, suggested that present-day conceptions of
agency reflect a triumphalist vision of history that “presupposes a teleological history and an
essentialized human subject [with an] emphasis on conscious intention and self-empowerment”
(p. 29). Beyond a “romance of resistance” which situates agency in the consciousness of actors,
whose “abilities and desires orient [them] in a singular historical direction,” Asad and Mahmoud
alike ventured into exploring the metaphysical and sometimes routinized unconscious aspects of
human agency. This is particularly important when considering non-Western contexts where
agency might be instantiated differently. Hence, Mahmoud (2005) and Asad (2000) championed
the idea that the “concept of agency itself… needs to be ‘kept open’ and freed from deterministic
binaries of resistance/subordination.” (Bautista, 2008, p. 76). According to Asad (2000),
the human body has a changing life largely inaccessible to itself, that in various ways its
behavior depends on unconscious routine and habit, that emotion, though necessary to
every kind of reasoning, may render the ownership of actions a matter of conflicting
descriptions—all of this problematises both the intentionalist claim that the embodied
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9 subject is essentially engaged in resisting power or becoming more powerful, as well as
the connected claim that the moral agent must always bear individual responsibility for
her act. It also problematises the larger assumption that agency must be defined, in the
final analysis, by a historical future of universal emancipation from suffering” (p. 32-33).
Hence, Asad (2000) called our attention to the idea of ensoulment—as opposed to
embodiment— where the living human body is viewed as an integrated totality with unique
“developable” and culturally mediated capacities for experiences and activities (p. 48). He
emphasized the role of rituals and particularly pain in bringing about this agency of the body,
where
the living body's materiality is regarded as an essential medium for cultivating the kind of
agency that such traditions define as virtuous conduct and for discouraging what they
consider vice. The role of fear and hope, of felicity and pain, is central to such practices.
…the more one exercises a virtue the easier—and less intentional (deliberate)—it
becomes. (p. 49)
In other words, agency can be biographical in enacting tradition, where individuals seek
to acquire the capacities and sensibilities specific to a particular tradition. Saba Mahmoud (2005)
as well, in her study of the Islamic revival movement and the feminist subject, decentered the
notion of agency from the pursuit of freedom to suggest that agency can also be a pursuit of piety
(or a better self), similar to the notion of ensoulment endorsed by Asad. In the case of her
Muslim women subjects, Mahmoud (2005) argued that “to veil oneself is a conscious act of self-
cultivation in which the body is an instrument utilized towards piety… [hence] veiling manifests
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10
female embodied capacities” (p. 79). She went to describe women in the mosque as “virtuosos of
piety” (Bautista, 2008, p. 79).
However, that is not to say that harboring optimism in the effectiveness of people-
oriented action is necessarily flawed, but that we, as researchers, should be aware that our biases
do not wash away the particularities of some of the contexts in which social action transpires. It
is through the traveling of such concepts as agency to different contexts that the necessarily
resistant, necessarily progressive notions of agency are questioned by theorists when they do not
adequately explain the experiences of different populations in different parts of the world.
Agency as Temporal
These less conscious, less progressive, and less theorized aspects of agency become
clearer, however, when examined in the flow of time as suggested by Emirbayer and Mische
(1998) in their comprehensive and eclectic analysis of the concept of agency. In their analysis,
they draw on theoretical writings from philosophy, phenomenology and social psychology.
According to Emirbayer and Mische (1998), agency is
A temporally embedded process of social engagement, informed by the past (in its
‘iterational’ or habitual aspect) but also oriented toward the future (as a ‘projective’
capacity to imagine alternative possibilities) and toward the present (as a ‘practical-
evaluative’ capacity to contextualize past habits and future projects within the
contingencies of the moment) (p. 962)

In other words, they argued that the interplay of habit, imagination, and judgment can reproduce
as well as transform structures in an “interactive response to the problems posed by changing
historical situations.” (p. 970). According to Emribayer and Mische (1998), there are three
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constitutive elements of human agency: iteration, projectivity and practical evaluation. So like
Asad and Mahmoud, they did not dismiss the habitual and routinized as activities that are devoid
from agency. They, on the other hand, suggested that every social action is both reproductive (of
past patterns) and transformative. In contrast to most of the social science of the early 20
th

century which has regarded habit as a fixed mechanical reaction to particular stimuli and thus
devoid of meaning from the point of view of the actor, they located the agentic dimension in
“even the most routinized, prestructured forms of social action”. In these cases, “even relatively
unreflective action has its own moment of effort; the typification and routinization of experience
are active processes entailing selective reactivation of received structures within expected
situations, dynamic transactions between actor and situation” (Emirbayer and Mische, 1998, p.
976). However, this acknowledgment of the role of tradition does not preclude the imaginative
and reflective dimensions of creative reconfiguration and decision making among possible
trajectories of action in response to both the past and future (Emirbayer and Msische, 1998).
Similarly, in the realm of cultural studies and cultural analyses, Raymond Williams
(1978) advocated treating culture as a process with internal dynamic relations. Hence, like
Emirbayer and Mische (1998), Williams suggested that cultural analyses should not only focus
on the dominant or hegemonic, but should also include the ‘residual’ and ‘emergent’, which are
“significant both in themselves and in what they reveal of the characteristics of the ‘dominant’”
(Williams, 1978, p. 122). The residual, though not part of the dominant culture, is an element of
the past, possibly alternative and oppositional to the dominant, and remains an effective element
of the present. ‘Emergent’ cultural forms are “new meanings and values, new practices, new
relationships… continually being created” (Williams, 1978, p. 123). This dynamic view of
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agency and culture not only connects past, present and future, but also invites us to think how
connections between the personal and the collective develop and transform agency over time.
Agency as Communicative
Agency is social (communicative and dialogic) as well as relational. One of the primary
tasks of social action, for example, argued Gamson (1991) is to bridge the individual and
sociocultural levels. This, he added, is accomplished by expanding the personal identities of the
constituencies and their definition of self, to include other relevant collective identities (Gamson,
1991). Historical tradition, or (mass mediated) imagined tradition can perform this function, as it
not only provides a schema to draw upon, but also provides a common communicative ground,
and a shared language essential for building collectivities. In his discussion of agency in the
movement of peasants and workers in El Salvador, Gamson (1991) noted how an innocuous
activity such as “Bible reading” was inevitably “a subversive activity [where] interpretation
emphasizes relating faith to what is happening around one” and “the persecution[Jesus] endured
arose out of his struggle for justice” (p. 37). To disregard the role of tradition, and religious texts
as false consciousness as some Marxist theorists may suggest, and to limit agency to a
necessarily progressive or emancipatory agenda, is to enact a restrictive ideal that few can
measure up to in any non-Western setting, where ritualistic practices and ideals of spiritual
cultivation are salient in the day to day life of its populations.
Fan communities are also one site where agency can be enacted in both its personal and
collective dimensions. According to Henry Jenkins (2017), agency is both personal and
collective, personal in “how much control do I have over how I perceive and act upon the world”
and collective in “how much power do I gain by joining forces with others to pursue shared
interests”. Apparently, these two aspects are also in dialog, where participation in collective
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spaces can help one discover and develop their sense of personal agency through conversation
and skill teaching, and vice versa. Stephen Duncombe (2011) noted this relationship between
community and agency where he suggested that fandom encourages relationships with other
fellow fans who share interests, and works to develop networks, institutions, and a common
culture. This ability “to imagine alternatives and build community not coincidentally,” he
argued, “is a basic prerequisite for political activism” (para. 1). Imagining alternatives, however,
is both a capacity and a privilege that are shaped by both structure and opportunity.
Agency between Ability and Limitation
The conversations and scaffolding that take place in local or online communities do not
happen in a vacuum, but are rather influenced by various “systemic and structural factors” (p. 5).
As dana Boyd pointed out, agency is “the ability to understand a social situation well enough to
engage constructively”. This ability is premised however on the availability of “skills to
contribute effectively, connections with others to help build an audience, emotional resilience to
handle negative feedback, and enough social status to speak without consequence” (Jenkins, Ito
and Boyd, 2014, p. 22).
A discussion of ability also invites a discussion of physical and semiotic limitations.
While state repression can pose severe threats to public expressions of dissent, this violence can
end up pushing resistance to the realm of imagination, resulting not necessarily in escapism
(which can be viewed as a dissipation of energy) but in many cases a reformulation of this
energy into more creative forms, ones that can effect change on the longer run. Emirbayer and
Mische (1998) noted for example that when blocked by problematic situations, actors can
pioneer in exploring and reconstructing contexts of action. Several empirical examples, argued
Morris (2000), point that enormous collective action is possible when political authorities “close
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ranks and when heavy repression is unleashed” (p. 447). For example, the early participatory
ideals of the US students’ New Left movement in the late 1960s which was met with state
violence and repression, argued Delwiche (2012), found expression in other creative arenas such
as counter culture and later cyber culture of the 1990s (Turner, 2006).
What is Agency Then?
The word agency implies an action, and a movement towards something, hence a form of
energy that transforms but is hardly destroyed. Agency is not created but discovered and
subsequently developed. Hence agency is temporal, with relations to the past, present and future.
It is also malleable, and contingent upon the actors’ abilities, and their structural limitations.
Therefore, agency lies on a continuum between open resistance and unabashed collusion, with
cultural resistance mediating between the two poles. In either case biographical agency can be at
work to develop self-control and spirituality within actors all while strengthening their collective
identities in performing rituals. In this formulation, there is no distinction between real and
unreal resistance, where even semiotic, digital or nonmaterial action have consequences in
changing minds and building a common conscience. Gilles Deleuze (1968/1994) pushed back
against the idea that being virtual is the same as not being real, suggesting that “The virtual is
opposed not to the real but to the actual. The virtual is fully real in so far as it is virtual” (p. 208).
In Abagail Derecho’s (2006) utilization of Deleuze’s contention in the world of fan fiction, she
added that “the virtual is that which could happen, what we could become, at any given time; the
actual is that which is happening, how we are, at any given time. Because both the virtual and
actual exist, they are both real” (p. 74). Hence, what we are really missing is a discussion of
agency at times of so-called complacency and a research agenda that asks: if the public arena is
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devoid of open forms of expression, what many deem as ‘primary’ or ‘meaningful’ resistance,
where can we find expressions of agency?

The Politics of Cultural Resistance
One of the main points of contention between the disciplines of social movements and
cultural studies is where to place culture in movements, is it instrumental or merely expressive?
This debate sometimes materializes around discussions of resistance. Colleen Roach (1997), for
example, noted that,
Although the feeling cannot always be expressed in scholarly terms, many people reject
‘resistance’ argument because they feel that the term itself belongs to a political
vocabulary of movements in opposition to real oppression, where the physical and
personal stakes (such as life/death) are extremely high. (p. 59)
She, hence joined, Gitlin (1990) in objecting to the use of the term resistance as it relates to
audience for example, because it stamped “these not-so-great refusals with a vocabulary derived
from life-threatening work against fascism – as if the same concept should serve for the Chinese
student uprisings and cable TV gazing” (Gitlin, 1990, 191). In such accounts the words “real”
and “serious” are pitted against “fantasy” and “everyday” —the latter, both characteristic of
cultural resistance—suggesting that there can be no crossover between the two.
Later theorizations, however, placed more emphasis on the role of culture and symbolic
production in the lives of movements. Snow et al. (2004), for example, defined social
movements as
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Collectivities acting with some degree of organization and continuity outside institutional
or organizational channels for the purpose of challenging or defending extant authority,
whether it is institutionally or culturally based, in the group, organization, society, culture
or world order of which they are a part. (p. 11)
Snow and Benford (1988, 1992) as well brought back attention to “the role of emotions in the
production and reproduction of social movements… [where] symbolic production is not only (or
mainly) strategically oriented, but it involves more feelings and emotions” (Della Porta and
Diani, 2006, pp. 13-14). In this view, far from being organizationally strategic, social actors
derive pleasures of social life from participating in social movements such as the sense of
community, companionship and identity and what follows in cooperation (Jasper, 1997). Along
the same lines, Alain Touraine (2002) noted in the context of mass production/consumption, that
“we cannot oppose this invasion with universal principles but with the resistance of our unique
experiences” (p. 391). This can be seen in the recent wave of global movements (alter-
globalization movements, Arab Spring and Occupy) which have demonstrated that the political
and expressive sides of social movements need not be necessarily separate, nor opposite, but can
rather coexist in the same social movement to mutually serve its goals. Therefore, a focus on
cultural resistance as a form of agency demands a broader understanding of politics as a “domain
in which meanings are constructed and negotiated, where relations of dominance and
subordination are defined and contested” (Jackson, 1991, p. 200). As Steven Duncombe (1997)
noted,
Unlike a political treatise or a demographic speech, the politics of culture never announce
themselves as political. As we live our lives and take pleasure in our entertainment, the
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politics expressed through culture become part of us, get under our skin, and become part
of our common sense. (p. 184)
What is Resistance?
Resistance can materialize at both the macro or micro levels (Reed, 2005). It can also be
viewed on a spectrum, in terms of scale of opposition. Repression, as well, can arguably exist on
a scale, where the most innocuous of actions can themselves be life-threatening if interpreted as
oppositional. Edward Said picked up on these variations and the crossover between them, when
he argued that “‘primary’ (or ‘armed’) resistance to colonialism and imperialism is intimately
linked to ‘cultural resistance’ (or ‘ideological resistance’) (Roach, 1997, p. 61).
This multifaceted nature of the concept was generative to a lot of research surrounding
the nature of resistance: is it necessarily a conscious and political act? For example, scholars
like Rebecca Raby (2005) argued that “resistance suggests conscious, political and directed
actions”. Henry Giroux (1983) similarly argued that “not all oppositional behavior has ‘radical
significance’ nor is all oppositional behavior a clear-cut response to domination” (p. 31).
Therefore, James Scott’s (1990) theorization of “everyday resistance” and “infra-politics” were a
departure from the “necessarily overt”, “necessarily political”, “necessarily useful” forms of
resistance. Scott’s work essentially raised the question: if most forms of overt political
expression were denied, does resistance cease to exist or does it reinvent itself in more
clandestine yet creative and artful ways, whereby it finds other cultural hosts to live off?
To Scott (1990), if we were to wait for overt political actions as expressions of resistance,
we would be missing out on an “immense political terrain that lies between quiescence and
revolt and that, for better or worse, is the political environment of subject classes” (p.
199). Instead, we should pay more attention to what he called the hidden transcript: “the
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privileged site for non-hegemonic, contrapuntal, dissident, subversive discourse” (p. 25), for
therein lies “the disguised, low-profile, undeclared resistance”

(p. 198). Hence to look for the
hidden transcript, one need not look further than rumors, gossip, folktales, songs, gestures, jokes
and theater of the powerless where critiques of power can be advanced behind the “innocuous
understandings of their conduct” (p. xiii).
Modernist theorists like Scott, however, were criticized for over-interpreting resistance:
what someone may deem resistance, another may characterize as teen rebellion

(Raby, 2005).
For example, Scott (1990) was specifically criticized for using oppositional binaries such as
“public/hidden”, “dominant/subordinate”, and “public/private” (Raby, 2005). Scott also over-
romanticized the heroism of the subordinate, where simple deviant acts such as pilfering or foot-
dragging were interpreted as acts of resistance. This interpretation in itself may be hyperbolic
given that the subjects themselves may not be intentionally resisting authority. Assef Bayat
(2010), for example, criticized open interpretations of resistance which read too much into the
act of agents, to the point that many poststructuralist writers come to “replace their subject” (p.
55). He added that by challenging the essentialism inherent in perspectives such as the
“submissive Muslim women” or “passive poor”, they are themselves falling into another type of
essentialism where ordinary acts are easily interpreted as contentious despite the fact that these
practices occur within the prevailing systems of power.
Postmodern theories of power came to disrupt notions of resistance in which subject is
whole and opponents are easy to identify. In these postmodern conceptions, “power is more
diffuse” and “more nuanced [in its] ability to shape social action” (Raby, 2005). The most
prominent of such analyses is Foucault’s (1980) analysis of power, where power is enacted
through discourses that shape our subjectivity. Hence, both dominant and resisting power contain
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elements of the other (Raby, 2005). Foucault was criticized, however, for “under-theorizing”
agency and the possibility of counter-discourse. His later writings however re-conceptualized the
exercise of power, and henceforth resistance to it, where resistance to power was not only to be
“understood in terms of agonistic force relations, but in terms of a creative traversing of the field
of possible action” (Hartman, 2003, p. 10).
In examining resistance as it relates to culture, a concept that is itself fraught with
ambiguity, Ann Swidler (1995) offered a useful framework for examining cultural factors in
social movements, and suggested four guidelines for such work. Reed (2005) summarized these
factors as:
First, focus on culture not as individually held beliefs but as structures embedded in
practices relatively independent of the beliefs held by individual actors. Second, focus
less on culture as what actors themselves really think and more on culture as their
‘knowledge of how others will interpret their actions.’ Third, focus on ‘public contexts in
which cultural understandings are brought to bear,’ often in ways that are functioning
above the level of individual belief in ways that unite diverse actors with diverse
opinions. Fourth and finally, focus on cultural institutions as sites that set limits and
possibilities for movement activity. (pp. 288-289)
This framework offers researchers interested in both movements and culture a clearly defined
notion of what culture is, as well as where and what to capture in movements. Instead of going as
far as claiming that “all personal is political” or that the personal is “merely cultural”, it offers a
useful connection between the personal and the political in “public contexts in which cultural
understandings are brought to bear”.
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Arab youth, share the relative marginalization and oppressive conditions of Scott’s
peasants and Bayat’s street vendors; the stakes are high in each case if opinions are publicly
voiced. Youth actions as well share a lot with what Bayat (2010) describes as the notion of
quiet encroachment… the silent, protracted, but pervasive advancement of the ordinary
people on the propertied, powerful, or the public, in order to survive and improve their
lives. They are marked by quiet, largely atomized and prolonged mobilization with
episodic collective action— open and fleeting struggles without clear leadership,
ideology, or structured organization. (p. 56)
Online Arab youth, however, unlike Bayat’s street vendors and Scott’s peasants, are tech-savvy,
educated and arguably politicized subjects, who consciously defy authority symbolically through
humorous and artful creations. Hence, I argue that what shifts these actions from the realm of
“quiet encroachment” to the realm of resistance is their conscious challenge of authority as
suggested by their knowledge of the surveillance risks involved in ridiculing authority on a
public online platform, their relative awareness of the power structure and the structural causes
for their marginalization, and their better access to tools of self-expression. The urban poor,
however, struggle to make ends meet amid the constraints of a social structure, thus arguably
working to keep those constraints in place. The artful creative spaces for expression, on the other
hand available to tech-savvy/educated Arab youth allows them not only to protect their ability to
publicly challenge authority but also to imagine alternatives to its structural constraints.
This analytical distinction between “resistance”, “quiet encroachment” in public spaces
(Bayat, 2010), or “evasion” in fantasy (Fiske, 2011), is not one meant to confine youth action
into one of those categories; it is rather meant to capture how action traverses these various
intensities of expression. Michel De Certeau’s pointed out the productive capacities of resistance
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that exist in spaces of potentiality that are not necessarily defined by their opposition to power
relations but by their ability to create, capture and use opportunities in the ‘blind spots’ of power
(De Certeau, 1984; Dey and Teasdale, 2016). Social change can be produced through the
everyday lives of ordinary people by “creating cracks in the smooth operation of the gatekeepers
of capital, prefigure a world which is different from the one they currently live in” (Holloway,
2010; Dey and Teasdale, 2016, p. 499). While it might be hard to qualify the multitude of
satirical videos, online songs and creative hashtags and memes as a social movement without a
clear collective identity and political goal, these cultural products/manifestations of resistance
constitute the field of action for a social movement in the making. The quiet encroachment of
Arab youth oscillates between the realms of physical space in uprisings and the realm of
changing minds and shifting public opinions online. It is not an everyday resistance with
marginal gains in the quest of survival and getting by, but rather a strategic guerrilla war waged
in the realm of public opinion that seeks to debilitate a superior opponent over a prolonged
period of time, yet a war not free of pleasure.
While cultural resistance might be an analytically useful concept in talking about the
intersections of culture and movements, it is not sufficient to describe the particular experience
in some of these spaces. For example, the study of alternative communities of resistance, would
not be complete without a discussion of participatory practices and participatory cultures
especially in the digital age, where technologies are non-hierarchical by design. Likewise a
discussion of popular culture and religion, what Gramscians might regard as hegemonic tools of
indoctrination, in relation to cultural resistance would not be accurate unless we bring in the
notion of negotiation a la Hall’s (1993) encoding/decoding and Jenkins revision of the concept
(2016) as it relates the complex relationships audience form with mainstream texts.
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Participation in Cultural Resistance
For a resistance movement to become effective it has to first become a culture of
resistance: “an assertion of dignity and autonomy within an environment that conspires to deny
both” (Batteau, 2000). Hence, a crucial dimension to understanding a culture of resistance is to
examine the kind of communities in which resistance is brewed: what people are participating in.
In Gamson’s (1991) study of El Salvador base communities, he noted how its members were not
only doing something for the poor but were standing with them as they themselves become
agents of change. According to Gamson (1991), “agency is contained in the idea that one learns
from the poor and they learn from each other by exploring the reality of their everyday lives.
Cultural action is heavily oriented toward the development of collective agency.” (p. 47).
Gamson was effectively describing a participatory culture: a culture that exhibits low barriers to
entry, artistic expression and creation, and peer-to-peer mentorship. It encourages and scaffolds
“participants as they [refine] their skills and [develop] greater confidence in their own voices”
(Jenkins, 2015).
Digital technologies in particular inspired many to optimistically envision a role for
technology in advancing notions of participatory democracy, particularly relating to who gets to
participate and what they are participating in. Bertolt Brecht (1932) was first to reimagine radio
from a mass media tool to a medium of collective participation. Enzensberger (1970) as well
made a similar prediction regarding the emergence of a more participatory media culture
(Jenkins, Ford and Green, 2006). Yet to Enzensberger, noted Jenkins et al., change would not
come so much from the emergence of new media technologies but from the “shifting of social
and cultural practices around media” (p. 161), to create new kinds of publics. Jenkins similarly
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argued that that digital did not make communities born online more participatory as much as it
dramatically expanded who got to participate in them.
While complete participation, on equal grounds, can be viewed as an ideal to be worked
towards but never fully achieved, as argued by Nico Carpentier in his conversation with Henry
Jenkins (2013), others like Henry Jenkins and colleagues are more interested in tracing
participatory practices as communities work towards “a more participatory culture” (Jenkins, in
Jenkins and Carperntier, 2013, p. 2). This distinction in emphasis between ideal and practice
allows us to develop more sensitive instruments to small acts of participation especially at times
of political censorship. For example, a narrow focus on decision making as a defining
characteristic of participation (as advocated by Carpentier (2006)), can slight off many important
forms of participation that can be as subtle as sharing a laugh at an authority figure or a social
norm, or as productive as making up one’s own joke, meme or remix video.
A focus on participatory practices allows researchers to trace how participatory cultures
can provide potential pathways to participatory politics (Brough and Shresthova, 2012; Kligler-
Vilenchik and Shresthova, 2013; Kahne, Middaugh and Allen (2014). Participatory politics,
argued Jenkins (2014), “offers a more welcoming space for diverse kinds of participants than
traditional politics, enables greater creativity and voice in expressing one’s views, and provides a
gateway to more traditional political activities, such as voting or petitioning” (p. 65). Studying
fan communities is one way of tracing these trajectories, where “key critical conversations
around media” take place, and people teach each other “the skills … needed to exert greater
collective and personal agency” (Jenkins, 2016-2017, p. 5)
Hence, a participation lens is more in tune with reality that is not lived through radical
utopic ideals, but also through the everyday tactics of making-do, where activists are not
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separated in alternative communities, but continue to physically interact and negotiate with the
same system that they symbolically oppose. While a resistance lens abstracts the struggle to its
bare power relations which is important on a theoretical level, a participation lens allows us to
dive deeper into the actual practices of what constitutes resistance, which might themselves be
highly participatory. Hence the value of examining concepts such as every-day resistance (Scott,
1990), and quiet encroachment (Bayat, 2009), which mostly deal with offline practices of
subordinate groups, in relation to the concept of participation (mostly concerned with mediated
spaces), to see how such practices manifest in different settings and by different subjects; what
are these groups participating in, and what are they resistant to?
Negotiation in Cultural Resistance
Negotiating Popular Culture
--- “Popular is political and sometimes pleasurable” (Jenkins, McPherson and Shattuc,
2003)
“Can the subaltern speak?” wondered Chakravorty Spivak (1988), suggesting that even native
intellectuals are limited by their training in the theoretical tools of Western education that
subsequently prevent them from experiencing and reflecting the experiences of non-elites.
Popular culture, often implicated in the production of hegemony and dissemination of dominant
ideology, is accessible to “the broadest spectrum of the society” (Root, 1987, p.10). Can popular
culture or its appropriations provide a stage for the subalterns to speak? Can politics, aided by
the intervention of popular culture, seem more within reach, particularly in societies where the
practices of democratic politics are closed off to the non-elite majorities?
Media scholar John Fiske (2011) suggested that “popular culture capital consists of the
discursive resources by which people can articulate their meanings of their subordination, but not
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their acceptance of it” (p. 135). According to Fiske (2011), popular culture is “shot through with
contradictions” (p. 6), which makes it an inviting terrain for struggle between hegemonic and
subordinate ideologies and for the productivity of its readers. Popular culture offers opportunities
for both evasion and subversion. To Fiske, the pleasure of playing video games is a pleasure of
evasion: evasion from the strict societal control on youth’s time and space, where “the physical
intensity with which the games are played produces moments of jouissance that are moments of
evasion of ideological control” (p. 93).
While evasion is not the same as active resistance in terms of effect or consequences, one
can, nonetheless, be a prerequisite for the other, where “avoiding capture, either ideological or
physical, is the first duty of the guerrilla” (p. 9). To Fiske, such arguments against individually
confined resistance “fail to take into account… the politics of everyday life that occur on the
micro rather than macro level… to account for the differences and potential connections between
interior, semiotic resistances and sociopolitical ones, between meanings and behaviors, between
progressiveness and radicalism, between evasive and offensive tactics". These, Fiske (2011)
argued are "the issues and relationships that are central to the politics of popular culture, and
theories that fail to address them can never offer us adequate insights” (p. 9).
Popular culture is a space where Scott’s hidden transcript resurfaces and becomes
temporally and unofficially public. In claiming to be only passing a story, a song, or retelling a
joke that one overheard, popular culture offers many disguises by which resistance can be
practiced relatively safely (Scott, 1990, p. 164). The raconteurs can distance themselves from the
act of resistance all while articulating it in discourse that might live on to inspire practical
resistance. Functionalist analyses might regard inversions such as the world-up-side down in
drawings, satire, or people’s theatre as a “safety valve… that like carnival harmlessly drains
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away social tensions that might otherwise become dangerous to the existing social order” (p.
168). These analyses however ignore the important “imaginative function” that such inversions
of social classification play (in which powerful becomes powerless and vice versa), and where
we are “forcibly reminded that it is to some degree an arbitrary human creation” (Scott, 1990, p.
168). Hence, the object of study for Scott includes folk tales and tricksters as important
imaginative tools where the “normal categories of order and hierarchy are less than completely
inevitable” (p. 168).
Another important distinction made by Scott (1990) and Bakhtin (1965/2009), is between
the official and unofficial transcripts and the official festival and unofficial carnivals (p. 9).
Popular culture and infra-politics obey different logics than logics of power and dominance
whereby the more homely, crude, profane and grotesque, the more true to one’s origins and more
powerful (in a mythical sense) one becomes. In the carnival, laughter is political: it is
ambivalent, “gay and triumphant and at the same time mocking, deriding. It asserts and denies, it
buries and revives. Such is the laughter of carnival” (p. 12). This is also an important distinction
between official popular culture and cultures of the subaltern. In western cultures, the field of
observation might thus include, “the pub, the tavern, the inn, the cabaret, the beer cellar, the gin
mill… seen by secular authorities and the church as places of subversion” (p. 121). In other
contexts with different historical opponents, sites of subversion vary from coffee shops to
mosques, which often acted as sites of resistance (Al-Fattah, 2010).
Carnivals are not only sites of reversals; they are also sites of renewal which relates to my
interest in social change: “a death that gives birth”. To Bakhtin (1965/2009), the grotesque
realism entailed in carnivals reflects a “phenomenon in transformation, an as yet unfinished
metamorphosis, of death and birth, growth and becoming” (p. 24). It symbolizes a connection
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between past and present and hence it captures the process of cultural change. The carnival is a
new type of communication where hierarchies are collapsed; it thus breeds new forms of speech
and speech patterns (Bakhtin, 1965/2009, p. 16). It shows in the utilization of abusive language,
which though humiliating and mortifying functions as well to revive and renew (p. 16).
Though both Scott (1990) and Bakhtin (1965/2009) examine the role of popular culture
in subverting authority, popular culture is conceived differently by each in both context and
temporality. While Scott examines resistance around the villagers’ ongoing daily activities of
joking, drinking, or storytelling: as a long-term buildup of hidden transcript that may turn public.
Bakhtin’s (2009) resistance on the other hand, is constrained in both space and time; however, its
intensity and visibility are much more pronounced than Scott’s hidden transcript; therefore, they
constitute the spectacle. Bakhtin’s carnival might be the moment the hidden transcript erupts into
public action or transforms into a long-term imaginative project. In order to distinguish itself
from the hidden transcript, it becomes loud, grotesque and shocking. Scott’s hidden transcript
constitutes the cultural practices surrounding our daily lives, while Bakhtin’s carnival can be
seen as the cultural product and consummation (or release) of accumulated outrage. In present
day, it might be the protest, the online video, the hashtag campaign or the street art, one where
grotesque realism of body and speech are transformed into written/visual discourse in remix
parodies, subversive tweets, wall art, or memes of popular official culture.
Additionally, with the steady erosion of boundaries between official and non-official
popular culture, it would be hard to keep using the term resistance with popular culture,
especially when much of the scraps and pieces utilized by modern parodies, are remixes of what
were once objects of both fandom and fascination. Hence, as mentioned earlier, a more fitting
description would be “negotiation”, a term coined by Hall (1993) and revisited by Henry Jenkins
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(1992; 2016). According to Jenkins (2016), “negotiation represents a middle position between
adoration and resistance” (p. 2). While Hall’s concept of a negotiated reading position implies
some fixity, Jenkins (2016) and Gledhill (1988) view negotiation as a process characterized by
flux rather than fixed positions, where “readers move through cycles of proximity and distance,
enchantment and disenchantment, engagement and critique; they work through contradictions,
repudiate negative elements, and embrace potentials.” In the chapter on Egyptian anti-fan
practices, reproductions of mainstream media texts are examined through the lens of negotiation
to uncover which aspects of these texts are accepted or continued and which are revised and
contested (Jenkins, 2016).

Negotiating Tradition
The contrast between two views (one that bids change against tradition and another that
views tradition as a constituent part of change) can be seen in the contrast between Bakhtin’s
(2009) and Scott’s (1990) descriptions of poplar resistance. While the subversive potential of the
carnival is evident as it stands in contrast with the church. Scott (1990) on the other hand,
examined the subversive potential of religion as a major constituent of folk culture. Western
thought, heavily influenced by Marx and Engels’ “Ruling ideas and Ruling classes” (Marx and
Engels, 2006), saw religion as one of the ideological tools for material exploitation. However,
Gurevish (1997) argued, such a dichotomy and separation between laughter and church was
intellectually imposed. To Gurevich, “everybody who lived in medieval Christian society
belonged to different levels of culture. Everybody was Christian and therefore had something in
common with the culture and religiosity of the learned people”. Therefore Gurevich (1997), like
Hall (2006), chose not to speak of popular culture in a pure form, but rather reminded us that “all
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information we can gather concerning popular culture we have to take from written sources. And
these documents were composed by the representatives of the learned strata of society”
(Gurevich, 1997, p. 59).
Everyday resistance can be traced in the spiritual traditions of American slaves, where
their folk songs, and tales were rife with elements of covert dissent. Religion, often a tool of state
domination in the Western consciousness, was used by slaves to resist their subordination. Scott
(1990) and Reed (2005) emphasized these contradictory possibilities of both religious and
cultural texts, where religion can be successfully appropriated to mythologize the role of the
subordinate as well as the dominant. Instead of drawing on themes of loyalty and honor, slaves
drew on themes of justice, freedom, and equality. Themes of deliverance used to justify a life of
slavery for the promise of freedom in the hereafter, were modified for the notion of deliverance
as “freedom now” (Reed, 2005). Gamson (1991) similarly noted the crucial role played by the
catholic base communities in the peasants and workers movement in El Salvador, where
members of these communities immersed themselves in the everyday lives of poor communities
to achieve Paulo Freire’s concept of consecientization or what Duncombe describes as becoming
part of our “common sense”.
While Scott (1990) did not explicitly deny the possibility of false consciousness
1
, he
nonetheless acknowledged subordinates’ capacity for revolutionary action, suggesting that piece-
wise achievements are enough to build social unrest. Scott, interested in the hidden script of
everyday life, did not make the intellectual separation between religion and resistance, nor did he
assume it. This might be partly due to the different contexts in which he drew his observations

1
In using the term False Consciousness, Scott was probably alluding to Marx’s concept of
Ruling ideas, though Marx did not explicitly use the term “False Consciousness”.

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(Malay peasants and the antebellum south) as well as the different subjectivities he dealt with
(black slaves as opposed to carnival predominantly white attendees). Like cultural texts, religion
to Scott was not a monolithic ideology only found in the courts of authority; it too had both a
public and hidden flavor. A public flavor emphasized themes of loyalty and honor, while a
hidden flavor emphasized values of justice and equality. This shows in the difference between
“the public Christianity preached to the slaves by their masters in the antebellum U.S. South and
the religion they practiced when they were not under surveillance,” where in the later, “an
entirely different atmosphere reigned-one of release from the constant guardedness of
domination, permitting dancing, shouting, clapping and participation…. off stage Christianity
stressed the themes of deliverance and redemption, Moses and Promised Land, the Egyptian
captivity, and emancipation” (Scott, 1990, p. 116). In the carnival, celebrators go out to
mockingly protest the church’s authority more than what it preaches, for if religion were not a
tool of physical subordination, it might not have evoked such a challenge. It is this notion of
authorial challenge through popular cultural that this study draws upon from Bakhtain’s work.
Drawing on tradition was not only a characteristic of serf and peasant uprisings, it was
also characteristic of recent movements such as the civil rights movement (Reed, 2005) and the
alter-globalization movements (Pleyers, 2010). One of the biggest challenges facing new
movements, argued Reed (2005), was how to bring “the strengths of tradition to bear on new
conditions” (p. 14). This transition from radically new ideas characteristic of the civil rights
movement was made possible “when attached emotionally and intellectually to the feelings and
ideas found in the old spirituals and gospel songs”. In fact some traditional hymns “could be
carried over into the movement intact, with no changes, because the change of context gave them
new meaning” (p. 15). Pleyers (2010) made a similar observation for the alter-globalization
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movement. Though the public imaginary may envision its activists as radically innovative,
Pleyers (2010) argued that “old and new practices co-exist within alter-globalization movements,
just as many younger activists participate in traditional leftist organizations” (p. 74)
Likewise, Egyptian and Arab youth cultures cannot be viewed in isolation of the past,
which informs their lived experience. In their subversive creative responses, they produce both
‘residual’ and ‘emergent’ cultural forms (Williams, 1978). One of the defining elements of their
tradition is religion as it is practiced in mosques and at homes, and enacted through rituals,
shaping their views of social change and meanings of resistance. Another defining element is
their cultural heritage in songs, popular myths and jokes. Both work to sometimes support,
sometimes constraint movements only to affirm an ongoing dialectic between culture and social
action.
Online Spaces of Experience
Scott (1990) argued that subordinate groups must carve out for themselves social spaces,
an offstage, insulated from control and surveillance from above where discourses of “negation
can be formed and articulated.” (p. 118). In such spaces, associations are developed. The
development of associations, according to Tocqueville (1835/2006) starts with an intellectual tie,
where men share an opinion, followed by meeting in small assemblies. This is culminated by the
transformation of a civic association into a political one, whereby
They form something like a separate nation within the nation and a government within
the government… they have no rights to make laws, but they do have the power to attack
existing laws and to formulate, by anticipation, laws which should take the place of the
present ones. (p. 190)
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In everyday resistance, assemblies take place in the off stage of “the pub, the tavern, the inn, the
cabaret, the beer cellar, the gin mill”. Yet, Egyptian and Arab youth, structurally impeded by the
state’s suspicion of assemblies and their own self-censorship, hardly find a chance for such
assemblies to become widely public except for the rare moments of public dissidence that are
soon silenced and contained. As Tocqueville noted, “despotism, by its very nature suspicious,
sees the isolation of men as the best guarantee of its own permanence” (p. 509). In democratic
contexts however, where the freedom to write is not repressed, Tocqueville makes the leap
between civic and political realms through the newspaper, which he argued, “gives publicity to
the feeling or idea that had occurred to them all simultaneously but separately” (p. 518)
Internet to Egyptian and Arab youth acts as an offstage for the formation of a counter-
ideology, yet one not free of struggles. As Howard (2010) noted, “in countries where political
parties are illegal, the internet is actually more important, because it provides the only
infrastructure for political communication.” (182). Therefore, while it is important to
acknowledge that Internet technologies do not negate the socio-political context that gave rise to
the political grievances fueling the Arab uprisings, it is also equally important to recognize the
value of the Internet as an alternative space for forming opinions and building associations. The
associations formed though not the epitome of equality (in terms of access, privileged Egyptian
youth are still at an advantage), or freedom of expression (online identities might be anonymous
and subject to surveillance), they nonetheless, constitute a valuable asset in an otherwise
restricted political environment. Their online presence constitutes a “networking, decentered
form of organization and intervention, characteristic of the new social movements, mirroring,
and counteracting, the networking logic of domination in the information society” (Castells,
1997, p. 362)
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The potential of this space is maximized over two dimensions 1) the artistic creative
dimension where art can carry multiple potentials of meaning without openly criticizing the state
2) a horizontal expansion of the notion of public sphere. In these spaces, wider audiences can be
reached with impactful messages utilizing the digital affordances of audio and visual effects.
Conversations in online spaces, though sometimes dubbed inferior due to their ‘virtual’ aspect,
are arguably less ephemeral than their offline counterparts (by virtue of ongoing comments,
shares and re-tweets). They are ubiquitous in that they seep through our daily lives making bits
and pieces visible to others. In the context-less posts or videos, youth can state an opinion
otherwise not feasible or opportune in an offline setting or start a discussion about it. Their
textual/visual nature highlights ideas at the expense of body language and charisma, and hence
may highlight personalities otherwise not recognizable in offline settings or even printed ones
(due to structural limitations of access). It is predisposed to the imaginary as users have to
imagine the posture and the tone of the poster in a post or the wider audience of an online video.
In the restricted context of fascist regimes, the process of imagining a distinct audience like
oneself can be a first step towards forging a perceived collective identity. As Juris and
Khasnabish (2013), noted
Online tools, such as movement-related forums, blogs, wikis, and emerging forms of
social networking represent new modes of collectively producing and distributing
knowledge in ways that reflect activists’ emerging utopian subjectivities and ideals with
respect to directly democratic practice, horizontal coordination, and the free and open
flow of information. (p. 21)
It is important to note, nonetheless, that new media technologies have a primary
dominant use: “as essential support for the global transmission of administrative, military and
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commercial intelligence, and the enhanced surveillance of labor” (Iain A. Boal quoted in Reed,
2005, 277). Hence, activists see it as a “site of struggle where with mobility, flexibility,
imagination, and daring they may actually have some tactical advantages over their often stodgy,
bureaucracy-bound opponents”, thereby creating, what Reed (2005) calls, a “new media culture
of resistance” (p. 277). Furthermore, with states themselves becoming increasingly tech-savvy
(Morozov, 2012), and with more state apparatuses and global conglomerates creating a strong
and professional web presence (mainstreaming the web), the pressure is mounting on
independent news sources such as Indymedia to compete for “viewers not users” (Reed, 2005, p.
278).
The question “Can the subaltern speak?”, has been complicated by the muddying of
classical online/offline barriers and the proliferation of technologies, that though subject to
possibilities of co-optation, government surveillance and a digital divide still constitute a brighter
potential when contrasted with the grimmer prospects of a despotic regime that stunts all open
forms of political and sometimes civic expression. Outside a framing of class stratification there
can be several degrees of the subaltern, uniting and diverging at various points in the ongoing
struggle against political subjugation. Internet technologies are not separate from our present day
realities, and therefore should not be excluded from any analysis of social and cultural change.
Theoretical Contingencies
Historians can omit the experiences of the underrepresented, in their pursuit of the
general and universal in understanding traditional historical accounts (Jenkins, McPherson and
Shattuc, 2003). Therefore, Jenkins et al. (2003) emphasize the importance of particularity,
contextualism, and situationalism in writing about popular culture. Writing about one’s own
culture, particularity inspires us to look for points of entries at places “where theories don’t fit
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the shape of our own experience” to “bridge the gap between theory and experience [leading] us
to more nuanced theories of how popular culture works” (p. 15). Popular texts do not stand
alone, but rather exist in relation to a broad range of other discourses (Jenkins et al, 2003).
Hence, Contextualism urges us to place “historical detail within broader social and ideological
frameworks… [to] illuminate the experiences of the underrepresented” (p. 17). By emphasizing
that “texts and practices have temporal and spatial properties… existing in particular places at
particular times for particular audiences” (p. 18), cultural analysts can preserve the integrity of
the situation.
Many perspectives rooted in Marxist theory focus on the elite economic exploitation of
working class citizens through ruling ideologies. At the heart of such perspectives is the
placement of church power, popular culture and more recently mass media as synonymous to
and furthering of state power through popular distractions. Though this study borrows heavily
from such analyses of power, it does so with the expectation that the same binaries between
resistance and state, church and enlightenment might not equally apply to societies where
antagonism towards religious institutions is not equally harbored or historically motivated as
they were in Europe. It recognizes that religion and specifically Islam as a dominant religion in
the region is a constituent part of the make-up of its daily subject, even its secular constituencies.
While moderate Islamists movement such as the Muslim brotherhood along with the secular
parties of the Left have fallen out of favor of many of the young protesters, one cannot say the
same for Islam in both its spiritual and ritualistic components, which are weaved into the
everyday life of its Arab subjects, however not without challenge to the dominant appropriations
of it. This focus on mainstream Muslim populations, allows us to shift focus from the media-
sensational extremist fringe groups (such as Da’esh and Al Qaeda) and outlier Muslim countries
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(such as Saudi Arabia and Iran) that have and continue to dominate the discussions of Middle
Eastern populations, to recognize that these populations rarely exist along clearly defined
ideological lines and that the so-called Islamists exist on a spectrum and are not necessarily
oppositional to democracy.
This study also departs from purely structuralist analyses and their emphasis on class
grievances and the universality of struggle. Though class struggle is ubiquitous in almost all of
the case studies examined, it nonetheless, does not define the struggle. Since the 1952 revolution
brought the Egyptian military to power (usually from the ranks of middle class Egyptians),
resistance against subordination and corruption has become the hallmark of the struggle. This
struggle is not sought at a macro-level between political parties and state; this study rather
descends to the daily struggles of young adults, and their reality of resistance and negotiation that
is neither purely socialist, nor purely intellectual or secular. It is a culture of resistance that does
not necessarily deny its roots, in which popular culture and religion are not only hegemonic tools
of subordination (a la Gramsci), but also tools of articulation and appropriation.
At the same time, the goal of this study is not to romanticize or celebrate youth
subcultures as heroic or utopic. In privileging the hidden transcript, Scott (1990), was also
advancing a homogenous heroic picture of the subordinates as individuals unified by their
indignities and their common aspiration for freedom and justice. Hence, to Scott, actions such as
pilfering and poaching were viewed as resistance in disguise. This disregards the possibility that
humans may be motivated by short term gains such as privilege and aspirations of upward
mobility, not to mention the possibility of internalizing the dominant logic. Scott (1990) rather
addresses these possibilities as anomalies to a trend of hidden resistance. Bakhtin as well, in
emphasizing the subversive element of carnivals, overlooks the fact that “cruelty, hate and
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massacre could be the components of carnival” (Gurevich, 1997, p. 54). Youth subcultures in
Egypt and the Arab world are sites of struggle, yet a struggle that is neither comprehensive nor
unified. Though mostly reflective of a desire for equality and justice, manifestations of this
struggle are not entirely free of misogyny or elitism. Sexual harassments and even rape were
present in later poorly organized protests following the uprisings. Class and ideological
distinctions are reproduced on a daily basis in online videos, memes and tweets that reiterate the
century-old dichotomies between wealth and education, religion and intellectual ability.
In Couldry and Jenkins (2014) “Dialogues on the Participatory Promises of
Contemporary Culture and Politics about participation”, a ubiquitous concern for the dialogue
was the possible co-optation of independent grassroots productions, which translates to a concern
for the purity and authenticity of independent productions from market goals and terminology.
What this study advances instead is an examination of Egyptian and Arab youth in both their
political and socio-economic contexts. This requires adopting a wider definition of popular
culture that neither limits it to the problematic ‘authentic’ nor expands it to “the practices of
everyday life”, but rather defines it as the “forms and activities, which have their roots in the
social and material conditions of particular classes, which have been embodied in popular
traditions and practices” (Hall, 1981/2006, p. 485). Danger arises, Hall (1981/2006) argued,
when “we tend to think of cultural forms as whole and coherent: either wholly corrupt or wholly
authentic”. Though grassroots in origin, producers of online videos, street artists, activists and
bloggers might enthusiastically welcome a source of income amid growing unemployment, and
hence might not mind mainstream co-optation. This does not negate the fact that their
unique/creative grassroots qualities and origin set them apart prior to possible co-optation. In
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aggregate and on the long run, their productions set in motion a new grassroots youth culture, in
which their generations’ consciousness is reflected and put into new codes (Melucci, 1996).
Such movements, argued Juris and Khasnabish (2013), practice a “‘dual politics’ …
strategically building up their own autonomous spaces and networks as spheres for developing
new meanings, subjectivities, and models of sociality, while tactically intervening within the
realm of the state through mass mobilizations, media campaigns, and direct action protests” (p.
381). Therefore, they can influence the state indirectly by making certain issues salient and
influencing public opinion, or by acting as an embodiment of their alternative paradigm or
“models of socioeconomic organization that may gradually migrate more widely” (p. 381). The
productions of these activist youth online groups, therefore, exist on a continuim between
complete independence and possible co-optation over which they may rigidly exist or flexibly
move. A more productive discussion realizes the instability inherent in the meaning of cultural
forms, where
this year’s radical symbol or slogan will be neutralised into next year’s fashion… today’s
rebel folksinger end up, tomorrow on the cover of the Observer colour magazine… what
matters is not the intrinsic or historically fixed objects of culture, but the state of play in
cultural relations. (Hall, 2006, p. 484)
The approach of this study, seeks to neither confirm nor challenge, but rather to examine
our assumptions about movements in different contexts and settings for the sake of enriching the
body of knowledge in the areas of cultural studies and social movements. Juris and Kasnabish
(2013) pointed out how the concerns of different transnational movements were shaped to an
extent by their place-based context. Hence, this study seeks to forgo the old dichotomies between
tradition and enlightenment, fantasy and reality out of conviction that “reality and fantasy don’t
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inhabit separate spheres, they coexist and intermingle. Reality needs fantasy to render it
desirable, just as fantasy needs reality to make it believable” (Duncombe, 2007, p. 9-10).
Research Questions
In three case studies that span the online realm of cultural/political practices of Egyptian
young adults (Online satirical videos, resistance songs, and anti-fandom spaces), I try to capture
what Duncombe described as attempts at “changing reality” in Egypt and some Arab-speaking
countries. Three main overarching questions run through all my case studies:
RQ1: How do Egyptian and Arab youth articulate agency to sustain (or not) the cultural
and social movements accompanying the Arab Spring uprisings? How are cultural
texts/products used to reimagine the political and social order by Egyptian activists and
youth post-Arab spring?
RQ2: In enacting their agency, what are online youth participating in? What are they
resistant to?
RQ3: How do they negotiate and reconcile their traditions and daily rituals with their
modern visions for the future?
Methods
This study argues that attention to the culture of movements (Reed, 2005) becomes a
necessity when political life is stunted in the context of a post-conflict political situation that is
dismissive and hostile to open political criticisms. The hidden transcripts of Egyptian and Arab
young adults are traced in the worlds of online vlogging, revolutionary music videos and the
anti-fandom satirical Facebook pages, while discussing the affordances and contingencies of
each within their proper social and historical contexts. This study employs a variety of research
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methods combining in-depth interviews and focus group with creative producers and fans with
textual and visual analyses of their online productions. The transcripts examined, though publicly
visible, are nonetheless hidden in their symbolic meaning, artful connotations and playful nature.
These forms of cultural resistance should not be placed in opposition to traditional forms of
practicing politics, however, they should be thought of “as a condition of practical resistance
rather than a substitute for it” (Scott, 1990, p. 191).
Positionality
Juris and Khasnabish asserted, “our location in relation to the perceived center of events
produces very different kinds of encounters and accounts" (p. 369). They added that, “any
purported natural stance is ultimately complicit with the status quo, reproducing domination by
allowing the current order of things to go unquestioned” (p. 373). Hence, my positionality as an
Egyptian Muslim researcher might produce a very different account from a Western non-Muslim
perspective. I position myself as an engaged researcher, as someone who is not only interested in
tracing expressions of cultural resistance, but also as someone who is affected by the wider social
forces shaping the movement and its actors. However, despite my investment in what Juris and
Khasnabish, termed “activist research”, I do not intend to offer celebratory accounts of the
movements surveyed, balancing my accounts with a cultural critique of their practices. Cultural
critique requires us to remain mindful of the “the lingering hierarchies, inequalities, and
exclusions along axes of race, class, gender, nationality and social location that continue to shape
our ethnographic engagements” (p. 375). This cultural critique, however, distances itself from
unproductive comparisons between a non-Western phenomenon against a Western ideal, to
examining each phenomenon based on its own merits and contextual and situational
particularity.
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In this study, I combine elements of ethnographic research such as participant
observation of online practices, and fandom spaces with semi-structured interviews with creative
and fan participants to examine what Swidler describes as actors’ interpretations in the public
context in which “cultural understandings are brought to bear”.
Subject
The subject in my research is not necessarily the leader or activist. Unlike studies which
focus on bringing accounts of the tech-savvy, specifically Western educated, English-speaking
celebrity activists, my subjects, though mostly tech-savvy are generally non-mainstream,
marginalized, non-Western educated, non-affluent activists. They are not protected by their
public name, nor international affiliations, and are at a perilous position due to their lack of
popularity among relatively exclusionary political circles in Egypt (for either their age, class or
political affiliation). I am concerned with those existing over the spectrum trying to find a voice
behind the purported anonymity of the Internet and the ambiguity of art performances.
Conclusion
Doug McAdam (1994) noted, “Given the entrenched political and economic opposition
movements are likely to encounter, it is often true that their biggest impact is more cultural than
narrowly political and economic” (p. 49). Cultural resistance in its various discourses and
practices, whether intentionally resistant or unconscious works to create fissures in the social
structure over time, perhaps prepping the terrain for what would be considered of ‘radical
significance’. The Egyptian uprising was a movement that has taken on different faces and styles
of action. Analyzing an Egyptian uprising thus demands a decentering of our understanding of
resistance from the political imperative to the wider space of everyday acts of resistance. This
entails dealing with a different type of subject as well: a subjugated post-colonial, yet global
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subject, who can take the form of unlikely actors such as a satirical vlogger, RAP singer, or a
creative anti-fan.
The notion of movement implies continuity, yet possibly continuity in an another form,
and the notion of conflict implies an opponent, yet not necessarily one positioned in power, but
one that might be as wide as cultural norms and practices or as narrow as our own identity make-
up. Actors are dynamically positioned, tactically navigating between political and cultural
bastions, using one to set the stage for the other in a reflexive motion: in Verta Taylor’s (1989)
words, they sometimes form a “movement in abeyance”. The challenge they pose is dual, in the
sense that it can oppose or counter oppose traditional norms or values, depending on the physical
or temporal contexts. Social movements are not discrete events severed from their colonial past
or bleak present of civil strife. They operate within larger dynamics that pose both structural and
symbolic limitations on actions advanced (Swidler, 1995). This fits with the view of social
change as a wave that is not only an event, but “a motion” and “a process”: “the movement of
forces, some visible above the surface, much of it unseen, rising from the bottom up”. In this
view, change as a process is “like the ocean itself, never stops moving” (Chang, 2014, p. 6).
As traditional means of expression are stunted, Egyptian and Arab-speaking youth look
for creative ways to express their opinions and subvert parental and political authorities. For
many this means turning to the ostensible benign and ambiguous worlds of humor and music. In
the following chapters, I trace manifestations of cultural resistance in the online productions of
Egyptian and Arab youth, post-Arab spring. Chapter 1 examines the potential of humor at times
of social transformation and increased polarization within and between nations. Utilizing a
qualitative thematic analysis of online video productions of Arab Internet satirists, it examines
instances of disguised dissent and consciousness-raising utilized by Arab youth away from
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closed-off public spaces. Chapter 2 traces cultural resistance in revolutionary songs pre and post-
Arab spring. Utilizing a thematic analysis of revolution-themed songs and a focus group with
their fans, this chapter seeks to highlight themes less openly discussed (or possible) in traditional
venues of political communication through the analysis of songs as a cultural subtext and
preserver of both affect and memory; it utilizes the focus group findings to examine the
collective meaning these songs acquired as they were sung and circulated. Chapter 3 examines
Egyptian youth online practices of parodies and remixes through textual analysis of creative
content, and in-depth interviews with page admins of some of the most popular Egyptian satirical
Facebook pages, remix artists and vloggers. Most of these are non-professional Facebook pages
dedicated to utilizing scraps from mainstream popular culture and Sisi’s propaganda in passing
social and political critiques through memes, parodies and remixes. In this chapter, I argue that
instead of a shared fandom of a media-text, the reviled media-text of power be it Egypt’s military
president, Sisi or his propaganda or their parents’ generation media productions, becomes the
meeting point of their anti-fandom, where they define themselves not around the media-text but
in everything else that this media-text is not. Chapter 4 is the conclusion and an overarching
chapter that interrogates the role of tradition in the previous chapters/case studies, how it is
contested or incorporated in youth’s visions for the future.

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CHAPTER 1: SUBVERSIVE HUMOR IN ONLINE VIDEOS OF ARAB
YOUTH

Five years following the Tahrir square uprising in 2011, Shady Hussein, a young
Egyptian activist and correspondent for a light comedy TV show independently recorded a
YouTube video in which he distributed balloons made out of condoms to Egyptian police
occupying Tahrir square on January 25
th
, 2016, to usurp a rerun of the protests. He was later
widely criticized and threatened for “disrespecting” and “tricking” the police into believing he
was a supporter celebrating their day with balloons. Shady’s video, nonetheless, was a reflection
of a widely felt disappointment that five years later and following countless victims, January 25
th

was still celebrated as the “Day of the Police.” He expressed this in an interview:
January 25
th
should be the day of the revolution, the Egyptian police pages are
filled with threats such ‘as let them go down, we’ll show them’… Okay we are
not going to protest, and we will not chant, for with one bullet they can take us
down, but we will stay here to laugh at you and ridicule you. (Mahdi, 2016, para.
4)
Shady’s comment signaled a general disenchantment with traditional politics and a growing
interest among Egyptian and Arab youth living under dictatorships in “new forums and new
forms” of expression to sustain the momentum of their movements (Windt, Jr., 1972, p. 11).
To many Egyptian and Arab youth, the temporary taste of freedom offered by the
uprisings was difficult to forgo, and subverting authority has become the hallmark of a
generation born out of the 2011 uprisings. This proved difficult to maintain with new, yet more
repressive regimes, resorting to nationalist polarizing discourse or state-sanctioned violence.
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Arab youth’ struggle against authority was further complicated by the long standing cultural
tradition of respect for authority of parents, teachers and more generally political leaders. Hence,
in their struggle for voice and a distinct youthful identity, they were not only challenging
political powers, but deconstructing social myths upon which these powers rest, where political
criticism worked to unsettle both political and cultural taboos. This dialectic between the cultural
and political realms, demands a wider understanding of politics where it is not only
representational in nature but also cultural, a “domain in which meanings are constructed and
negotiated, where relations of dominance and subordination are defined and contested” (Jackson,
1991, p. 200). The interplay between parental and political authorities complicates youth
attempts at political change and demands an analysis of resistance at both the cultural and
political levels. With a focus on Egypt and Jordan, this chapter utilizes a qualitative thematic
analysis of satirical online videos, to examine instances of disguised dissent and consciousness-
raising utilized by youth away from closed-off public spaces.
As traditional means of expression are stunted, Arab youth look for creative ways to
express their opinions and subvert parental and political authorities at the murky boundaries
between jokes and insults, seriousness and frivolity. They resort to online spaces—relatively
unconquered by parents and political authorities—to challenge authority and carve out new
identities, yet utilizing techniques borrowed from comedy and entertainment to disguise elements
of challenge in their discourse. For many this means turning to the ostensible benign and
ambiguous world of humor.

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Satire and Censorship in Arab countries
While many Arab countries experienced the ripples of the Arab Spring, this chapter
focuses on instance of political satire in Egypt and Jordan as two major Arab countries that
experienced the Arab Spring in differential ways. They are also two of the most active producers
of satirical online videos (Naar, 2014). The history of humor in Egypt can be traced as far back
as the time of the pharaohs, argued Houlihan (2001) and Salvatore & Ergül (2014). It was not an
overstatement, when Morris (2006) remarked that “Egyptians have a perverse sense of humor”.
Perhaps synonymous with their history of oppressive rulers, Egyptians may have turned to
humor as a coping or protective strategy. Poets and song writers such as Bayram El-Tunsi and
Sayed Darwish composed satirical ballads critical of the British occupation, and the Egyptian
monarchy. In Jordan, the well-known poet ‘Arar wrote satirical poems criticizing Jordanian
society (Al-Sijill, 2009). While Egyptian political satire took on various shapes from print to
songs and performance, Jordanian satire remained concentrated in satirical columns and cartoons
(Al-Sijill, 2009).
However, even the tempered freedom of expression prior to the 1940s began to shrivel
under nationalist claims that rising Arab nations cannot withstand satire. Criticism of political
leaders was not tolerated in both Egypt and Jordan. Therefore, Egyptians came to be known for
their play on words, otherwise known as puns, and colloquially “Alsh”. To Bakhtin, writing
under the name Voloshinov (1929), words and their meaning were a site of struggle where,
[t]he very same thing that makes the ideological sign vital and mutable is also, however,
that which makes it a refracting and distorting medium. The ruling class strives to impart
a supra-class, eternal character to the ideological sign, to extinguish or drive inward the
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struggle between social value judgements which occurs in it, to make the sign uni-
accentual.
Puns have come to constitute a way of exercising control on the meaning of a word: they have
the power to confuse and frustrate authority all while making light-of a serious situation.
However, since the 2011 uprisings, the accorded sanctity of Egyptian and Arab leaders has been
openly challenged. This was followed by a surge in caricature depictions of Ben-Ali, Mubarak,
Assad, and Saleh on protests signs.
Comedic productions that took aim at cultural traditions on the other hand, were much
more tolerated by authorities. Egyptian plays such as “Madraset Al-Mushaghbeen (School of the
Mischievous)” and “El-‘Iyal Kebret (Kids have grown)” were not only local sensations but were
also widely watched across the Arab world. The Egyptian dialect understood by most Arabs
encouraged Arab countries to acquire a lot of their TV programs from Egypt (Tutton, 2011).
Those two plays not only highlight an inter-generational dilemma, but they also signal a
departure from a culture of reverence and respectful language to a culture of rebelliousness
against an older venerated generation in the figures of teachers and parents (Salem, 2014).
Though written and directed in the 70s and early 80s, they remain very popular among youth
who continually reference them in their jokes, memes and daily conversations. In Egypt and
much of the Arab-speaking world, reverence for the elderly is not only a cultural norm, but one
embedded in Islamic traditions; it becomes problematic, however, when conflated with political
authority (which happens to be elderly as well). Hence, more often than not, political opposition
is equated with “lack of respect” for the elderly or more precisely, authority figures.
While Freedom house (2015a) ranked Egypt’s Internet Freedom as “partly free” in 2014,
this changed to “not free” in 2015, where crackdowns on online activists led to prison sentences
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and in more severe cases life-imprisonment. At the same time, though Freedom house (2015b)
ranked Jordan as partly free with regards to the Internet, this freedom took a plunge in 2014–
2015, when Jordan started cracking down on activists for their social media posts, and closed
news websites for not obtaining a license. Regional influences on political rights, especially
following the Arab Spring uprisings, were notable; according to Helfont and Helfont (2012),
“after flooding Jordan with economic aid, Saudi Arabia now hopes that Jordan will not only
accept formal membership in the GCC, but will also adopt the GCC model of limited political
rights in exchange for economic stability” (p. 84).
Though satire may constitute a means for safe disrespect in the above contexts, it runs the
risk of overstepping its boundaries when open political criticism is involved. The assassination of
Naji al-Ali in London, the beating of Syrian Ali Farzat (Freedman, 2012), and the persecution of
Egyptian Bassem Youssef in March, 2013, the censorship of his show Al-Bernameg in October
2013 (Abdulla, 2014) shows the extent of threat authorities sometimes see in satire and how their
response can be detrimental in authoritarian contexts.
Authority, Identity and Cultural Resistance
The interplay between authority (in its many forms) and identity, should not be examined
in isolation of Foucault’s concepts of “regimes of truth” and “technologies of power” (Foucault,
1977). To Foucault, political power extends far beyond centralized legitimated authority to a
variety of institutional settings that “cut across the distinctions between the political and the
social, the public and the private” (Dyrberg, 2015, p. 89). Rather than focusing on figures of
authority, he interrogated the conditions of possibility for authority, whereby roles of power and
subjectivity are determined. Foucault noted “how authority comes to constitute, inscribe and
invest itself in the different ways we produce true and false statements about who we are and
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what we should become” (Dean, 1996). This ubiquity of power is also germane to Lakoff and
Johnson’s (2003) concept of unconscious metaphors,
[M]etaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action.
Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is
fundamentally metaphorical in nature. (p. 3)
Consequently, according to Lakoff (2008), political reasoning is largely influenced by
unconscious metaphors such as the Nation-as-Family. This metaphor, he argued, presumes two
idealized versions of the family that correspond to two idealized versions of the nation: the strict
father model that map onto pure conservative politics and the nurturant parent model that map
onto pure progressive politics. In the strict father model, the father supports, protects and lays out
the moral code for what is right and what is wrong while children must be obedient, or suffer
retribution (Lakoff, 2008). While how we think about politics and how we think about
families/gender roles are historically and culturally specific, political systems, including
opposition parties, in Egypt and much of the Arab-speaking world tend to fall into the strict
father model.
Following the January 25, 2011 protests, Ahmed Shafiq, the then-prime-minister, likened
the Egyptian president to the father of the people, suggesting that it is not appropriate to demand
his departure “that way.” Egyptian and Arab nationalist authority figures, like Mubarak,
managed to appeal to the masses for more than half a century by first drawing on notions of
nationalism, and later—as they themselves aged—by drawing on traditional notions of respect
for the elderly. Like Weber’s authority of the “eternal yesterday,” the aged were granted “the
right to prescribe behavior for others in practically all behavior areas” (French & Raven, p. 265),
while dissent was crippled by the social taboo of “disrespect.”
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As political conflict starts to seep into the social fabric of society, political loyalties
reorganize networks of friends and families. However, as Hugh Duncan (1985/2002) noted, “the
conflict between family, school, state, church and art does not resolve itself in the individual by
some kinds of social mechanics. It is a dramatic struggle” (p. 310). The ubiquity of power in
Foucault’s regimes of truth or Lakoff’s metaphors hints at the role of culture in the formation of
primary or complex metaphors, social myths or regimes of truth, as well as the need for an
analysis of resistance at the level of our everyday life: a “technology and practice of resistance
analogous to Michel Foucault's analysis of the technology of domination” (Scott, 1990, p. 20).
This is what James Scott (1990) described as the study of “infrapolitics,” where in contrast to
“the open, declared forms of resistance, which attract most attention,” it is “the disguised, low-
profile, undeclared resistance” (p. 198). To miss it, Scott (1990) argued, “is to miss the immense
political terrain that lies between quiescence and revolt and that, for better or worse, is the
political environment of subject classes” (p. 199) .
One form of Scott’s “disguised, low-profile, undeclared resistance” is Duncan’s
(1985/2002) “sanctioned disrespect,” or comedy (xlix). In comedy, he argued, “we uncover the
ambiguities and contradictions that beset us as we seek to act together” (p. xlix). However, joke
perception and subsequently its pleasure, noted Mary Douglas (1968), are based on congruence
between the joke structure and the social structure. Hence, satirists have to build their jokes on
grounds of non-threatening familiar situations. Through congruence with the social, comedians
not only identify with their audience, but also assert their control of the social situation in their
ability to articulate that which is “widely felt” but “rarely said” (Jenkins, 2007, para. 5). Ali
Kandil, one of the first Egyptian stand-up comedians, stressed this element of congruence:
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it’s not very easy to make people laugh, you may be funny among your friends and
family but to make people, that don’t know you and you don’t know them, laugh, you
have to touch something inside them … talk about a problem that’s troubling them…
give your opinion about an experience they had already gone through, this is stand-up
comedy. (3alNasyia, 2014)
This congruence, however, serves only as a disguise, and an entry point to the much more
complex and subversive functions of humor through “its ruses, its fragmentation, its poaching, its
clandestine nature, its tireless but quite activity, in short its quasi-invisibility” (de Certeau, 1984,
p. 32). By poaching on social situations, jokers “constantly [manipulate] events in order to turn
them into ‘opportunities’” (de Certeau, 1984, p. xix). Hence, jokes are “dependent on time, the
moment of action” (Castello, 2010, p. 72), while jokers, like workers practicing la Perruque,
divert time from the social situations, using scraps from the social context to “cunningly” create
“gratuitous products,” jokes, to signify their ability to control the situation (de Certeau, 1984, p.
3).
Jokes can be particularly valuable at times of social transformation, which are also times
of social conflict and disintegration. In her discussion of political humor in the Arab Spring,
Allagui (2014) noted that “[c]ritical humor makes sense of serious and significant political
problems while at the same time entertaining the audience” (p. 988). Opdycke (2013) also noted
how use of the comic frame by satirists such as Bassem Youssef allowed the audience to reflect
on several perspectives. By existing at the social boundary point between organization and
control on one hand and vitality and relaxed control of consciousness on the other (Douglas,
1968), jokes serve a double function; they confront eroding old structures with emerging cultural
forms, imparting an “expressive form on an emergent perspective within a culture” (Jenkins,
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2007, para. 5); however, they do so in the safety of humor where jokers can always claim to be
simply passing a joke (Scott, 1990). Gordon & Arafa (2014) noted how Youssef drew on
Egyptians’ nostalgia for Nasser’s patriotic songs (Wataniyat) to criticize and mock Morsi.
Humor can also foster a sense of identity among group members; Terrion and Ashforth (2002)
noted how putdown humor “helps foster group identity and cohesion in a temporary group” (p.
55).
Amid the growing polarization characterizing post-Arab-Spring politics and social life,
we ask how Egyptian and Jordanian youth utilize humor to subvert, control, or consolidate
authority in both its cultural and political forms. Furthermore, with the ongoing destabilizing
cultural and political conflict, how do these videos work to define their identity as it relates to
their parents and national boundaries?
Method
This chapter analyses a large selection of online YouTube videos produced by non-
mainstream Egyptian, and Jordanian youth in the period from 2011 to 2014. While countries
such as Libya, Syria, and Yemen fell into violent manifestations of civil strife, both Egypt and
Jordan arguably had some room for the expression of various intensities of political and social
criticisms, especially online. The criteria of selection is the vloggers’ age-group (18–35), and
their humorous semi-professional content. The non-mainstream content is important in
considering what is at stake for these young video producers and hence their need for artistic
performance to disguise elements of dissent. Individual videos are selected based on whether
their titles or descriptions reference a form of authority, identity, or cultural practice. This
selection does not deliberately consider political content a criteria (though some of the videos are
openly political) due to this chapter’s wider conception of politics as outlined earlier. The dataset
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includes 58 videos from the YouTube channels of two vloggers/satirists from Egypt, Joe Tube
(18 videos, from seasons 1 & 2, 8–10 minutes each) and AlBernameg (15 videos, from seasons 1,
2 & 3, 30–45 minutes each), and a YouTube channel from Jordan by Kharabeesh, N2OComedy
(25 videos, 3–8 minutes each) featuring a variety of amateur to semi–professional comedians.
The choice of these channels is based on their ranking as some of the most subscribed or most
viewed video channels in Egypt and Jordan. In a recent infographic of Arab YouTube viewership
by Startappz, Kharabeesh, the producer of N2OComedy ranked second in viewership in the Arab
world (Farhat, 2014; Boshers, 2013), while Albernameg and JoeTube ranked second and third in
most subscribed YouTube channels in Egypt (VidStatsX, 2016). Whereas much of these reports
rely on different criteria for determining the popularity of these shows, and are categorized by
either country or genre but sometimes not both, JoeTube, AlBernmag and N2OComedy
consistently show in the lists of top viewed or subscribed YoutTube channels locally and across
the Arab-speaking world (Boshers, 2013; Gamaleldin 2016).
Youssef Hussein, an online satirist and supporter of Morsi, dedicated his online show
JoeTube to criticizing the military while breaking down its myth of impeccability. Relying on
simple resources, Hussein set up his camera to record videos in his Nasr City apartment. JoeTube
now has more than 1.6 million subscribers to their YouTube channel, and over 150 million views
(Gamaleldin, 2016). Likewise, Bassem Youssef, a medical surgeon-turned-comedian from
Egypt, started off with an online show, B+, for satirical political commentary. It too was
recorded at his Ma’adi apartment with the help of his friends. Later, Youssef’s show turned
mainstream following the ouster of Mubarak and became highly popular among youth.
Kharabeesh (scratches), an online youth-led Jordanian startup launched in 2008, has
several YouTube channels that feature rising satirists and stand-up comedians in individual or
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group comedy sketches (Awad, 2012). Their online show, N2OComedy: Tahshish Kanony
(Legal Toking), tackles topics ranging from parent-child relations, peer relations, relationships
between sexes, education, psychology, and social habits, to the effect of wider government
policies on their future. They started with amateur equipment, yet became one of the most widely
watched YouTube channels in the region. N2O has more than 550 thousand subscribers with
more than 96 million views (Gamaleldin, 2016).
It is important to note, that these satirists exist on spectrum when it comes to levels of
professionality and political dissent. While one of them, Bassem Youssef, is now 42, which is
older than the set age criteria, he was 36 when he started; it also important to examine his early
contributions as one of the pioneers of online political-satire in post-Arab Spring Egypt, not to
mention his target audience which is predominantly young (Durham, 2014). While the
comedians examined may self-identify differently, as either regular vloggers, activists, or stand-
up comedians, they all share aspects of being non-mainstream self-starters who utilize humor to
introduce challenge in their online shows.
This chapter employs theoretical thematic analysis, where concepts from literature inform
the coding and identification of themes (Braun & Clarke, 2006), nonetheless, in a reflexive
process that allows the introduction of new themes informed by the data (Saldana, 2009). In the
first cycle of coding, instances of humor (e.g., conversational or situational jokes) (Sen, 2012)
were extracted as the unit of analysis from the script of online satirical videos (transcribed in
Arabic, and translated to English). They were initially coded using process coding as detailed by
Saldana (2009), where the guiding principle in assigning codes was the function of humor (e.g.,
subverting or controlling). In the second cycle of coding, data is analyzed for similarities and
differences to come up with subthemes (Glaser & Strauss, 1967, pp. 101–116). In identifying the
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themes, and the subthemes, “the keyness‟ of a theme [was] not necessarily dependent on
quantifiable measures– but in terms of whether it captures something important in relation to the
overall research question” (Braun & Clarke, 2006, p. 10).

Findings and Analysis
Context for Analysis
Political leaderships in much of the Arab-speaking countries are legitimated through a
complex of long standing power relations that include the military, state-media and pro-
government religious authority. Myths of leaders’ impeccability, military efficiency and state
media credibility work variably to embed these power relations into citizens’ imagination of
social order. In Egypt, following the 1952 military-led revolution, in which the monarchy
subservient to Britain was overthrown, the Egyptian military was upheld as the people’s ally. To
this day, this myth continues to dominate discourse regarding the political legitimacy of military
rule. Recently, in what was perceived as a favorable move, the Egyptian army decided not to side
with Mubarak during the 18-days of the Tahrir sit-in. Since then, it was common to hear the
slogan “The military, the people… are one hand” chanted in Tahrir square (Ketchley, 2014, p.
155).
Political authorities across the Arab world manage to perpetuate their myths via different
platforms, from informal allusions in popular culture to the more formal religious Friday
sermons, and educational curriculums. In Egypt, for instance, it has often been reiterated falsely
in media and popular culture, that prophet Muhammed said “Egyptian soldiers are earth’s best
soldiers” (Mandour, 2013, para. 7). In monarchies such as Jordan and Saudi, discourses of ruler
obedience are often invoked to legitimize their rule (Affan, 2014). This conflation between
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political and religious discourses often throw average Arab citizens at odds with criticizing
authority on basis of corruption or incompetence.
The visibility of the political role of the Egyptian army was substantially revealed during
the 2011 uprising, Jordan on the other hand, argued Helfont and Helfont (2011) became, “a key
battleground between those who would like to see a more democratic region, and those who
would like to maintain economic stability” (p. 82). Hence, though Jordan experienced the ripples
of the Arab uprisings through a succession of protests, it did not reach the point of overthrowing
the well-established monarchy along with its network of power. Confrontations remained
confined to clashes with police. Additionally, the makeup of Jordan of both East Bankers (those
with historical roots on the East Bank of the Jordan River) and the West Bankers (Jordanians of
Palestinian descent) largely put questions of national identity and Palestine at the heart of many
of their political and social debates.
1) Subverting Authority
Following the violent crackdown on protesters in both Egypt and Jordan (with variable
outcomes), many acts of resistance were reformulated by youth to target the underlying myths
rather than just protesting the actions of authorities. A common theme of subversion runs
through the videos examined. Yet, subversion manifests itself with various political and social
intensities depending on the context. While Egyptian videos were more intense with political
criticism that occasionally flowed to the social realm, Jordanian videos, probably influenced by
the less intense local context, mostly invoked the political through the social. The target of
subversion in Jordan was more diffuse, yet more in conversation with the larger themes of Arab-
nationalism and globalization.

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Subverting political authority.
Subverting the leader. The Arab Spring uprisings saw the first public subversion of a
leader’s figure, starting with Ben-Ali, followed by Mubarak. Mubarak pictures were taken down
from public squares in euphoric celebrations, and protest signs parodied him as the devil, Hitler,
and the laughing cow. It comes as no surprise, with Mubarak described as the father of the
people, that the protests were barraged by mainstream media accusations on grounds of
disrespect: a moral weapon for silencing political opposition. However, this unequivocal support
for the leader by state-loyal media changed with the election of Mohammed Morsi, of the
Muslim Brotherhood, who arguably was not viewed as a regime insider (Bradley, 2014).

Prior to Morsi’s ouster by the military, state-loyal media systematically attacked him on
grounds of incompetence. Lamis El-Hadidy, a prominent TV hostess known for her support of
the Mubarak regime, called Morsi, “Loser… Loser… Loser” (MediaMasrTv14, 2013). Abdul-
Fattah El-Sisi, on the other hand was often portrayed as the military rescuer from instability. As a
military general, Sisi, drew legitimacy from the myth of military efficiency and organization,
which were both lacking in post-revolution Egypt. Morsi’s supporters, however, were first to
take aim at Sisi, exposing what they viewed as the hypocrisy of state-loyal media in magnifying
Morsi’s failures while downplaying Sisi’s. “Morsi was not supported by the military, state
security, Justice Department, nor the media, so he failed; there were reasons for his failure. The
question is, how could [Sisi] with all these resources fail?” exclaimed Youssef Hussein. Hussein
was not only challenging Sisi’s presumed competency, he was also alluding to Sisi’s complex
network of power which was masked by an ostensible separation of authorities. The segment
concluded with a movie scene, featuring Sisi’s face superimposed over a character being called
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“Loser… Loser… Loser” (JoeTube, 2014f). Bassem Youssef, poked fun at Morsi’s overuse of
his index finger in threatening his enemies by altering his speech video to have it shoot out laser
beams instead (Albernameg, 2013).
Other subversions relied upon developing an incongruity between the person’s comments
and their actions (Apte, 1985). Hussein utilized incongruity to challenge state media attempts at
portraying Sisi as a world-renowned leader. Commenting on Sisi’s visit to the US and his speech
to the UN General Assembly in September, 2014, Hussein noted how he was not formally
received by president Obama or any other US official as claimed by some media outlets, but was
rather received by the Egyptian minister of foreign affairs (JoeTube, 2014c). Photoshopping a
wooden nose over Sisi’s face (which kept elongating every time he, arguably, told a lie), Hussein
remixed parts of Sisi’s speech to the UN with his local Egyptian speeches to show the
discrepancy between the two discourses. While one spoke of human rights and justice, the other
prioritized state sovereignty over human rights and dignity. He contrasted Sisi’s proclamation to
the UN that Egypt is “a civil democratic state,” with a local Egyptian news segment detailing
nation-wide governor appointments, all filled by military officials. Less direct, the N2O team
relied on incongruity to expose the hypocrisy of appointed parliamentary members, using
parodies instead of actual segments to juxtapose the members’ promises of prosperity and
fighting corruption with their documented actions of cronyism and fraud (N2OComedy, 2013b).

Subverting the military and state apparatuses. Egyptian youth criticisms of the military
ranged from questioning its vast and misplaced authorities to criticizing its performance at its
designated functions. Following the July 3
rd
military takeover, Sisi asked Egyptians for an
authorization to support a “war on terrorism,” which turned out to be a crusade against political
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opposition, especially the Muslim brotherhood (Hamid, 2015). Wondering at the military’s
inability to face ISIS’ ‘real’ threat of terrorism, Hussein joked, “So, this authorization is only for
fighting the ‘potential’ terrorism not the one ‘for real’” (JoeTube, 2014e [video]). With pictures
of Macaroni and olive oil in the background (alluding to the military’s vast food industry),
Hussein exclaimed, “how about [the army/police] leave politics to protect borders instead… Oh,
no, that won’t work… they did not pay 50,000 LE bribes [to join the police] to serve us, sons of
dogs” (JoeTube, 2014b [video]). The N2O team addressed a similar rhetoric of security over
democracy, by parodying the transnational show Who wants to be a millionaire? Asking: “What
is the country of safety and security?” they offered only Scandinavian countries as options.
When the contestant asked for a friend’s help—the prime minister—he was met by a resounding
“Jordan,” as the only answer.
More specific criticisms tackled the military’s incompetency sometimes masked by their
guarded secrecy and claimed “control.” In a collaboration between Hussein and fellow vlogger
Tamer Gamal, they enacted a scene in what appeared to be the private office of a high military
official. Following several unsuccessful attempts at entering through a biometric authentication
device, Gamal calls from inside the office for Hussein to use the doorknob (JoeTube, 2014a). By
subtly alluding to the military’s economic empire, coupled with an inferior technological
competence, Hussein, worked to subvert the myth of a heroic self-denying military to ultimately
question its legitimacy (JoeTube, 2014a). Addressing the popular argument that “the army
protects us,” Hussein exclaimed “well, haven’t they taken their money!” He likened this to a
carpenter affirming that “he fixed the door for ‘you,’ or a plumber nudging you, ‘I fixed the
pipes for you’.” He wondered,
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So apparently everyone gets paid, except Egypt’s army, they work for free! [asking
rhetorically] Have you ever heard of army officers taking the highest salaries in Egypt?
Or officers with allotted apartments, residential areas and private beaches? That’s why
they are ‘earth’s best soldiers’! (JoeTube, 2014b [video])
Fady Idrees, a Tunisian stand-up comedian of N2OComedy, addressed the more salient and
notorious state apparatus of intelligence, and its undeclared job of spying on citizens in most of
the Arab-speaking countries. His political criticism, though originating in the political, soon
flowed into the social where he suggested that it should not be surprising if family members
spied too, noting that parental and state authoritarianism share the same mentality (N2OComedy,
2012a).

Subverting state media. Though Egyptian youth activists were initially celebrated by
state media as the “generation of the revolution,” this position soon turned into strategic
antagonism, where they were accused of treason and receiving foreign funds (currently
criminalized by the new Egyptian constitution re-written following the military takeover of
2013). They harnessed the digital media capacities of storage and recording to document,
compare and contrast the differential state-loyal media treatment of the same topics over time,
depending on who was in power.
Bassem Youssef pioneered criticism of state-loyal media in numerous episodes of his
earlier and later shows (Albernameg, 2011b, 2011c). In an episode titled “I’lam Al-Darabuka”
(Media of Darabuka: colloquial for belly dancing rhythms indicative of wavering), he noted how
state-loyal media returned to grooming the interim military-council leader as it used to do with
Mubarak. Accompanied by a goblet drum player, Youssef remixed media segments recorded
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during Mubarak’s rule and others recorded during military council’s rule, to expose their return
to state-loyalty despite their claims of reform (Albernameg, 2011a).
Alongside exposing state media’s subservience to the state narrative, Egyptian youth
sought to uncover the absurdity of this narrative as well. Following several terror attacks in
Sinai, Sisi issued a proclamation demanding the forced migration of Rafah/Sinai residents near
the Egyptian border with Israel under the claim of creating a secure buffer zone. Hussein noted
state media’s euphemisms in replacing words such as “displacement” and “forced evacuation”
with a benign word such as “moving,” while portraying those affected as “pleased and content”
(JoeTube, 2014d). With an audience of mostly young city dwellers (away from the remote
Sinai), Hussein helped them visualize the absurdity of this proclamation through humorous
incongruity and exaggeration. Posing as a TV anchor, Hussein received calls from ‘content’
Rafah residents expressing their delight (and taking selfies) with their army-bombed houses. This
is contrasted with a video of what appeared to be a more “authentic” account from real Rafah
residents, who were outraged by the governments’ decision and dismayed at the loss of their
homes and source of livelihood (JoeTube, 2014d). Nudging media’s lack of credibility as well,
Youssef, jokingly noted how pundits notoriously cite themselves as sources for their own
statements (Albernameg, 2012b).
Subverting cultural authority. Not all subversions were political; Jordanian youth,
unable to criticize political figures or their policy decisions, focused on wider social phenomena,
breaking down social taboos and questioning cultural habits. Online spaces, perhaps presumed
by youth to be parent-free, enabled their criticisms to flow more freely without fear of backlash.
In two episodes titled, “The Father” and “The Mother,” Ragaee El-Kawas, a Jordanian stand-up
comedian, took aim at parental authority (N2OComedy, 2011a; N2OComedy, 2011d). Building
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on familiar social situations and common expressions used by parents, he noted their desire for
controlling the movement, and financial spending of their children. “A father thinks himself a
detective: ‘why is your door closed?’ ‘Why are you sleeping on your tummy?’ ’what are you
watching?’ ‘Oh! The weather channel!’” El-Kawas recounted (N2OComedy, 2011d [video]).
Criticisms of authority expanded to cover managerial authority. El-Kawas noted how
managers drew on team spirit, urging youth to work harder, “so [they] can grow together”;
wondering why it was only managers who grew in the process. “You mean age together… it’s
not a family tie, you know, if it can end suddenly!” he added (N2OComedy, 2011c [video]).
Thus, in the process of drawing laughs, El-Kawas was breaking down taboos that scrutinize
making fun of authority, leaving the audience ambivalent, entertained yet uneasy, about whether
his goal was merely entertainment or subversion.
Youth criticisms of authority flowed fluidly between social and political spaces in a
productive cross-fertilization. Though generally refraining from open criticisms to political
leadership, they took aim at the consequences of failed leadership and its economic policies.
Idrees, used a very familiar social situation to hint at structural inequality:
when asked what will I be when I grow up, I used to say doctor, engineer, etc…
only to find out that I cannot be a doctor just by wanting; Instead, I should have
been asked, does your father have enough money to merit you becoming a doctor?
(N2OComedy, 2013a [video])
Egyptian satirist Bassem Youssef, however, was more direct. Starting off with a political
question, he wondered why Mubarak was not yet tried and sentenced one year after the
revolution. His discourse soon flowed into the social, when he showed state media segments
likening Mubarak to a father, and people to his children. Youssef took aim at the absurdity of an
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older generation’s argument against Mubarak’s removal on grounds of his age and status. In one
of Youssef’s selected media segments, a famous Egyptian actor exonerated Mubarak arguably
for his obliviousness to state atrocities, suggesting, “If someone had ten children, he would not
know if one of them inhaled marijuana, what of a president with 83 million children!” Another
prominent TV personality, described Mubarak as “the one who brought the ‘kids,’ the Internet.”
Youssef exclaimed, “thank God, if it had not been for our father, we would have been still using
smoke signals!” (Albernameg, 2012a [video]).

Just as criticisms of political authorities targeted their underlying myths, social criticisms
were used to unmask some of the meta-phenomena that underlie some social practices. Jude
Batayena, a female standup comedian at Kharabesh, sought to change society’s perceptions of
plus-size women so people can see beyond their weight. She wondered at her friends and
family’s disapproval: “Jude, why are you telling people that you are overweight?” She
responded, “I am not telling people... Being overweight is a reality in me, just as I have two eyes
and a nose; I am overweight!” She perceptually showed how even benign comments can betray
unspoken prejudices, by noting how it escaped them sometimes, “so why do you tell them that
you are ugly?” “I never said I was!” she replied (N2OComedy, 2012c [video]).
Social taboos were not only broken figuratively but also literally in the form of language.
In societies where speech profanity is still a marker of social class, Arab comedians utilized
language to break down these social separators and navigate the space between derisive humor
(that surprises, shocks or offends) and safe joking (that entertains). El-Kawas, for example, was
not timid about using mild profanity, such as cursing the butts of his jokes or challenging
universal rules of conversation. In an episode titled “Thunderstorm Showers,” he discussed
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farting, burping, and nose poking, bordering the line between what is humorous and what is
shocking (N2OComedy, 2011b). Douglas (1968) noted that while a “joke discloses a meaning
hidden under the appearance of the first, the obscenity is a gratuitous intrusion” (p. 371).
However, “abominations depend upon the social context to be perceived as such” (p. 371). The
social context of an online youth culture might have encouraged El-Kawas to experiment with
more daring jokes.

2) Redefining Identity
Working to deconstruct myths of political and cultural authority went hand in hand with
attempts at redefining youth identities outside their parents’ “regimes of truth.” At the group
level, laughter may function to strengthen “a sense of group cohesion” by “widening the gap
between those within and those outside the circle of laughter” (Levine, 1978, p. 359). Humor
itself is an interactive experience and a social phenomenon among those who share a sense of
commonality of experience (Levine, 1978). Hence humor can act as a means of identity
demarcation, defining those who share the joke as “we,” and those who do not as the “other.”
Through humor, youth sought to establish their generational identity, while
simultaneously negotiating their national and ideological ones over a rapidly changing
sociopolitical terrain. Starting off their routines with “We the youth,” they asserted their
generational identity while narrowing down their target audience to youth. Confronted with
global alternatives, they questioned myths of superiority and nationalism in light of present
upheavals to look for new expressions of identity that were not bound to national borders.
Manuel Castells (1996) centralized the role of identity as it relates to global order,

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In a world of global flows of wealth, power, and images, the search for identity…
becomes the fundamental source of social meaning… in a historical period
characterized by widespread destructuring of organizations, delegitimation of
institutions, fading away of major social movements, and ephemeral cultural
expressions. (p. 3)

However, they sought to re-establish their national identities, not through nationalistic ideals and
pride in past achievements like their parents, but rather through self-criticism: identifying
through their common fallibilities. These criticisms were sometimes advanced in the most benign
of language and framing. For example, the N2O team criticized Arab-speaking societies’
contradictions with regards to practicing sports, such as commending its practice while
considering it a distraction, and zealous fandom with no comparable physical practice. Waseem
Awabedah wondered at expressions like “I’ll walk my legs to the cigarette booth!” He suggested
that perhaps Arabs practice sports secretly or in other ways. Alluding to their lives of financial
hardship in Jordan, he exclaimed “who said we never practice sports? How about the sport of
slamming our heads against four walls (an expression of futility)… the sport of evading your
mom’s flip flops,” or “the sport of carrying a gas cylinder up a flight of stairs!” (N2Comedy,
2012b [video]). Using Sports as a launching point, El-Kawas criticized the older generations,’
especially Egyptians,’ ethnocentricity and pride in past achievements,

The ignorant backward West had us believe that they are more progressed
because they invented the word ‘Olympics’ [Olemboyad in Arabic]; this is
completely false! There was a man from… Egypt, who was trying to teach his son
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correct pronunciation, and he was telling him ‘Ol’ [say] ‘embo’ [babytalk for
water] ‘yad’ [colloquial for boy]. (N2Comedy, 2012b [video])

Their redefinition of Arab identity through self-criticism, distinguished itself from an
older generation’s notion of guarded nationalism where open criticism of one’s culture in a
Western context may be taken as a sign of westernization and moral betrayal. Kharabeesh,
untraditionally, included an American on their team of stand-up comedians. Brett Weer, an
American standup comedian living in Jordan, wondered, what it would be like if Arabs did
Formula1 racing,

It would be the first time a driver has his whole family with him, with his
‘hamatoh’ [mother in law] in the front seat and his ‘Ibn ‘ammo [cousin] at the
back seat, and there’d be about four kids and none of them would have seat belts
on… it will be the first ever Formula1 Kia-Sephia race car. (N2Comedy, 2012b
[video])

Self-criticism was sometimes more pointed towards their specific identity as youth and
not only Arabs. In an episode titled “The Arab Spring,” N2O comedians criticized foreign
interference in the Arab Spring which resulted in what they called, “Arab Spring with American,
Russian, and Chinese flavors,” yet they did so, while humorously suggesting that “the youth will
not be silent against those wolves! For, they will hold yet another meeting!” (N2OComedy,
2012d [video]).
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Ideas of national citizenship were also challenged. Nicholas Khoury, a Palestinian stand-
up comedian at N2OComedy and Kawabonga, an offshoot of Kharabeesh, redefined racism as
nationalistic pride suggesting that

Racism starts when we are forcibly placed inside a square drawn by the
occupation, yet are proud of belonging to this square… what have you done to
belong to this square? It’s natural selection my friend! Love your country as you
like, but do not hate others for it. (ArabComics, 2014 [video])

In Egypt, during the temporary period of freedom of expression, questions of identity
manifested themselves along political and ideological lines. JoeTube, pushed against the notion
of citizenship, by questioning who is a good citizen, in light of media’s persistent usage of the
term to describe thugs and pro-government protesters (JoeTube, 2013). Ideological differences
manifested in the style and language of jokes. Conservative youth for example, known for their
slur-free speech, not only created this identity but were constrained by it. Out of fear of being
called hypocrites, they harnessed digital media to tread the line between jokes and insults
without having to utter slurs themselves. By superimposing the face of Sisi over a movie
character being insulted or ridiculed sufficed to deliver their message and subvert his political
sanctity (JoeTube, 2014f). At other times, they would pretend to speak in defense of Sisi while
contrasting their words with visuals that incriminate or insult him, hardly delivering their
message directly, as this may render it too serious or even an Anti-joke (Lewis, 2006).
Secular comedians, however, were more open to using profanity and curse words in their
routines despite the general cultural disapprobation. The use of slurs by secular commentators
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served not only to draw the line between liberal and conservative ideologies but also targeted a
specific type of audience that was particularly young and liberal. In doing so, they were also
implicitly asserting a long-standing distinction from religiously conservative youth arguably in
their ability to break free of religious and social constraints. This tension was sometimes
verbalized in their opinions of each other; in an interview with vlogger Tamer Gamal, he
criticized affluent surgeon Bassem Youssef, for using slurs or inappropriate allusions in his
sketches (AlShabab, 2012).
This ideological distinction was also manifest along class lines, where secular comedians,
despite their occasional use of slur, often utilized Western cultural references, such as Bob
Marley, and English expressions as a way of relating to the youthful, yet affluent Western
educated sector of society, while, JoeTube (who are not identifiably secular), emphasized their
affinity to the majority of working to middle-class Egyptians at risk of poverty. The affinity was
evident in their choice of language which drew on social references to life in small under-served
villages utilizing working class colloquial Arabic (AlShabab, 2012).
Chapter 3 discusses in more detail how Egyptian satirical Facebook pages worked to
develop a new collective identity, that of the Anti-Fan, which bases its social and political
critique in common feelings of nostalgia and shared history.
3) Exercising Control
In Danielle Russell’s (2012) study of female stand-up comedians, she noted that “stand-
up comedy is an aggressive act; to elicit laughter is to exert control, even power” (para. 10). One
of the main sources of laughter, Levine (1978) argued, is the desire to put the situation within
which we find ourselves into perspective, and to exert some degree of control over our
environments. Youth, often lacking the means to exercise power over their immediate
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governments and societies, turned to online platforms to reclaim their sense of control and assert
their power through humor and mastery of digital tools.
At the forefront were female Arab satirists. Though Egyptian and Arab popular cultures
are rife with female comedians, female stand-up comedy remains an emergent cultural form in
its ability to reinterpret and redefine social relations. Subverting situations in which women are
being judged, to ones where they are the judges, allowed them to be in control of what Bey
(1985/2002) calls a ‘temporary autonomous zone’ (a liberated area “of land, of time, of
imagination”) without direct confrontation with social values.
Using a public, somewhat context-free medium, they were able to take the edge off
opinions that might otherwise deem them aggressive or overly sensitive if expressed offline,
thereby regaining control over similar future situations. In her video “Plus-size is an art,” Jude
Batayena, criticized her friends’ seemingly tactful plea “let’s lose weight together,” to wonder
about this element of ‘togetherness’. “How can we lose weight ‘together’? How much will you
lose, 4lbs?” she exclaimed. Regaining control over the situation, she asked instead, “how about
we gain weight together?” (N2OComedy, 2012c [video]).
Subversions also touched upon male’s dress. In an episode titled, “There’s no hope
guys,” Rawsan Halaq, another female stand-up comedian, poked fun at young men’s futile
attempts at impressing college girls using failing fashion trends. In the context of Arab societies
that place strong emphasis on women’s dress, linking it to society’s chastity, this served to
overturn the situation to one where men’s dress was the object of scrutiny (N2OComedy, 2014).

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Managing Authenticity between Politics and Economics
“Difficult contingencies for participation can derive not just from the explicit imbalance
of power relations but from simply broader impediments of sociological reality” (Peter
Dahlgren, 2011, p. 103).
Egyptian online videos were not isolated from the growing polarization characterizing the post-
uprising scene. Creatives’ choices were therefore constrained by the political ideologies of their
supporters’ and audience constituencies. For example, Joe Tube, though openly critical of the
military, remained in the realm of defense when it came to criticisms directed at Morsi’s party,
where they were rarely critical of their many miscalculations. This may be attributed to a range
of constrains, starting from self-censorship to larger power calculations as it related to both
organization and possibly funding. Online videos can earn up to 2.5$ per thousand views through
YouTube Ad Revenue, which is not enough to provide a sustainable source of income (Pham,
2013). By urging their audience to “Like and subscribe”, Arab video producers, relied on the
large size of Arab populations to reach millions of views. However, this number of views was
affected when factoring in the ideological dimension. By starting off as quite critical of Egyptian
self-proclaimed liberals –an offshoot of nationalists with predominantly secular views– Hussein
estranged this sector of society despite general political agreement against state militarization.
This made his show entirely dependent on a conservative audience segment, and hence the stakes
of him being self-critical of his affiliation were higher. Bassem Youssef, as well, though quite
critical of Egyptian conservatives, was not equally critical of Egyptian liberals such as former
director general of the IAEA and Nobel Peace Prize winner, Mohammed El-Baradie. Likewise,
Youssef, was not able to openly criticize General El-Sisi or even call his arrival to power a
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“coup”, a fact he humorously alluded to as he jokingly muffled the mouth of a co-performer
calling it so. His program later stopped completely in April 2014, due to what Youssef described
as an “unsuitable general atmosphere”. He bid farewell to his audience saying, “I became tired of
fighting, of worrying about myself and my family’s safety” (El-Kilany, 2014)
The perception of online anonymity, privacy and its allure of safety (Morozov, 2012), has
sometimes put youth in trouble with authorities, where state apparatuses were now more tech-
savvy and less tolerant to criticism. The group “Street Children”— composed of six amateur
stage actors, famous for their selfie-recording of satirical group-songs in Egyptian streets
circulated on social media—were arrested in 2016 for releasing a video titled “Sisi my
president… regressed us”. Though their songs were mostly critical of social issues, some
political allusions were not tolerated. According to Reham Desouky, the sister of one of the
arrested members, Mohammed Desouky
Any topic has become political, for example talking about unemployment is political; the
whole situation is ironic… we are all in danger, no one is out of the danger zone
especially after the random arrests of youth on coffee shops in anticipation of protests on
the “Friday of Land” against the surrendering of the two Egyptian Islands, Tiran and
Sanafir to Saudi Arabia. (Hashim, 2016)
Alongside censorship, the online terrain was no longer leveled to Arab youth, with almost
all popular mainstream shows creating a parallel online presence on YouTube channels, and
social media. Even the realm of online satire, which flourished post 2011, was ventured by
mainstream media, where show segments were uploaded regularly to their YouTube channels
garnering a significant number of views, but with the added advantage of professional actors, set,
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and direction. Dahlgren (2011) suggested that “the mainstream within politics and economics has
migrated to the net” which in turn affected “the scale of visibilities for alternative/oppositional
voices” (p. 102).
However, when considering the harsh economic realities of many of these online satirists,
it is hard to maintain such a purist view of online participation and its political function, where
mainstream co-optation might be viewed by those youth as an upgrade if not a goal in itself. El-
Kawas, for example, in collaboration with Kharabeesh, is now the lead actor of a TV comedy
show titled “Fe Male” aired on satellite TV. “Fe male” discusses in a comic, nevertheless
formulaic, frame gender-based psychological differences and how they manifest themselves
early on in marriage. However, as Dahlgren (2011) noted, online youth turning to mainstream
media, are “striving for visibility and mass media impact”, but in doing so “they must adapt to
the regime” (p. 102) Almost lamenting a loss of authenticity associated with his earlier amateur
videos, El-Kawas said, “right now, I am living the worst phase: when comedy became a
profession” (Bani-Hudhayl, 2013).

Conclusion
When politics draw on social mystifications and tribal traditions, resistance takes on
wider meanings and repercussions, where social subversion feeds into political subversion and
vice versa. Harnessing the power of humor and digital media technologies, Arab youth were able
to covertly navigate between social and political spaces, all while asserting their generational
identity, seeking to both control and subvert a situation where they had limited control. At this
time of demoralization and silenced outrage, the need arouse for alternative sources of hope,
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while, the ongoing social conflict, called for tactics that can poach on social situations without
openly challenging them.
By relying on humor which lies at the boundary point between social acceptance and
challenge, Arab youth were able to navigate previously deemed taboo or inappropriate topics and
open them up for public debate. Their strategy was “don’t argue about corrupt ideas, ridicule
them” (Windt, Jr., 1972, p. 13). Jokes were a temporary displacement from the control of the
conscious to the arbitrariness of the subconscious, hence unaccountable. The joker’s goal was
merely to “lighten the oppressiveness of a social reality”: a ‘ritual purifier’ performing a cathartic
function for both him and society (Douglas, 1968). Because jokers worked within the constraints
of the social structure (Douglas, 1968), they were relatively safe from backlash. Their playful
nature was a double tactic, on one hand disguising dissent from power and on the other hand,
facilitating a quasi-political discussion across political differences. Their safety, however, was
contingent on a balance between social and political criticism, their number of followers, and
international recognition (where stakes were higher for those less known and/or of an outwardly
opposing political affiliation). Mohammed Andeel, a stand-up comedian and vlogger,
contemplates in a Facebook post on the boundaries between political correctness and comedy,
suggesting,
Freedom of expression is what guarantees to those marginalized that they have a voice in
society… Comedy or sarcasm shortcuts the path of criticism and kick the tyrant right in
balls with a sarcastic joke around which people gather and feel stronger than the tyrant
The tyrant can be a president, a … apons, prisons, TV and money who possesses we
religious majority, or social norms and traditions that force everyone to act a certain
way… the main measure in deciding if this joke works or not, is: is the kick up or down?
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Hence the struggle of young Arab vloggers took place, not only in the bastions of power,
but in the realm of consciousness as well. Masked by their humorous overtone, they were
sometimes invisible to “an omnipresent and all powerful” state, occupying online spaces
“clandestinely and carry[ing] on… its festal purposes for quite a while in relative [emphasis
added] peace” (Bey, 1985/2002, p. 118). Humor enabled them to reconcile their hidden
contradictions, navigate their changing reality and come in terms with an irreconcilable
oppressive past. Signaling a departure from a culture that reveres authority to one that laughs at
it, Egyptian activist and documentary filmmaker Baraa Ashraf (2015), wrote in a Facebook post,
I really appreciate the effort of everyone who [work in mainstream comedy]…
It’s not your fault… your jokes used to make us laugh in 2008... But right now,
we are in 2015… Either bring us an ‘authority’ that we cannot laugh at… or bring
us back Bassem Youssef to save your efforts and ours… and don’t worry, we will
laugh while silent.

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CHAPTER 2: ONLINE PROTEST SONGS AND THE AFFECTIVE SIDE OF SOCIAL
MOVEMENTS

Ramy Essam, dubbed the revolution singer, lead the crowds with his guitar and rough,
throaty voice: “We are all one hand, demanding one thing… Leave … Leave”. The crowds
echoed his words with exhilaration. Their voices became especially enthusiastic in anticipation
for the words “Down, Down, Hosni Mubarak… He leaves… we won’t leave”. In the following
two years, this same song took on different targets of authority from the military council during
the interim period to Mohammed Morsi, the first democratically elected president post 2011. In
2013, however, the revolutionary fervor waned in favor of a so-called return to “stability”.
Despite taking part in the protests leading to Morsi’s ouster, Essam relayed his disappointment in
a square he once considered his “home”, when he concluded his performance decrying the, then,
ruling Muslim Brotherhood with a song titled “F**k the Military Council”

It was the first time in my life to be in the square singing in front of hundreds of
thousands and they’re not singing with me. But I finished the song and told them, ‘We’re
not with the army! They killed our friends and we will not forget that!’ I was so angry.
No one said anything. They just listened and kept silent. (Peisner, 2015)

Following the military

takeover in 2013 that ousted President Mohammed Morsi, Essam among
many other youth activists became targets of Sisi’s military regime and its propaganda. Essam
had to flee Egypt to Sweden, where he currently resides (Peisner, 2015).
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Ramy Essam was part of a larger phenomenon of “Revolution songs” that circulated
social media websites and were sometimes performed in squares and stadiums. These songs went
hand in hand with mobilization videos featuring activists such as Asmaa Mahfouz, urging people
to protest against the corrupt government. The lyrical, musical and performative aspects of these
songs all featured elements unusual to Egyptian society and politics. Overwhelmingly falling
into the hip hop and RAP genres, the lyrical, musical and performative aspects of these songs
functioned to convey in affective rhetoric what many were struggling to articulate in speech.
Protest songs captured in “sound bites” the emotions of youth activists, their changing
conceptions of the revolution over time, and their reading of the political situation and global
realities. They, along with comedy and creative arts, were part of a cultural movement that
accompanies, preserves and revitalizes social and political change.
This chapter combines focus group findings with a thematic analysis of revolution-
themed songs. By analyzing songs as a cultural subtext, it highlights themes less openly
discussed (or possible) in traditional venues of political communication. Furthermore the
discussion from the focus group also uncovers the individual and collective meanings young
Egyptian adults ascribed to these songs and how they changed over time.

Protest Songs and Collective Action
The role of music in collective action has been observed by many. According to
Dewberry and Millen (2014), “music moves us into collective embodied alliances”. We are
“drawn, haphazardly, into affective and emotional alliances with the performers and with the
performers’ other fans” (Firth 2004, p. 37). The value of music in major political events,
Dewberry and Millen (2014) argued, lies in its ability to move “people by building unity and
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creating euphoria” (p. 88). Mostly amateur musicians, Born (2005) attributed this unity partly to
“the fluid roles in contemporary popular musics between musicians, DJs and audience, [which]
favour the ongoing formation, in microcosm, of collective identities – of ‘musically imagined
community’” (Born, 2005). Furthermore, by simply participating in singing the song, Stewart et
al. (2012), suggested that protesters themselves become active participants rather than passive
listeners to speeches or printed leaflets.
Anthropological investigation into the functions of music in non-Western cultures also
emphasized the social aspect of music whereby music works to provide (1) emotional
expression, (2) aesthetic enjoyment, (3) entertainment, (4) communication, (5) symbolic
representation, (6) physical response, (7) enforcing conformity to social norms, (8) validation of
social institutions and religious rituals, (9) contribution to the continuity and stability of culture,
(10) contribution to the integration of society (Merriam & Merriam, 1964).
However in the realm of political protests, music can also work to defy long established
institutions and articulate agency. Laiho (2004) research divided the psychological functions of
music in the four categories of interpersonal relations, identity, agency and the emotional field.
Protest songs can be especially valuable at times of social transformation. As Lipsitz (1994)
argued, “new forms of domination also give rise to new forms of resistance” (p. 30). Their
unusual rhetorical form, much like humor or body rhetoric, gives “persuaders a poetic license to
challenge, exaggerate and pretend in ways that audiences would find unacceptable, unbelievable
or ridiculous if spoken or written in prose… they have powerful nonverbal (voice, instrument,
rhythm), as well as verbal (words, lyrics, repetition) components” (Stewart, Smith & Denton,
2012, p. 155).
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In Egypt, a country historically beset by foreign occupation and military rule, dissidence
has often assumed indirect forms of expression, such as poetry and songs. As Scott (1990)
suggested, we might think of “rumors, gossip, folktales, songs, gestures, jokes, and theater of the
powerless as vehicles by which, among other things, they insinuate a critique of power while
hiding behind anonymity or behind innocuous understandings of their conduct” (xiii). Songs
were prominent, yet ambiguous, carriers of a “hidden transcript” utilized by peasants and serfs to
critique power behind the back of the dominant (Scott, 1990). Bayram Al Tounsi was one of the
pioneers of anti-colonial satirical ballads inspired by a tradition of Zajal or partially improvised
colloquial poetry. Poetic license however did not protect him from being exiled by the British
occupation. In the sixties and the seventies, Sheikh Imam and Ahmed Fouad Negm composed
and performed songs that were critical of government policies and advocated the working class.
Both artists were imprisoned for their political criticisms, yet their songs continued to inform and
inspire youth action in the Arab Spring. Hence, when youth activists compose and perform
protest songs, they are drawing on a long tradition of embedding dissidence in artistic
expressions. The audience however may have changed from closed circles to a wider and more
diverse audience online. As Howard and Hussain (2013) noted, “in the absence of legitimate
opportunities to be a citizen through voting and public assembly, generating content for blogs
and news sites has become, in recent years, one form of civic expression for people in several
countries across the region” (p. 91).
RAP, Chorus and the Different Dimensions of Rhetoric
Music as a rhetorical device adapts the “three appeals of classical rhetoric, logos, ethos,
and pathos” (LeCoat, 1976, p. 1). Furthermore, Dewberry and Millen (2014) suggested that
songs possess “multiple levels of textuality (e.g. the lyrics, the sounds of words being sung, and
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the numerous instruments involved)” (p. 83). These verbal and nonverbal elements of protest
music transform our perceptions of social reality (Stewart et al., 2001).
Persuasive appeals can emanate from the rhythm which carries the “rhetorical impact” of
the song, as it “reduces the inhibitions and defense mechanisms of the listener… to render him
more susceptible to the rhetorical aspects of the musical message” (Irvine and Kirkpatrick, 1972,
p. 277). Dewberry and Millen (2014) also noted that delivery may have a stronger influence than
content, where music amplitude can have a greater effect on listeners than written or sung words;
in other words, they concluded, rhetoric needs to be examined in totality.
This chapter examines the themes revealed by some of the most widely circulated
influential, yet amateur, online protest songs that mobilized and documented the 2011 uprisings.
The songs almost overwhelmingly fell into the RAP genre, a subset of the wider Hip Hop
culture, uncharacteristic of Egyptians’ musical preferences which tend to fall between
melancholy and cheerful tunes. Continuity can exist, however, in viewing RAP as a form of
“unofficial poetry”. Tricia Rose calls for understanding hip hop as a “secondary orality”, “the
deployment of oral traditions in an age of electronic reproduction” (Lipsitz, 1994, p. 37). Though
set against a background of lute music played by Sheikh Imam, Ahmed Fouad Negm chanted
more than sung the rhyming speech or poetry.
RAP as a genre also fits well with struggle; for example, historically, “hip hop and reggae
have… played roles in political movements opposed to apartheid in South Africa, in struggles for
educational and curricular reform, and in battles against police brutality around the globe”
(Lipsitz, 1994, p. 33). Sometimes, Lipsitz noted, it is the “the politics in the drums” that pervades
hip hop. The way these revolutionary songs were delivered in strong utterances might have had a
stronger role in empowering the listeners than the words themselves. Max Roach, Jazz
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percussionist, drummer, and composer, described hip hop as rhythm that “lives in the world of
sounds—not the world of music—and that’s why it’s revolutionary” (Lipsitz, 1994, p. 35).
However, this forceful delivery was sometimes achieved through the chorus, not the
instruments. Songs by activist groups, such as the Ultras and April 6
th
youth movements
overwhelmingly relied on a stadium-like chorus despite being recorded in closed studios and
circulated on social media websites. They therefore managed through social media, to transfer
sentiments of the stadium and the square to the wider online public. Despite their reliance on a
music that can be classified as pop, the source of strength evoked from the song stemmed from
the collective voices of the chorus that almost came across as militant. The chorus acted as
though the embodiment of their identity as a fan or activist group. Emphasizing the
overpowering presence of the chorus, Dewberry and Millen (2014) noted that, “it is the chorus
that possesses greater presence for ‘when two things are set side by side… that which is best or
most often [heard], is, by that very circumstance, overestimated’” (p. 86). Choruses leave
listeners with a sense of collectivity and an impression of unity and perhaps a perception of a
wider acceptance of the message conveyed.
Music was very intertwined with the struggle that Swedenburg (2012) rejected the
Western media description of Egyptian protest songs as the “soundtrack of the revolution”, for
the false sense of distance it purports between revolution and its music. He emphasized however
that,
Protest music at Tahrir was not a soundtrack, not a reflection, not a commentary or a
report on events, but something integrally tied to and embedded within the social
movement. Musicians on the square for the most part performed a repertoire that the
crowds could sing along with, a body of songs that connected the artists and their
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audience to a history of struggle… The purpose of musical performance at Tahrir was to
move the crowds (and the musicians themselves) into a sentimental or affective state,
such as anger, mourning, nostalgia or patience, or to unify the crowds in a state that
Durkheim has called “collective effervescence”.
Most protest songs were low-budget, low quality productions by either individual artists
or independent musical groups. As cultural products of that time, these songs captured in “sound
bites” the emotions of youth activists, their arguments, their reading of the political situation and
global realities, and their visions for the future. Though mostly glossed over by researchers of the
Arab Spring in favor of the more direct written records of posts, tweets, or memoires, these
songs represented a valuable peek into the affective side of the uprising which can only be
captured through an equally ineffable tool of expression, such as Music.
Methods
The dataset for this chapter is composed of sixteen songs themed around the Egyptian
uprising. They were released over a period from 2011 to 2014. The languages of the songs are
Arabic, English or a mix of both. All songs are available through YouTube. Translations for
some Arabic songs’ lyrics were retrieved from the blog “Revolutionary Arab Rap: The Index”
(http://revolutionaryarabraptheindex.blogspot.com), the rest were translated by the author from
Arabic to English. The singers range from amateur to professional; some sing solo while others
utilize a chorus. Arabian Knightz is a hip hop band from Cairo that gained prominence with its
songs “Rebel” and “Not Your Prisoner”. Revolution Records is another Egyptian hip hop band
who record their own tracks “using a portable studio and software for recording, music
producing, and sound engineering” (https://www.reverbnation.com/revrecords). Ultras Ahlawy
and Ultras White Knights, on the other hand, are groups of Egyptian fans of the rival soccer
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clubs, Al Ahly and Al Zamalek respectively. Their role in the Egyptian uprising was
instrumental in mobilizing their fan base to the squares and organizing protests, chants and
revolutionary stadium performances. Their songs are characterized by the utilization of a chorus
with no solo singers. They are mostly known for their songs, “Horreya [freedom]”, “Hekayetna
[our story]”, and “Shams AlHorreya [Sun of Freedom]”, which were sung in both stadiums and
squares. Edd Abbas, Deeb, MC Amin, Ramy Donjewan, and Ahmed Mekky are all solo, semi-
professional, hip hop artists. Cairokee, an underground rock band, and Hany Adel, were an
aspiring band and artist respectively at the time of the uprisings. They shot their first music
videos crudely in Tahrir Square and capitalized on the collective sentiments of fervor and hope
to gain traction among youth activists and fans. Their music was mostly intertwined with themes
of the revolution, yet over time, they tackled wider social themes. Hamza Namira, an
independent artist turned professional, was one of the few artists who not only sang for the
revolution but also were outspoken about the military human rights’ violations in Raba’a square.
Songs were chosen based on their revolutionary semi-professional content and the time period in
which they were released. A focus group discussion was also administered in Spring 2017 with
nine Egyptian participants who resided in California and were participants in or close followers
of the events of the Egyptian uprising and its related online protest songs.
This chapter employs thematic analysis of focus group findings, song lyrics, and
performances. It utilizes the constant comparative method as outlined by Glaser and Strauss
(1967) to inductively identify categories and assign text or themes to them in a systematic
process. Informed by social movement, collective action, and functions of music literature, this
chapter employs process coding as detailed by Saldana (2009), where the guiding principle in
assigning codes was the function of music. In the initial phase of coding, focus group discussions
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and lyrics were read and annotated for manifest themes. In the second cycle of coding, pattern
codes were identified to “build a more meaningful and parsimonious unit of analysis… a meta-
code” (Miles & Huberman, 1994, p. 69; Saldana, 2009, p. 152). Pratt (1987) raised the concern
that findings of the thematic analysis of lyrics “can't be the sole source of data on the producer of
any musical product, nor the nature of the audience, nor the effect on it of that product” (p. 52).
However, Pratt (1987) added, this does not preclude the analysis of lyrical content, which can
reveal a lot about “the political significance of identified themes, the relation of that thematic
content to political-economic context, the self-conception of the artists, and the historical
limitations within which politically relevant popular song has heretofore operated” (p. 53). This
chapter, nevertheless, combines lyrical and performance analysis with audience discussions of
the songs and their effect on them to identify—alongside the obvious mobilization intent— the
following functions and sub-functions for music during and post-the-Arab Spring: (1)
documenting and preserving emotions and (2) collective identity formation, through (2.1)
extending alliances (2.2) challenging established institutions, and (2.3) challenging global
influences.
Documenting and Negotiating Emotions
Despite their strong connection to political mobilization, emotions are usually
characterized as fleeting, thereby constituting methodological challenges for both documentation
and research. Yet music as a form of emotional expression can capture and preserve emotions
that accompany certain memorable events and milestones in people’s daily lives and even their
identity as a nation. This is particularly salient in music that accompanies struggle. Gospel
music, for example, argued Jon Michael Spencer, worked to document the African American
oral history and religious tradition formed by the African American experience (Hicks, 2014). As
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Collins (1982) noted, music, a non-rational medium, has an emotional function that more
effectively charges the interests of group members than other rational language-based means. In
the Arab Spring, music documented the emotional stages of the uprisings, from demanding
dignity through consciousness raising to developing resilience, and sometimes despair. It also
helped activists negotiate and make sense of the complex and rapid set of events that were
transpiring in the following years.

The Arab Spring: Human Dignity as a Moral Demand
Dignity was a central demand to the Egyptian and Tunisian mobilizations. Bu Azizi’s
economic indignation was exacerbated by a “slap” on the face from a figure of authority, a police
woman, while Egyptian youth were enraged by the picture of Khaled Said’s brutally beaten face.
The process of identification by protesters built on countless “very personal” encounters of
citizens with authority, a collective “personal indignation” that many experienced firsthand or
within their close family circles, sometimes irrespective of class. As Della Porta (2015) noted,
“in order to transform discontent into grievance and then claims, the personal situation needs to
be linked to a collective one” (p. 215). Protest songs as part of the social movements’ rhetoric
were no exception to those appeals to human dignity. They too emphasized dignity as a point of
departure and common aggravation. By drawing on this basic human need, they were building
alliances that went beyond ideologies and party loyalties to touch the core of shared Egyptians’
grievances against the government, which systematically worked to dispossess them of their
human dignity politically, economically and socially.
Therefore, it was not surprising that much of the recent anti-austerity protests including
those of the Arab Spring, Della Porta (2015) noted, utilized moral and injustice framing to appeal
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to “an emotionally intense sense of injustice that fuels mobilization into action” (p. 83). “Ded El
Hekouma [Against the government]” was particularly eminent in its coincidence with the call for
the January 25
th
protests. It started off with a memorable scene from one of Mubarak’ parliament
addresses at the time, where he scoffed off the idea that he should keep track of what is
happening in Egypt, saying “Will I keep track of everything that’s happening in the country,
man, get over it”. “Against the Government” circulated online as a music video without showing
the RAP singer. Almost like a slide show, the frames flipped through the printed lyrics of the
song juxtaposed over what appeared to be a blood stained wall. The song’s main appeal was a
moral one to the embattled dignity of the Egyptian. Hence the disembodied voice of Ramy
Donjewan utilized RAP to list in angry speedy utterances various familiar and daily violations to
Egyptians’ dignity,
I'm against the government. Against the thuggery and the injustice.
Against the government. Against the ruler and the authority.
Against the government. Against the traitor and the coward.
Against the government. Against he who accepts being humiliated.
Every worthless Tom, Dick, and Harry now is still humiliating you.
You have no value. You have no worth. Your rulers are selling you.
They are neglecting you. They are making a fool of you.
They threw you into the arms of your enemies with the greatest of ease.
…
I tell him, "for thirty years he's been beating you."
With his sword he cleaves you. You're not dead, but your brain is being killed.
Enough sleep! Enough death! Enough silence!
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If you have blood FOR REAL, yell with your loudest voice:
I'm against the government because I have value [as a human being]! (Ramy Donjewan,
2011).
The song utilized evocative words such as “humiliating”, “worthless”, “neglecting you” and
“selling you” combined with Donjewan’s angry rapping to build a sense of a shared collective
indignation. The appeal Donjewan made was not to his listeners’ logic, but to their “Blood” as a
sign of life. His frequent transitions between the ‘I’ and the ‘you’ worked to create a bridge from
the singers’ individual experience to that of the collective and a sense of social solidarity. This
social solidarity, argued George Lewis (1991), charges the common interests of the group
members, thereby elevating them to moral rights and surrounding them with a “symbolic halo of
righteousness” (p. 55)
Ahmed Mekky’s “25 January”, released prior to Mubarak’s ouster, captured the same
theme in its opening verses: “The Egyptian’s dignity is worth a lot. He wishes to restore his
dignity and for corruption to fly”. It utilized similar stylistic elements to “Against the
Government”, with the RAP style of Mekky interwoven with the melancholy voice of
Mohammed Mohsen. It differed however, in its leveraging of pictures from the square and
pictures of young martyrs in a slideshow video. To many Egyptians, the uprisings were a
restoration of their long lost dignity not only as citizens but as human beings, where “the
Egyptian's value as a human being today, after the revolution, is so much greater!” (Ahmed
Mekky, 2011) Mona, a focus group participant, noted, “We felt that people’s view of Egyptians
before and after the revolution has completely changed; after the revolution we gained more
respect.” Sahar, who resided in Qatar at the time of the uprising, affirmed this by noting that
Qatari nationals left them the whole Cornish Street (that extends across a sizeable area of Qatar)
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to celebrate Mubarak’s downfall on February 11
th
. Nina also recalled how in 2012, following the
election of Morsi, “people… had a lot of hope; we used to walk in the streets and people would
wave ‘Hi’ at each other”. In that year, she recalled, “we had dignity”.
Cairokee’s iconic song “Oh the Square” was a call for a restoration of this newly-
acquired sense of dignity that was taken away by state security’s continued assaults even after
the ouster of Mubarak. The song came out in November 2011 at a time when clashes were
renewed between revolutionary youth, the military and state security. Using a mixture of lute and
electronic guitar sounds Amir Eid and Aida Al Ayouby (lead vocalists) mixed melancholic tunes
with nostalgic words to remind their listeners with what they gained from the square. The
combination of Eid’s rasping voice with Al Ayouby’s singsong voice conveyed in sound the
mixture of hope and melancholy respectively associated with the call to return to the square.
Their voices were accompanied by a video of what appeared to be the home of a protester filled
with memory objects collected from the square; all these elements worked hand in hand to revive
in their listeners nostalgic memories of the square all while signaling to them that the struggle
was far from over and mobilize them back to the square:
Oh the Square… It’s been so long…
You tore down the fence, ignited the light, and gathered around you… a broken people.
We were reborn, and our stubborn dream was born too.
With you, we started to feel, after we were apart and withering
You got the world to listen and the neighbors to gather
Oh the Square, It’s been so long (Cairokee & Aida Al Ayouby, 2011)
The square symbolized not only the restoration of freedom and dignity, but also the ability to feel
and dream as well, suggested the lyrics. Nina, recounted “Our sense of feeling started following
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the revolution”. “During the time of Mubarak, we were coping; we did not have in mind that
something could change, and we did not have an idea; we did not start to feel the problem until
the revolution started,” elaborated Mona.
However, with moral demands and no clear targets, it was not surprising to see the
movement fall short of achieving long term successes. Therefore, success itself was framed
abstractly, where “Even if you don't implement all of our demands, we've already gained so
much because the whole world knows who we are!” (Ahmed Mekky, 2011)

Interim Military Period and Consciousness Raising
Protest songs circulated online, comprised an opportunity to raise consciousness away
from the pressure of protests and public squares. One of the main consciousness-raising struggles
that Egyptian activists faced, following Mubarak’s ouster, was relating to the wider public that
the Egyptian military was allegedly complicit with the fallen regime and should not, therefore, be
trusted with power during the interim period. Socialized to venerate their military through
propaganda that raised the 1973 war to the ranks of historical epics, average Egyptians could not
imagine leaders of their army acting against the benefit of their country (Ketchley, 2014; Elsayed
2016). Furthermore, slogans such as “Egypt, above everyone”, “Police and people are in service
of the country”, and “Long Live Egypt”, all worked to demote the value of the citizen to that of
the state and its apparatuses.
Like humor, protest songs were one way of deconstructing these myths and making sense
of an ongoing rapidly progressing struggle. In their widely circulated song, “Our Story
[Hekayetna]”, Ultras Ahlawy recounted the story of their transformation from football fans to
political activists. The song acted as a retrospective exercise for making sense of the fast-paced
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events and their violent confrontations with state-security that took place in squares and
stadiums. Ultras Ahlawy were particularly picking the bone of the military which they accused
of plotting their massacre in Port Said
2
and the detention and humiliation of Square protesters
and activists. By highlighting its service to the old out-of-favor regime, the song was trying to
subvert the myth of military impeccability. Singing as a disembodied chorus over a visual
background with their slogan, they sang,
When we came, soccer was all lies and deceit, it was cloaking the minds and masking
authority
They try to beautify it and make it the country’s concern, forgetting about the stadium
filled with thousands.
Kill the idea more and more
Tyranny is everywhere
I will never forget one day
You were a slave to the regime (Ultras Ahlawy, 2012a)
Their description of soccer as “lies and deceit”, a cloak and a mask for authority, went to show
the degree of “disillusionment” such avid young fans were experiencing, given that soccer was
described as their “life” in other songs. This disillusionment, however, did not lead them to
abandon soccer all together but rather to develop a more mature and conscious relationship with
it as an object of fandom, with the awareness that it could be possibly used as a means to distract
them from the political struggle. Black feminist Gwendolyn Pough noted a similar complex
relationship with hip hop music, where despite her awareness of its gendered and heterosexist

2
In a soccer match between Al-Ahly and Al-Masry (of the city of Port Said), fans clashed in bloody confrontations;
security forces did not intervene but rather closed the gates which resulted in the death of 72 Ahly fans in a
stampede. Ultras Ahlawy accused the army and security forces of plotting this massacre as a payback for their taking
part in the uprisings. They cited the incident of police forces closing the gates in the face of fleeing fans as evidence
of a premeditated massacre.
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tendencies, she was able to both enjoy and critically evaluate it, which, she argued, worked to
develop her feminist consciousness (referenced in Sowards and Renegar, 2004).
The audience of the songs was not only comprised of the political but also the apolitical.
Hence, songs were also an opportunity to counter the arguments directed against activists in an
emotionally evocative presentation, while working to humanize their 72 Port Said victims. Over
a remix of images documenting the massacre, the Ultras recounted their narrative of Port Said,
In Port Said there were dogs when the guards opened the door, they ran and chaos was
abound and killed the most precious youth
Of them, there was the engineer, the worker and the child: they went and their wish was
to cancel your rule
Oh, you bastard council, how much did you sell the martyrs blood for?
to protect a regime
that you are part of, too. (Ultras Ahlawy, 2012a)
Identifying the victims by their jobs, was also a tactical response to the accusation usually
directed at protesters as “jobless thugs”. The delivery of the song as a disembodied chorus and
the emphasis on the Ultras sacrifices gave it a transcendental quality, and subsequently
credibility. Their organized protests and characteristic musical productions transformed their
image in the popular imagination from a zealous mob to an organized movement. Yara, recalled,
“this song came out during the interim period, when people started to realize that nothing was
happening [to hold the old regime accountable]”. Amina, added, “I used to not like them [the
Ultras] at all. I used to think they were trivial, but they proved to be different; that they were that
organized… They used their organization the right way, which is why the system harbored
enmity against them.”
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Alongside political authority, protest songs also worked to deconstruct the myth of
impeccability accorded anyone with a religious label or background, from the Muslim
Brotherhood to the officially appointed religious clerks. Though this myth was eventually
“physically” shattered by the political events and the military takeover which practically
annihilated political opposition starting with the brotherhood and moving on to youth activists,
the songs and cultural productions at the time attempted to do the same in the symbolic world.
To MC Amin, those who used religion to influence people’s decisions were not so much
different from those who used a claim to patriotism to silence opinions,
Do not trade with patriotism like the traders with religion
Right now, I no longer understand the difference between the two (MC Amin, 2014)
The state not only used political arguments against its opponents but also economic ones.
Addressing the arguments of the apolitical calling upon dissidents to stop protesting in order to
accelerate “the wheel of production” (which were in effect a reiteration of state media
propaganda), Deeb and Edd Abbas sang,
Rise up, O Egyptian: No revolution finishes in a day and night.
Bear with it a little. Have endurance and tolerance.
Don’t be afraid of the cycle of production: there should be a revolution of the self.
Tomorrow is better than the past.
By emphasizing that economic instability was a by-product of demanding change and asking
people to bear with the revolution, Deeb and Abbas were essentially reorienting people’s
attention to the central demands of the uprisings so as not to be distracted by the state’s
arguments.

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Post-Spring: Fearlessness Turned Resilience
Though the uprisings failed to completely eradicate the corrupt regime, if not resulting in
a more vicious incarnation, they nonetheless went to show that regimes and security forces were
not as invincible as previously thought to be. The unbalanced standoff between youth activists
and the ministry of interior in Mohammed Mahmoud events
3
, however, left many contemplating
the futility of confrontations between unarmed protesters in their youth, and the heavily armed
state security. The songs of the Ultras, and April 6
th
youth groups offered a peek into their
psyche. On the theme of fearlessness, Ultras Ahlawy’s “Freedom” lyrics read, "From death, I no
longer fear. Amid your terrorism, my heart has seen, the sun will come up again". “Our Story”
added defiance to fearlessness, to emphasize that death no longer intimidated them:
Kill the revolution more and more… the word ‘free’ for you is madness…
No matter how oppressive the guard will get, in front of my voice he will be a coward
Steal security, destroy homes… the past was the time for silence… The dream is no
longer far. (Ultras Ahlawy, 2012a)
Not willing to forgo what they considered to be revolutionary gains alongside an
intensifying state crackdown, artists and song writers turned their fearlessness into resilience;
calls for short-term mobilization were substituted with cold-calling for a vision of a future
uprising. This generation, Della Porta (2015) described as one of “precarious youth”, “a defiant
new generation, with no money, no future, and huge debts” (p. 52). With both political and
economic opportunities closed off to the youth, revolution, as an idea, was transformed from a

3
In November, 2011, a group of youth activists went to commemorate the martyrs of the January 25
th
uprising and
to reassert their rejection of the military rule. Some youth activists were close to the ministry of interior which
resulted in police forces firing pebble bullets at young protesters. Some of these protesters were young street
children and street vendors. Many lost their eyes or limbs in the clashes and around 61 died
(https://wikithawra.wordpress.com/2013/09/24/scafcasualities/). These events mark the beginning of the schism
between youth activists and the Muslim Brotherhood blamed for not intervening to the stop the bloodshed due to its
preoccupation with parliament elections and electoral politics.
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temporary event to a way of life that could not be relinquished. At a background of cheery
optimistic music combined with drums and synchronized clapping characteristic of stadiums, the
White Knights
4
chorus of Al Zamalek soccer club sang to freedom as an idea that has
permanently changed their frame of mind despite regime oppression. Combining still images
with moving frames from their recorded protests in squares and stadiums, the music video “Sun
of Freedom [Shams AlHorreya]” emphasized their collective and new revolutionary identity
through both their large numbers and frequent inclusion of the “anonymous” mask,
This revolution was born an idea that cannot die
A knight living in struggle… all his weapons are in his mind
Steadfast in the mountains… a step to the land of freedom
Revolution and struggle … a way of life
A part of my mentality despots did not understand ….
The birth of revolutions is in the minds, forget that you can erase it with your tyranny
Fire Gas, fire bullets, our generation of death
No longer fears (Ultras White Knights, 2012)
By disembodying the revolution from the corpus of protesters to the symbolic world of ideas,
song writers sought to immortalize revolution in a way that could not be targeted by state
repression. This moral framing of the uprisings, however, whereby activists distanced themselves
from authority as inherently immoral, left a lot of vacuum in the political scene that was filled by
those willing to allegedly taint themselves with authority or lay claims to it.

4
Ultras white Knights are the soccer fans for Al Zamalek soccer club. The adjective “white” is a reference to Al
Zamalek’s characteristic white shirt as opposed to their rival Al Ahly’s red shirt. Ultras white knights had their share
of conformations with state security as well in what was commonly referred to as “The massacre of the Air Defense
Stadium”, where at least 40 fans were killed by Egyptian security forces to prevent them from attending a match.
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Figure 1 A frame from Ultras White Knights' "Sun of Freedom"
Youth activists also realized that their struggle went beyond the national boundaries of
Egypt, where their quest for freedom was governed by larger regional and strategic balances—
after losing countless victims to state brutality, particularly following the Rabaa’
5
massacre, with
no international condemnation; hence, the continuation of the revolution was laid on the
shoulders of coming generations. In the 2013 song, “El Hekaya [The Story]”, we notice a return
to frustrated anger in RAP lyrics overlaying a digital image of a tainted grey wall reminiscent of
the aesthetics of early 2011 mobilization songs such as “Ded El Hekouma [Against the
Government]”.
The story is way too big to end or to be erased.
Going around the same circle and back to the beginning.
And the one who started the story had an aim, had a dream.
His aim was to destroy injustice; they took his life in the midst of his dream.
And everybody suddenly became divided. A story of a right being stolen….
But free will still endures, infinite patience…

5
Rabaa square was the site of the violent crackdown on Egyptians protesting the military coup of July 2013 which
ousted President Mohammed Morsi. On August 14
th
, 2013, police and military forces ended the Rabaa and Nahda
sit-ins resulting in the death of over 817 protestors.
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The idea is still alive. The story hasn't ended yet.
The revolution isn't over. Our dreams are yet to be seen…
Our time is running out… And then my son will finish what I started.
The one whom I'll raise in bright light so that he will lift away your darkness.
And he won't keep a low profile because, freedom, he chose you.
The generation that witnessed death for your sake
We’ll finish the story and we’ll be the one to continue the journey. (Revolution Records,
2013)
In this more recent song, revolution became more an idea than a demand for action, yet one that
was supposed to be passed through generations, and a “lifestyle”.
A revolution and a belief taught us to fight tyrants.
It matured and was carved in our minds. It became a lifestyle.
I'm the voice of right in the minds of a generation that broke the meaning of submission.
I'm the anger of the hungry, the underdog that handed you the lifeline.
People who are being sucked dry, being consumed, and fighting the impossible
we’ll leave behind a revolution, an idea for the upcoming generations. (Revolution
Records, 2013)
Post-2014: Splintered Identities
The effect of the many revolutionary sacrifices that went unrewarded, were exacerbated
by a severe polarization, whereby supporters of Sisi and the old regime reveled in state victories
and demanded more repression even between neighbors, friends and families. This was captured
by Cairokee’s song “Some are dancing, some are dying”. Possibly a call to unity, the music
video started off with a quote purportedly by Che Guevara reading, “The road is dark and
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96
gloomy, so if you and I don’t burn, who will light the way?” Shot through a blue camera filter
and utilizing a selfie stick, the video featured Eid in his characteristic black leather jacket and
dark sun glasses, solemnly walking on rail tracks at a background of humming music (see Figure
2). Primarily a rock band, Cairokee mixed elements of rock such as the sound of an electric
guitar with a RAP delivery, which worked to convey feelings of both sadness and anger
The truth is as clear as the sun
But you cannot approach or touch
The word of truth in this age is suicide
If you say it, you will be going against the tide…
Try to say freedom or social justice
Try to say equality or human dignity
Try to say human rights or oppose the regime
Don’t dare think… your thinking is a red line…
At best, you will get bread
So they can silence you but not to live
And if you insist to go against others
[Pointing his fingers like a gun] The answer will be in bullets…
Some are dancing … Some are dying
[Covering his mouth]
The loudest sound in the party is the sound of… silence (Cairokee, 2014)
Eid’s song documented how words like freedom, dignity and social justice—which were basic
demands from the January 25
th
uprising—became taboo words under the military regime, and
how people returned to colluding complacency, where even extrajudicial killings were cheered
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97
by them. His description of the political scene as a “party” was a reflection of youth
disenchantment with politics where none but the state had a voice and “the loudest sound in the
party” was “the sound of silence”. While the railroad in western popular imaginary is usually a
metaphor for progress and change, Egypt’s popular culture and history associate different
meanings to railroads that are not free of deaths, suicides or twists of fate (Sha’ban, 2017). It also
symbolizes distance between loved ones and in this specific context, a split between two peoples
on opposite sides of the track.

Figure 2 Cairokee’s Amir Eid in "Some are dancing.. . some are dying"
Though limited on movement, Eid combined his singing with a gestural performance of
some of the sounds, such as using his thumb and index fingers to symbolize a gun shot or
covering his mouth while uttering the word “silence”. These gestures worked to help listeners
visualize these actions and highlight the contrast between the silence of the masses and the
blatancy of state violence. Hence, sonic metaphors worked to bridge the world of the song with
the lived realities of its listeners using both sounds and gestures.
It was not surprising that the general sentiment among the focus group participants upon
rehearing protest songs was a sense of “sadness”; Mona explained, “they were always on replay
in my car during and after the revolution, but now, I no longer listen to them; it’s just too hard;
they remind me of sad memories”. Nina on the other hand, who fled the country with her family
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98
in 2014 for fear of persecution, considered the songs an anchor point: “a reminder of why we are
here [in the US]”. “We came here because of this pain; we were at an age where we were about
to reap the outcome of our lives’ hard work, then we had to stop and start all over again in a new
place. If we forgot those songs, we would be forgetting why we are here: I need to re-listen to
those songs [to] understand why I am here”, she elaborated.

“The Square” as Identity
To demand dignity, social movements had themselves to be an embodiment of this
demand, what research on social movements describes as “prefigurative politics… where
movements should… do their best to choose means that embody or ‘prefigure’ the kind of
society they bring about… [and] activists must seek to develop … modes of interactions that
embody the desired transformations” (Della Porta, 2015, p. 163). Many have noted the potential
of the Square (at the onset of uprisings) to embody almost a utopic version of a deliberative
participatory democracy and high levels of inclusion. This was part of Ahmed Mekky’s appeal to
ethos in contrasting the humiliation of the state with the humanization of the Square.
If you go out to Tahrir Square, you will find a small nation within the nation,
a nation where if someone strikes you, he will tell you, "sorry."
And if someone wants to pass, he will tell you, "only with your permission."
And if someone wants to see your identity card, he will tell you "don't think too much of
it. We're required to."
Within [the nation], you often hear the word "Haasib"[Be Careful] because women pass
by freely.
Within it, there is no contrariness or sexual harassment.
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When the Christian prays, the Muslim guards his back.
When the Muslim prays, the Christian guards his back.
This is the Egypt that we want. (Ahmed Mekky, 2011)
According to Mekky, dignity was about respectful and equal treatment regardless of gender or
religion, where the square became a symbolic embodiment of the “Egypt that [they] want[ed]”.
This utopic image was not only prefigurative but also the identity around which disparate
activist groups found common grounds, emphasizing unity, shared memories and struggles in the
post-Spring phase. In “Oh the Square”, Cairokee and Aida Al-Ayouby sang,
With you we sang, and worked hard
With you we fought our fear and prayed
One hand day and night… with you there’s nothing impossible.
The voice of freedom unites us… finally, our lives have a meaning.
We differ but our intentions are sincere… sometimes the picture was not clear
…
A square that’s filled with types, the nonchalant and the brave..
In it, there are those in love, the opportunists, the ones who shout and those who are
silent…
In our gathering, we drink our tea, we now know how to get our rights back. (Cairokee &
Aida Al Ayouby, 2011)
With not so much in common, activists from across the spectrum found in “the square” and their
shared memories in it, a starting point for a united front against the old regime. The song not
only used evocative words to emphasize this identity, but utilized memory objects and artefacts
that were symbolic of the square (Figure 3), such as the mask and the vinegar (used to counter
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100 the effect of the gas canisters), to encourage activists to join the protests again (against the
military this time). This function was evident in Nina’s comment after watching the song:
It reminds me of certain events, like when I used to prepare vinegar for my husband and
how he used to come back with pellet bullet wounds… People used to be there every day
and especially weekends, this was the routine, and every Friday people were out in huge
numbers… this song was always in the background, playing on TV.
The song’s mise and scène worked together with the lyrics to convey a message of unity, from
Aida Al Ayouby’s traditional clothing with her arm stretched over a lute to the rock band
alternating between the traditional Duff (hand drum) and western rock instruments.

Figure 3 Some memory objects used by "Oh the Square ": (Left to Right) Blood stained white coat from th e field hospital, a bottle
of yeast, and a jacket with pellet bullet holes
According to the song, differences were forgiven “in the square”, because there was the
assumption, that “intentions were sincere”, and mistakes were excused, because “sometimes the
picture was not clear” (Cairokee & Aida Al Ayouby, 2011). “The square identity”, however,
only worked as a departure point, where subsequent events created schisms along political and
ideological lines that sometimes required extending alliances and emphasizing cultural
continuities. These schisms were oftentimes the byproduct of contesting visions for the future
rooted in two different orientations in the past: restorative and reflective nostalgias (Boym,
2001). Svetlana Boym argued that while nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement
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101 created by a longing for a past that never existed, it is also a romance with one’s own fantasy (p.
xiii). She distinguished between two forms of nostalgia:
Restorative nostalgia stresses nostos (home) and attempts a transhistorical reconstruction
of the lost home. Reflective nostalgia thrives on algia (the longing itself) and delays the
homecoming… Restorative nostalgia does not think of itself as nostalgia, but rather as
truth and tradition. Reflective nostalgia dwells on the ambivalences of human longing
and belonging and does not shy away from the contradictions of modernity. Restorative
nostalgia protects the absolute truth, while reflective nostalgia calls it into doubt.
Caught between different visions for the future originating from different ways of grappling with
the past, youth activists and subsequently musicians had to toe the line between continuity of
tradition and reflexive discontinuity. The first worked to extend alliances to the general public
while the second worked to actualize the new ‘square identity’ beyond the confines of the square,
actualizing it as social change.

Extending Alliances: Continuity and Conformity in Revolutionary Rhetoric
Revolutionary forms of art run the risk of rejection if not emphasizing any familiar
continuity with what Raymond Williams described as residual forms of culture. The residual,
though not part of the dominant culture, is an element of the past, possibly alternative and
oppositional to the dominant, and remains an effective element of the present. Burke (1969) also
noted the power of ‘casuistic stretching’, whereby one introduces new concepts while remaining
faithful to old ones (p. 229). Writers of protest songs carefully treaded the line between
subversion and loyalty: subverting longstanding political authority figures, all while emphasizing
their loyalty to their country and cultural tradition. This not only applied to lyrics but extended to
musical composition. According to LeCoat (1976), classical music composers of the seventeenth
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102 century emphasized that the “rules of composition should be largely dictated by social
convention”, and “respecting the complex code of behavior of the time”.
Continuity was a form of negotiation with nostalgic visions for Egypt, ones that were
based in tradition and tended to simplify the past. The old regime still in control of state media
and the general public opinion, embodied a ‘restorative nostalgia’ which only knows two main
plots: the return to origins and the conspiracy—“a simple premodern conception of pure and
evil” (Boym, 2001, p. 14). With the onset of revolutionary demands and the mounting rhetoric
against “the way things were”, state media retaliated with an overpowering restorative rhetoric
that demonized the revolutionary youth as spies and anarchists and romanticized a pre-republic
idyllic-complacent-image of a 1940s Egypt as ‘Egypt’s past’. It nevertheless was a class-based
visualization that only included upper-class modern Cairo residents and disregarded the struggle
of peasants and dissenters against poverty and classism on one hand, and the British occupation
and the corrupt monarchy on the other. Therefore it was not surprising to see Egyptian artists
tapping into a parallel reflective nostalgia that reminded people, not of the idyllic complacent
Egypt, but their ancestors’ struggle against the British and Israeli occupations in the beginning
and middle of the 19
th
century. Though the past in both cases almost referenced the same time
periods, each side told a different story. According to Boym (2001)
Restorative and reflective nostalgia might overlap in their frames of reference but do not
coincide in their narratives and plots of identity. In other words, they can use the same
triggers of memory and symbols, the same Proustian madeleine cookie, but tell different
stories about it. (p. 15)
Building on common Egyptian idioms and myths, Mekky’s “25 January” emphasized
activists’ loyalty and patriotism towards Egypt, their ethos:
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103 Don't be afraid, my country. In the worst adversity you protect us.
We are your children. Be a man! We put you above our heads and our eyes.
My grandfather and my great-great grandfather were martyred for you and they
protected you.
Their grandchildren will never, ever forget you or sell you out.
Standing firm like lions with total unity for the sake of liberating you!
Mekky, among others, rhetorically utilized nationalistic references to assert activists’ patriotism
in response to state media accusations of treason and foreign interference. This reflected a
struggle over the meaning of patriotism. After years of equating patriotism with the notion of the
docile citizen, the uprisings put state media in a dilemma of how to contradict their long tradition
of state-support by describing activists, who disrupted the status quo, as patriots. Activists turned
to Egypt’s familiar and highly-venerated anti-colonial history as an example of how someone
can be both a patriot and at the same time disruptive of the status quo. Through such historical
references, singers were able to appropriate nationalistic narratives to support their demand for
freedom. In the above song, for example, Mekky affirmed his patriotism by tracing his ancestry
to that of Egyptian soldiers who fought Egypt’s wars, and relating his cause of deposing the
regime to a wider ideal of liberation.
However, the utilization of national symbols, as dell Porta argued, did not necessarily
mean a sacralization of the nation-state, as much as it served as a unification symbol for the
various identities involved. The emphasis on “the love of Egypt” might have been a rhetorical
strategy to counter the mainstream media charges of treason and instigation of chaos, but also an
attempt to dislocate notions of nationalism from statehood all while asserting a demand for a
grassroots (non-imported) version of democracy.
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104 We also see another utilization of reflective nostalgia in artists’ references to elements of
the Islamic tradition. To deconstruct the popular misconception of the anarchist revolutionary,
protest songs conveyed activists’ loyalty to the religious tradition while denouncing the political
tradition of respect for authority. Though most of the song writers were not particularly religious,
they, however struggled with an Egyptian cultural tradition that was scarce on examples of
defiance and rebellion against injustice that they could draw upon, hence they resorted to the
familiar, though not encouraged (by state and official Imams), Islamic values of social justice.
Let Tyranny fear, for soon right will prevails
The night is long, with our hands we’ll bring it light
A nation of tyranny is a short-lived one, and Egypt is the land of bounty
And right is till the Day of Judgment, because your God is great
I wonder at you Egyptian, with fear rooted inside you; rise up my comrade, Egypt is
calling you. (Ahmed Rock, 2011)
The invocation of notions, such as “Right will prevail”, “The state of tyranny is but an hour and
state of the righteousness is till the hour [Judgment day]“, which reference a collective Islamic
worldview, served to legitimatize dissenters demands in a familiar, yet less utilized tradition, all
while challenging the status quo.
Continuity can also be manufactured by the invocation of old familiar songs or tunes.
Lipsitz (1994) argued that RAP music turns consumers into producers by “tapping consumer
memories of parts of old songs and reproducing them in the present” (p. 37). In “Rise up
Egyptian”, Deeb (2014) tapped into a 1920s resistance song of Sayed Darwish with the same
name, against the British Occupation and appropriated it to one against the present Egyptian
regime. Following 50 years of acquiescence, he sought to evoke familiar notions of resistance in
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105 Egyptians’ collective memory to legitimize their present struggle against a local oppressor.
Sheikh Imam’s 1960s resistance song “Build your palaces over farms” was also reincarnated in
Tahrir square and circulated on social media to reconnect the present (uncharacteristic) struggle
with the authenticity of the older widely respected figure of sheikh Imam, the first singer to be
imprisoned for his music in Egypt. It recirculated, noted Yara, “because it suited the period of
oppression post-revolution similar to what happened during Sadat time. It fulfilled this
psychological need.” Yaman added, “It was also a song sung by a reference group. If I were a
revolutionary, I would associate with those people by listening to their songs.” Hence elements
of continuity worked side by side with the disruptive discontinuity caused by the uprising to
calm fears of change and ease the transition. One can also argue that youth appropriated
restorative elements such as references to religious and historic traditions for the transformative
purposes of creating long-lasting social change.

Discontinuity and Challenging Established Institutions
Continuity, however, was utilized only so much so as to set the ground for what was
perceived in Egyptian society as radical demands. Alongside their appeal to ethos and pathos,
arguments were also advanced as to why change was imminent. Youth activists did not only
rebel against the oppressive regime, but also against institutions of the past, including decaying
political (opposition) parties representing was viewed as a bygone era of historical grievances
(such as the one between the Nasserists and the Muslims brotherhood), and even the notion of an
Egyptian docile citizen. Boym (2001) noted that while restorative nostalgia is determined to
return and rebuild a homeland, reflective nostalgia fears that return. Reflective nostalgia
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106 does not pretend to rebuild the mythical place called home… This type of nostalgic
narrative is ironic, inconclusive, and fragmentary. Nostalgics of the second type
[reflective nostalgia] are aware of the gap between identity and resemblance; the home is
in ruins or, on the contrary, has just been renovated and gentrified beyond recognition. It
is precisely this defamiliarization and sense of distance that drives them to tell their story,
to narrate the relationship between past, present, and future. The past is not made in the
image of the present or seen as foreboding some present disaster; rather, the past opens
up a multitude of potentialities, non-teleological possibilities of historic development.
(Boym, 2001, pp. 15-16)
Hence discontinuity or this sense of distance is the first step towards opening up potentiality or
what Boym (2001) described as ‘possibilities for historic development’.
As noted in Chapter 2 on humor, the Arab Spring marked a strong break with traditions
of reverence for the elderly in both their parental and political representations, where the
generational struggle was a constituent part of their overall struggle for dignity, freedom and
social justice. This generational rift extended to even well-established opposition parties, who
were viewed by youth as compromising to the revolutionary demands of the Arab Spring. As
Della Porta (2015) noted for the anti-austerity movement, there was a high level of mistrust in
traditional and representative politics. Ahmed Rock’s “Forbidden from Change” echoed this
disillusionment,
I'm tired of promises every day and the same discussions.
Every day we wait for a tomorrow that might be better than what has come before.
The police are the ones who guard us. Their role is still to hurt us….
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107 The opposition parties are disappointing. The nation's will is dissipating.
The most negative word you can hear is "it's no use." (Ahmed Rock, 2011)
The lyrics not only blamed the government for the lost dignity of the Egyptian citizen, but also
shifted responsibility to citizens themselves for their lack of action:
A hostile government wants to tear you and me to pieces!
The oppressor and the oppressed. The ruler and the condemned.
To whom will I complain? And whom will I blame?
Should I blame the people who get hit by the dirtiest boot and remain silent?
Or a government that controls everything with hearts that've died?….
So down with the government! So down with the regime!
So down with the [Emergency] Law! So down with the rulers!
So down with the coward! So down with the traitor!
So down with the nice man if his kindness will let him be humiliated! (Ramy Donjewan,
2011)
By blaming the government, and its laws alongside the citizens, “Forbidden from Change”
signified a rebellion against any factors that worked to reproduce Egyptians’ subjugation,
including citizens’ docility. Featuring Donjewan’s face partially covered in shadows over a black
background and employing fast and angry RAP music, the music video itself embodied
discontinuity with the Egyptian musical tradition characterized by slow tempos and melancholic
tunes. A recurring assault, according to the song, was the older generation’s attempt to silence
the younger one by forbidding them from ‘singing’ or even ‘talking’ as ways for change.
The same sentiments were captured by Hamza Namira’s 2014 song “Listen to me”,
which patently framed the struggle as a generational one
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108 My life had never been my choice,
Despite my wishes, I found you taking my decision.
You treat me as if a shadow and that our generation is nothing but a bunch of juveniles.
No!
We are sick of silence… I am saying it with the loudest voice: Listen to Me!
You are wasting my life
Bringing back the past and wanting to lock me there
My dreams… you destroyed them when you controlled them …
No!
I’ll say one word to you: I will not be a copy of your past...
I will choose the way, and fight everything, and those are my days. (Hamza Namira,
2014)
The sonic metaphors continued, where like many of the post-2014 songs, the emphasis on silence
was imminent, and hence the plea for the older generation to “Listen”. With the physical square
lost, cultural practcies around voice and speech became the new battle ground between youth and
the regime, which explains the recurring themes of silence, voice and the value of singing.
According to Namira, the older generation not only ruled the country but controlled their
individual choices and even their ability to dream. Speaking on behalf of the younger generation,
Namira opened the songs with a reflection on his past life (pre-revolution) and how it was never
by choice, and concluded with a passionate assertion that he will not be a copy of the past and
that those days were his days. This was a literal example of Boym’s reflective nostalgia that
reflects on, but does not seek to repeat the past; it rather distances itself from it, so it can tell its
own story.
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109 One of the participants commented on this song saying, “this song came out in 2014, so it
felt like a dying breath; it was addressing the elderly ruling regime and the generation that
supported them, telling them ‘it’s our future and we should be the ones to decide it’”.
Signaling this discontinuity in the perceptions of the two generations, participants were
very adamant on not describing protest songs as “patriotic”, choosing to call them
“revolutionary” instead. To them, the word “patriotic” carried nationalistic undertones
reminiscent of the Nasserist and subsequently Mubarak eras. “They are not patriotic songs? I
don’t feel it. Patriotic songs were “Ikhtarnah [We chose him]” [made for Mubarak], and songs by
Mohammed Tharwat, etc… they were related to the ruler”, suggested Nina. Heba affirmed that
protest songs were more revolutionary than patriotic, suggesting that,
The biggest attestation to that is that they remind me of the revolution but do not make
me want to go back to my country… If it were a conference for the president, you
wouldn’t play those songs, you would play something like ‘Have you drank from its
Nile?’… Revolutionary songs are mobilization songs… patriotic songs encourage
stability, and belongingness.
Heba’s remark again captured the difference between restorative and reflective nostalgia, where
the former emphasizes the values of home, stability and belongingness while the later distances
itself from old notions of patriotism and seeks to reinvent a new definition of what it means to be
Egyptian.
This rejection of old symbols, however, sometimes left them with limited, somewhat,
untenable options: either complete rejection of the old order or submitting to the idea that
revolution was an impossible ideal that could only be worked towards, yet not fully achieved.
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110 For example, “Against the government”, left the listener with one of two choices: either
overthrowing the entire system or continued victimhood:
Your blood, they're spilling it. Your death, they're sanctioning it.
Your homeland, they're making a laughingstock out of it.
Your religion, they're targeting it.
Your voice, they're silencing it. Your rightful due, they're devouring it.
Your brother, they're still killing him and the rest of the people are being tortured.
If you live, you live in starvation. If you die, you have no blood money.
If you speak, you become a victim and you're treated with savagery. (Ramy Donjewan,
2011)
The April 6
th
song, “We are the Sound when you like the world silent”, also invoked the same
dichotomy:
I neither like authority nor the lives of slaves
Fear fears me in the Square.
In the Square you will hear of me
Authority does not make a difference to me (Hussam Al Hakary, 2012)
Three years following the revolution, certainty turned into doubt. In what could be
described as a saga of the Egyptian uprising, “El Hekaya [The Story]”, released November,
2013, provided a retrospective evaluation of a revolutionary development of consciousness.
However, the optimism characterizing the earlier songs such as “25 January” sank into cynicism
and lack of faith in any of the past institutions, even if it was opposition parties or their parents’
generation:
Down with parties… down with every crow
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111 Down with every name that bought itself and sold the land
Revolution is not a president, military, Sheikh or Police
Revolution is a trusteeship that we’ll protect with our souls from the dogs (Revolution
Records, 2013)
Singers rather reaffirmed their loyalty to a civil state, and no particular flag. Remixed to sound as
if rapping, the statement “Oum ya Masry [rise up Egyptian]” by the original voice of Sayiid
Darwaish soon faded into the sound of Deeb rapping the story of the Egyptian revolution in the
present tense. Edd Abbas, a Lebanese singer, interjected with a warning to Egyptian citizens to
“stand up” against a system that was “screwing” them; he then sang,
I am a civilian, waving my pen as if my flag…
There are no limits holding me back.
You see me in Tahrir Square and in downtown Beirut,
not for the sky to become blue again [i.e., not with the Future Movement]
But to topple the regime that has robbed us of our freedom. (Deeb & Edd Abbas, 2014)
This lack of faith in traditional politics was also echoed in “Not Your Prisoner” by Arab
Knightz’:
Mr. Politician, I got a little question:
How come you are eating and all your peoples isn’t?
I am on a mission to break up [sic] out of this prison
If you’re with me and share my vision, let’s start by saving the children! (Arabian
Knightz & Shadia Mansour, 2012)
New symbols of authority borrowed from the recent military propaganda, following the
military takeover, were also subverted. MC Amin’s “ Mabrouk ya Sisi [Congratulations Sisi]”,
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112 released following Sisi’s election as president, utilized Burke’s perspective by incongruity by
placing symbols characteristic of Sisi’s era such as titles of propaganda songs, slogans, and Sisi’s
recurrent statements, in an unexpected revolutionary context:
“Bless the hands”
6
of those who returned the rights of my brothers to me.
Here’s “A Good Omen”: the revolution is still alive in my country.
“Long live Egypt” even though so many people sold her out shamelessly.
“Every single person among us” is angry about our situation.
The third wave is coming! Congratulations, ya Sisi (MC Amin, 2014)
Perspective by incongruity was even extended to the song’s title where the last verse of the song
revealed it was not congratulating Sisi for winning the elections, but for starting a third wave of
the revolution.

Challenging Global Influences
Egyptian activists perceived themselves not only as bodies in local contexts, but as global
citizens affected by pervasive global phenomena. This perception was perhaps facilitated by
what Della Porta described as a crisis of legitimacy and political responsibility for local regimes
where activists realized that “privatization, liberalization and deregulation reduce the instruments
in the hands of the states to steer the market and address social inequalities” (p. 123). For
example, the theme of dignity was extrapolated trans-nationally where it was suggested that
Egyptians abroad were not respected due to the weakness of their regime. “My Dignity abroad is
lost because my oppression in my country is taken for granted”, sang Ahmed Rock. Hence, songs

6
“Bless the hands [of the military]”: a military propaganda song released in the wake of the Raba’a massacre to
justify the military crackdown on protesters. “Good Omen”, a propaganda song released to encourage Egyptians to
vote (under the military rule of Sisi). “Long Live Egypt”, a slogan and a symbol used for Sisi’s propaganda. “Every
single person among us” and “I cannot give you” were frequently utilized expressions in Sisi’s speeches, resulting in
large-scale ridicule on social media.
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113 were contextualized in a global field, where cross national references to common grievances of
economic dependency and imperialism were often invoked:
They divided Sudan. They took Tunis.
They cut up Lebanon. They divided Egypt.
For my country, I prefer unity. One hand - always unity! (Ahmed Rock, 2011)
Arabian Knightz’ “Not Your Prisoner” referenced a similar “They”,
They’re dropping bombs over Baghdad, Libnan, Afghan Palestinians, Bin Laden,
Saddam
Listen, Islam is all about the peace, man
But wars up in these streets, man, got me losin’ sleep, man (Arabian Knightz & Shadia
Mansour, 2012)
This unclaimed “They” is a reflection of Della Porta’s observation of a crisis of political
responsibility, which can be attributed to either authoritarian rulers, Western imperialism or even
neoliberalism. These fluid attributions and cross-national grievances served to create what has
become known as the Arab Spring, where Egyptian activists identified with the plight of
Tunisians and more fundamentally the Palestinians, who were viewed by many of the activists
throughout Arab-speaking countries as icons of resistance. Arabian Knightz and Shadia Mansour
sang:
For every Arab who gets humiliated, I am waiting to help
But it’s over, they shattered for us the word “solidarity"
And from our minds they took the cards that win the game
CHORUS:
I want a country free of injustice!
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114 I want a country free of oppression!
I want a country free of evil!
I want [it for] my land and the land of the Arabs - yeah! (Arabian Knightz & Shaida
Mansour, 2012)
Protest songs, such as “Not Your Prisoner,” featured rappers from neighboring Arab
countries, such as Shadia Mansour from Palestine, alongside the Egyptian hip hop band Arabian
Knightz. “Rise up Egyptian” by Deeb, also featured Lebanese producer and rapper Edd Abbas.
The pan-Arab references in “Not Your Prisoner” were intermingled with other global references.
The song started off with a sped-up hook from Barbra Streisand’s “Prisoner”: “You want to keep
me here forever, I can’t escape… then you completely turn against me”. The love song melody
soon turned to RAP; like many of the songs from this genre, the music video was a remix of
videos and still pictures from the Arab uprisings with no physical presence from the singers; it
featured images emphasizing the commonality of their oppression. The lyrics not only tapped
into the Arab-Israeli struggle, but also made references to the African American Islamic
resistance movements by sampling from the address of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan at
the Great Western Forum in Los Angeles on February 17, 2002. According to Ackfeldt (2013),
“This section in Minister Farrakhan's speech is a reference to a letter he wrote to President
George W. Bush in December of 2001, after the attacks on the Twin Towers, raising his
concerns over the American foreign policy and the war on terror in particular”.
“Not your Prisoner” persistently drew a moral contrast between “presumed” powers that
bomb and kill, and singing as a form of peaceful resistance. Alongside the direct quotes from
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115 resistance leaders, the verses clearly engaged with wider and more tenacious issues than the
present local struggle, such as the global media portrayals of Arabs and Palestinians as terrorists:
They’re dropping bombs over Baghdad, Libnan, Afghan
Palestinians, Bin Laden, Saddam….
The media is backing up murderous propaganda
While we fight eternally like immortal highlanders!
Al Durrah, Sheikh Yassin
7
, the pains unseen
Forging your own stories for the blind to see.…
It’s too easy to speak when you’re far from the heat
Through the White House I creep and yes I’m armed to the teeth
With a mic and a pen and a pad here’s your evidence:
“Weapons of Mass Destruction,“ Mr. President! (Arabian Knightz & Shaida Mansour,
2012)
The fusion of both global and local cultural productions in protest songs signaled a not entirely
antagonistic view of globalization, especially after the fervor of the uprising has receded.
Globalization and especially Internet technologies were partly credited for youth maturity and
growing sensibilities. Commenting on the difference between nationalistic songs during the time
of Gamal Abdul-Nasser and the present, Yara suggested,
It’s also globalization, we had no internet or dish: no other opinions other than what the
ruler told us—it used to be completely manufactured: what the artist or authors had to

7
Mohammed Al Durrah, a Palestinian child killed by Israeli forces while being shielded by his father. His picture
was iconic of the second intifada. Sheikh Ahmed Yassin was Palestinian politician, imam and spiritual leader of
Palestinian resistance, he was also quadriplegic. He was assassinated by an Israeli missile in 2004. Both killings set
a wave of outrage throughout several Arab countries.
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116 say. You were inside a box you could not get out of. We were naïve and believed
everything, now that we see a bigger picture… things have changed.

Authenticity between Artistic and Revolutionary Quality
Protest songs were low-budget, low quality productions. Their choppy transitions and
low audio quality, however, did not dissuade their fans from sharing them for the value of their
experience. In fact low quality sometimes worked as an attestation to their authenticity or grass-
rootedness. Like Bakhtin’s carnival, the more homely, crude, profane and grotesque, the more
true to one’s origins and more powerful (in a mythical sense) one became. Sheikh Imam’s “Build
your palaces over farms” sung during the time of Sadat (1970s), was widely recirculated during
the 2011 uprisings. Commenting on Imam’s song, focus group participants observed its low
quality and lack of artistic elements, yet signaled their unwavering admiration for the song.
“Artistically it was simple, his voice was not that great, it was actually the words and the
revolutionary themes that resonated with people”, noted Yaman. “It was the RAP of that time”,
she added. Amina, also suggested “it might have been his performance more than the song that
affected me… you can touch the feeling.”
This was also evident in the Ultras songs which though crudely made, functioned to
articulate the feelings of many youth at the time. Yara commented on their anthem-like songs,
“that’s the style of the Ultras. Because I know they are ultras, I would accept it. It’s different!”
Marwa added, “I don’t not care so much about their artistic quality; I rather feel they are sincere
and close to me. It feels natural!”
Contrasting those songs with a 2017 promotional song titled “With you in your dreams”
by singer Hany Adel and sponsored by prominent mobile provider, Orange, participants agreed
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117 that the later was “a propaganda song”. The song featured Egyptian youth making strides in
Sports and entrepreneurship with an overall message calling for renewed optimism; Nina,
passionately interjected, “Whose dreams? What about the dreams of youth who have been
imprisoned or killed; I cannot see successful youth now without remembering the oppression
others are experiencing.” Participants explained that despite the fact that it was sung by Hany
Adel, a singer they related their first memories of, to his Tahrir Square song “Sound of Freedom”
(Figure 4), they viewed songs that call for hope at the present moment “propaganda”. More than
once, they used the words “comedic” and “depressing” to describe their feelings towards hearing
mobilization songs post-2014. When asked what they envisioned the lyrics would look like if
they were rewritten for the current moment, one participant suggested that “It would be sarcastic.
Maybe it would be an ad for elections. They would be songs on how to survive the way it is
now.”
Cairokee, a revolutionary band also started off independently with online circulated
protest songs; they developed artistically with time. Yet, unlike Adel, their later professionally
produced songs did not work to reduce their credibility, as they continued with their
revolutionary references and did not side with any of the states’ positions. Noor noted how their
song “Some are dancing, some are dying” increased her perception of their credibility. “I thought
they were just riding the wave with their increasing popularity, until I heard ‘Some are dancing
and some are dying’”, she explained; “It was about Raba’a, and the polarization that
subsequently ensued: those who were dancing over the bodies of those who died.”
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118
Figure 4 (Left) Hany Adel in Tahrir Square, 2011 (R ight) Hany Adel in promotional ad, 2017

Conclusion
Theories of collective action have wavered between explanations that centralize common
grievances to ones that centralize resource availability (of both financial and human
constituencies) as reasons for mobilizations. What many of these theories leave out however, are
the cultural factors that act as a conduit between the different phases of movements. As Howard
and Hussain (2013) noted “some of the important innovations are cultural: soundtracks to the
revolution produced by digital hip hop artists from Libya and Algeria inspired young citizens and
earned artists jail time” (p. 47). Our daily conversations, jokes, and popular culture productions
allow the exchange of ideas and arguments without the added pressure of immediate action,
leaving the space for incremental cultural changes that accompany, facilitate or hinder collective
action. Protest songs served to articulate the slew of emotions accompanying a long-awaited
uprising. Those emotions served not only to dissipate energy but also to refuel and mobilize
people back to the square repeatedly with both logical and visual appeals.
Egyptian protest songs shared similar aesthetic elements such as overlaying the singers’
voices over moving lyrics or over a slide show of images from the uprisings, without actually
showing the singers themselves, who usually utilized pseudonyms such as Donjewan or Deeb.
Hence, the emphasis was more on words rather than bodies, and RAP rather than instruments.
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119 Songs were youth’ new way of communicating in a stifled political environment, where the
emotions of anger over injustices were best communicated through RAP.
Protest songs continued the tradition of protesting online without the added risk of
physical protesting. Willie Howard (1999) noted that at the time of slavery, sometimes music
was the only way of communication between slaves. He also observed that the contemporary
turn to RAP was not only an artistic choice but an economical one as well, where many African
Americans were denied the opportunity for a formal music training due to budget cuts in
education and music programs, so “turntables became instruments and lyrical acrobatics became
a cultural outlet (Lusane 38)” (Howard, 1999). Likewise, most Egyptian protest songs were
amateur low-quality productions that nevertheless managed to open an affective back channel of
communication between youth activists and the general online public.
Dissident songs of the Arab Spring functioned to create unity, and mobilize protesters.
They captured and preserved the collective emotional memory of the square while aiding their
listeners in negotiating and making sense of the rapidly changing events. But at the same time, in
their multiple modalities, singers and activists found a poetic opportunity to subvert long
standing myths affecting the relationship between people and authority. They did so, all while
extending alliances to the apolitical: at times emphasizing continuity and social conformity, and
at others emphasizing discontinuity and rebellion. The alliances were cross national too,
connecting the struggle of other Arab populations with that of Egyptians to protest a global,
perhaps immoral, neoliberalism that has marginalized and stigmatized them as the oriental other.
The manifestations of this post-colonial struggle have been characterized by “disillusionment
and despair”, Lipsitz (1994) noted. However, he warned, “rather than viewing post-colonial
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120 culture as a product of the absence of faith in yesterday’s struggles for self-determination, it
might be better to view it as a product of the presence of new sensibilities uniquely suited for
contesting the multinational nature of capital” (p. 30). In this case, disillusionment and despair
become important milestones in the consciousness building of these nations over a “shared
disillusionment with the nation state and its failed promises”, where “the state can longer serve
as the sole site of contestation for movements that find they have to be cultural as well as
political, global as well as local, transnational as well as national” (p. 30).
Essam was disheartened by people’s dissatisfaction with his anti-military song in June,
2013 after getting accustomed to two years of exuberant cheers from his fans in Tahrir Square.
This can be attributed to the difference between the demands of a live performance and that of an
online video. While a music video circulated online takes more than one time of watching to
develop a liking, a live performance demands an instant response of either approval or
disapproval, one mediated by concepts of social proof and acceptance (possibly under the
watchful eye of Mubarak loyalists and state security forces (Ketchley, 2017)).
This also loops back to the value of social conformity, and the setting or Karios of the
rhetorical situation. Essam seemed to have satisfied the ethos or the general sentiment of the
crowd in his decry of Morsi, the logos or logical reasoning in drawing on the military atrocities
in the past two years and pathos or poignancy in conveying his anger and appealing to his
audience emotions of vengeance for their friends and comrades. The timing and the audience,
however, were not right, as the June 30
th
protests were attended by Mubarak loyalists and backed
by state security forces whose best interests lay with the military (Ketchley, 2017).
What Essam was experiencing was essentially a mismatch between culture and
revolutionary action, as the targets of the revolution have changed; while people in January 25
th

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121 have grown dissatisfied with Mubarak, the same could not be said for the Egyptian military,
which held a far stronger grip on Egyptians’ national consciousness since the 1952 military-led
revolution and the 1973 war with Israel. He was dealing with a yet unresolved ambivalence
towards a fundamental pillar of the Egyptian state: an ambivalence that could not be resolved
with a short-term uprising or an ostensible change of power.

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122 CHAPTER 3
DEVELOPING THE ANTI-FAN: NEGOTIATION AND PARTICIAPTION IN POST-
SPRING DIGITAL SPACES
On Sunday, April 9
th
, 2017 marking Palm Sunday for Coptic Christians, Egyptians woke
up to the news of two concurrent church bombings by ISIS. The bombings set a wave of outrage
in the country that could be felt across social media websites. The admin of a very popular
sarcastic Facebook page titled “Dubsmash Egypt” known for its apolitical, decontextualized fan-
made funny video clips, reacted to the bombings with a post that assigned blame directly to Sisi
and his interior ministry. The post read, “F**k Sisi and F**k his interior ministry”. This post was
followed by an edited version of a popular ominous video in which, Sheikh Sha’rawy, a famous
Muslim clerk was addressing Mubarak saying “If you were our destiny, may God guide you, and
if we were your destiny, may God help you get through it”; it was edited with the picture of Sisi
over Mubarak and fan-subbed as, “If you were our destiny, then F**k you, and if we were your
destiny, then F**k you too”.
The entertaining Facebook page suddenly turned political after months of posting
apolitical non-serious content, however, only for this brief moment that was possibly shielded by
the general outbreak of rage among Egyptians that day. It nevertheless managed to direct a very
pointed criticism that went beyond the safe condemnation of terrorism to condemning the failed
administration of Sisi and his interior ministry. Soon, however, the political posts were masked
by everyday satirical ones addressing soccer, relationships, and even weather. While satirical
Facebook pages with millions of followers, may not revolve around a certain fan object or text,
they are nevertheless a phenomenon that shares a lot of the fan practices characteristic of fan
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123 communities. They enact elements of participatory cultures, and collective intelligence all while
sharing a common distaste for certain institutional influences in their lives, namely, political
authority, bipartisan politics and an ambivalent relationship to their childhood texts.
This chapter examines Egyptian youth online practices of remix and appropriation post
Arab spring as expressions of anti-fandom. Looking at the relationship between online youth and
state-produced media (also childhood texts of the past) as a case of anti-fandom reveals how
someone’s relationship with a text can be a reflection of their developing self-understanding of
the meaning of citizenship, especially when a text exemplifies the tropes of power and power
relations. In this chapter, I interview the admins, and fans as well as textually analyze the posts
of some of the most popular Egyptian Facebook pages. Common among these pages is the
systemic appropriation of current and older media texts as memes, parodies and remix videos,
framed as social, economic or political critique. I argue that those evolving anti-fandoms are
symptomatic of a growing re-questioning of much of what this Arab Spring generation, grew up
with in the 1980s/1990s. Their requisitioning however, is one that is not free of feelings of
familiarity, as these texts were themselves childhood texts they grew up with. Therefore, anti-
fandom represents a terrain of struggle and negotiation between youth’ nostalgic feelings
towards the past and what it represents and their growing media literacies and reimaginings of
the future. This chapter builds on notions of negotiation and participatory cultures introduced in
chapter 1, Susan Stewart’s and Jonathan Gray’s conceptualizations of nostalgia and anti-fandom
respectively to examine what these texts have come to represent to online youth; in doing so, it
looks into their practices of resistance and how they are using their appropriations to collectively
critique and reimagine their present social and political realities.
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124 Fandom in 20
th
century Egypt
Egyptian fandom as a communal phenomenon can be traced as far back as religious
gatherings in love of the prophet’s descendants in villages and towns. However, fandom as a
national, even pan-Arab phenomenon was most evident with Om Kolthom, an Egyptian singer
and Arab sensation in the sixties and seventies of the twentieth century, and a symbol of Egypt’s
cultural leadership alongside its political leadership in the Arab World. Families would gather
around radios to listen to the broadcast of Om Kolthom’s musical parties. Other more dedicated
fans traveled to her concerts around the Arab World. In the rare recordings of her parties, one
could still hear the echo of their captivated voices shouting the famous expression of praise
specific to Om Kolthom: “Greatness above greatness Madame”. Prominent as well, were fans of
esteemed religious figures such Sheikh Sha’rawy, whose lessons were weekly broadcast on
Egyptian national TV every Friday afternoon throughout the 80s and the 90s; Soccer, the
national sport in Egypt, was perhaps the most visible kind of entertainment that brought fandom
to the fore. Gathered in stadiums, around radios or TVs, fans would go through visible cycles of
frustration and elation that sometimes developed into physical fights or street celebrations.
Comedy as well was prominent on stage, with plays that were both written by Egyptian
writers or localized for the Arab world. In the 80s and 90s of the twentieth century and alongside
the famous “School of the mischievous” and “Kids have grown” (see Chapter 1 on humor),
Mohammed Sobhy, a prominent stage and later TV actor, collaborated with playwright Lenin
Al-Ramly on several plays, that were a hit among this generation of youth; the plays were
layered and tackled larger questions related to human nature, authoritarianism, and poverty
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125 (Kandeel, 2016). Kandeel (2016) credited Al-Ramly for the success of these plays while sharply
criticizing Mohammed Sobhy’s later directed plays without Al-Ramly.
The fans of these productions or objects, however, were fans in a non-digital era, and
hence could be ironically described with the same contemporary description accorded to their
digital descendants, as “followers”: who are non-identifiable in crowds with voices homogenized
in applause or cheers. This, however, changed following the 2011 uprisings; fans of soccer,
called the Ultras, took part in the 2011 protests utilizing their wide fan base, their organized
crowd management skills and rhyming chants to mobilize thousands of Egyptians to squares.
This politicization, nevertheless, was paid for dearly when those fans were subsequently targeted
by state security, even killed in Port Said Stadium in 2012 and Air Force stadium in 2013. Their
relationship to soccer grew more complicated with time (see chapter 2 for details).
A similar turn took place with comedy and its fans with the passing of many stage and
television comedic icons and others’ outspoken support of the military state. Comedy has
receded to productions of less quality and depth that relied on exaggerated physical gesturing,
movements, and situations, otherwise known as slapstick comedy. Like soccer fandom, sarcasm
was rejuvenated or rather visibly politicized with the 2011 uprising, this time online. Since then,
several sarcastic Facebook pages and social media personalities employed comedy to criticize
both politics, society, celebrity and comedic icons themselves. This move towards online
sarcasm, can be traced back to Bassem Youssef’s first show B+, which was later followed by a
proliferation in the practices of online vlogging and remixing. These events moved fans into the
center stage of action in many cases, resulting in a shift to both the balance of power and the
affective relationship between the audience and their objects of fandom. These turns in fan
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126 relationships to objects of fandom all drive us to examine the question of satire and online
creativity through the lens of anti-fandom.
Anti-Fandom
Through his interviews with the Simpson’s viewers, media and cultural studies scholar
Jonathan Gray discovered a new range of fandom often ignored by audience, reception and
fandom studies’ researchers, he called it “anti-fandom”. He attributed this slight to the difficulty
of studying anti-fans. Fans, unlike anti-fans, tend to be clustered around a text of interest, are
enthusiastic interview participants and exhibit similar characteristics (Gray, 2003). Gray (2005)
defined anti-fandom as “active or vocal dislike or hate of a given text, personality, or genre” (p.
847). He argued that media studies’ emphasis on audience constructs a continuum of viewership
from the casual viewer to the fan while leaving out the anti-fan (Gray, 2005). Anti-fandom,
however, can “be just as productive as fandom”, argued Gray (2005, p. 842).The crux of Gray’s
argument is that audience develop different affective relationships with the text; these differences
are reflected in their “proximities to, understanding of, and engagements with that text” (p. 842).
Studying anti-fandom reveals layers of texts that were previously treated as a monolith by
fan studies (Gray 2003; 2005). Gray (2005; 2006) for example posited that all texts have three
dimensions, namely the moral, the rational-realist, and the aesthetic. Due to its different level of
engagement with the text, Anti-fandom is more likely to reveal these layers at the point when the
consumer is “unwilling or unable to interact with all three levels” (p. 844). This in turn tells us
more about “border territories” between fandom and non-fandom (p. 844). Textuality itself shifts
with the viewers’ different engagement levels (Gray, 2003).
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127 Suzanne Scott (2012) also noted that this layering maybe an indication of the temporality
of anti-fans’ relationship with the text in question. Scott (2012) suggested that the temporality of
anti-fan practices reveals two further categories/demarcations of anti-fans which she called
“anticipatory anti-fandom”, and “acclimated anti-fandom”. Anticipatory fandom, argued Scott
(2012), shows in the, sometimes paratextual, immediate negative response to the media text,
while acclimated anti-fandom occurs over time, where the affective relationship between the fan-
base and the text shifts based on “specific authorial or textual shifts” (Scott, 2012). Acclimated
fans might be distinguished by their transformative interventions, added Scott (2012), “through
the production and circulation of their own texts”. Similarly, Wanzo (2015) argued, antifandom
can be a knowledgeable dislike of the text or a dislike based on knowledge of the paratexts
surrounding the text (Wanzo, 2015). Whitney Philips examined the “So bad, it’s good genre” to
suggest another variation of fandom that does not fit squarely in either the love or hate camps,
but rather occupies a gray area of people “who love to love [the text], but for all the wrong
reasons” (2013, para 2.2). In other words, fans derive their pleasure from mocking products they
genuinely like (Philips, 2013).
What these studies go to show is the breadth and depth of audience affective relationships
with various texts and of the fandom space. These are not only descriptive studies of the range of
fandom, but are themselves revealing of the various social and political contexts they emerge
from. De Kosnik (2008) study of Clinton supporters as anti-fandom and marginalized fans went
to show how viewing certain groups as fans allows us to account for the affective dimensions of
not only alliances but also schisms in politics. Some anti-fan accounts, argued Gray (2006), can
have such a strong impact that they impose a limited frame through which all viewers will watch,
“even if they actively reject it”.
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128 Fandom, argued Peter Guiterez, is a site for asking questions that feature a strong media
literacy flavor, where fans are aware of “behind the scenes” production processes and details
regarding the creative decisions. Most importantly, however, fandom can be a form of self-
reflection “the beginnings of metacognition… [where] fans observe themselves thinking and
reacting because they have a stake in their thoughts and reactions” (p. 56). Anti-fandom, perhaps
more than fandom, due to its layered engagement with the text and the possible pushback from
the fan base of family and friends, also exhibits many of the necessary critical thinking skills for
media literacy. Gray (2005) noted for example, that antifans’ worry about other people’s
perception,
points to the general concern for relative levels of media literacy and for the state of the
public and textual spheres that often subsume viewers as they watch and discuss
television. It is almost as if, above and beyond the level of personal interaction with a
text, many viewers are constantly obsessed with the ‘massness’ of the medium and,
hence, a good deal of what the text means to them is a reflection of what they believe it
will mean to others and what effects it will have on them. (p. 851)
In sum, anti-fans, particularly acclimated anti-fans, exhibit a set of identifiable
characteristics, namely: their (growing) shared-dislike of the fan object, self-reflection, critical
thinking and media literacy skills, their participatory practices and collective identity as anti-fans
that drives them to create memorable objects of their anti-fandom. While they may not see
themselves as fans, Egyptian online satirists and amateur remix artists share a lot with Gray’s
anti-fans. Their anti-fandom is a reflection not of their unequivocal aversion but rather of a
complex relationship that they have formed over the years with state-sanctioned TV texts, which
can themselves be an object for their collective reflection on how they consume media and what
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129 they dislike about it. In analyzing such a complicated relationship with a text, we have to bring in
notions of nostalgia, and disenchantment.
Nostalgia and Disenchantment
In her book On Longing, Susan Stewart (1984) wrote,
Nostalgia is a sadness without an object, a sadness which creates a longing that of
necessity is inauthentic because it does not take part in lived experience. Rather, it
remains behind and before that experience. Nostalgia like any form of narrative, is
always ideological: that past it seeks has never existed except as narrative, and hence
always absent, that past continually threatens to reproduce itself as a felt lack. Hostile to
history and its invisible origins, and yet longing for an impossibly pure context of lived
experience at a place of origin, nostalgia wears a distinctly utopian face, a face that turns
future-past, a part which has only ideological reality. (p. 23)
To Stewart, we feel nostalgic to an imagined, utopic past to which our lived experiences are
often judged. Nostalgia separates past and present around questions of distance and authenticity.
These questions become clearer in her discussion of souvenirs which bring public history into the
privacy of personalized experience, where “a souvenir might mark the privatization of the public
symbol… the juxtaposition of history with a personalized present” (Stewart, 1984, p. 138).
Souvenir from the past can also be our way of making sense of the present where “a souvenir is
not simply an object appearing out of context, an object from the past incongruously surviving in
the present, rather, its function is to envelop the present within the past.” (p. 151)
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130 This connection between past and present through the object of nostalgia becomes a site of
struggle when that object is a sign, a historical narrative or an allegory. According to Bakhtin,
“various different classes will use one and the same language. As a result, differently oriented
accents intersect in every ideological sign [and] Sign becomes an arena of class struggle.”
(Quoted in Stewart, 1984, p. 18).
On the flipside of nostalgia, there is growing disenchantment brought about, no longer by
modernity and bureaucratization as suggested by Max Weber, but by something similar in
mechanism, that is the global digital space. Digital space offered Egyptian youth access to an
alternative world view that was neither constrained by national boundaries nor national
ideological politics, even interpretations of Islam that were not culturally constrained nor
implicated in relationships with political authority. Most importantly these digital spaces weaved
youth’ lifestyles around a new technological model, that though itself implicated in its own
profit-making algorithmic strategies, unwittingly presented them with alternatives for self-
expression and tools for communicating with one another, otherwise unattainable in their
authoritarian settings.
Their growing disenchantment, however, was also equally motivated by the rapid and
repeated disappointments they had suffered from entities that used to offer them: safety from
oppression (historically provided by the political left), enchantment (historically provided by the
moral guidance of religious and moral figures and the political right), and quality entertainment
(provided by creative producers of quality art and entertainment). They, however, found
themselves caught between a political left that decided to sidestep their quest for freedom by
endorsing a military coup for the sake of what seemed like a political revenge from the political
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131 right (“The Sad,” 2015), and a political right that they felt circumvented many of their
revolutionary demands and failed to appreciate the diversity of Egyptian society (El-Sherif,
2014). Religious figures also failed to see the deep social transformations that were taking place
in Egyptian society continuing to emphasize the Islamic values of order at the expense of the
more fundamental values of social and political justice. Even the creative spaces of arts and
entertainment were infiltrated by political polarization and cronyism, which intimidated many
mainstream creative producers into supporting the state authoritarian rhetoric equating political
expression with disrespect. Mohammed Sobhy, one of this generation’s most admired comedy
idols, often dated what he termed “The Egyptian Morality Crisis” to the beginning of the 2011
uprisings (Rassd, 2013).
In a series of conversations with his brother Ali Kandeel, a stand-up comedian and stage
actor, Mohammed Kandeel, a comic artist and social media influencer, along with Ali discussed
the reasons for their growing disenchantment with their childhood entertainment idols (Kandeel,
2016). The conversations revealed a strong connection between parental, cultural and political
authority. Mohammed titled his articles “A conversation with my brother, atheist with [name of
childhood idol]”. Their choice of the word atheist, shocking as it was to the Egyptian religiously
conservative mindset (even if it was merely disbelief in a famous person), went to show how
their dislike was more disenchantment than mere distaste. In a conversation about their
disenchantment with Mohammed Sobhy in particular, Mohammed asked Ali about the turning
point in his relationship to Sobhy’s stage art,
Kandeel: But you must have viewed—in your burgeoning relationship to Sobhy’s
theatre—that it was something promising: a revolutionary valuable art; to a great extent:
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132 different, as you mentioned, from Mohammed Negm or the summer theatre for
entertainment. What was the fundamental message to you in Sobhy’s earlier good works
[his plays in collaboration with Lenin Alramly]?
Ali Kandeel: That’s a very good question! So it appeared to spectators, that Sobhy was
enticing people to change, embrace humanity, resist oneself sometimes for the sake of
becoming a better person, an instigator for resisting oppression, he even—before his
preoccupation with perfectionism and theorization—used to be good at this game (let me
repeat, with Lenin
8
), but with time, with his separation from Lenin on one hand, and my
maturity on the other, I was surprised that he started preaching: ‘I am good and you are
bad, listen to what I have to say’”. (Kandeel, 2016)
Kandeel’s point of contention with Sobhy’s art was not only his message, but the way he treated
his co-actors and audience: bureaucratic and authoritarian. “He’s the only actor that makes me
feel that he is only acting from 8 am to 2 pm where actors sign in and out… there’s no art… it’s
the work of professional crafters,” he explained. He also credited much of Sobhy’s
authoritarianism to the Egyptian audience, who, he argued, are pressured to accept subpar jokes,
especially when repeated by stage actors “over 20 times to cue the audience to clap.” The turning
point for Kandeel, however, was Sobhy’s views on the revolution, where he recounted “With
time, I started to doubt what he’s presenting, it lost its taste completely and my frustration with
the fact that he tricked me as a spectator turned into utmost anger when I read his opinions on the
revolution—where I wanted to believe that he was one of its catalysts… I was like ‘What
happened man? Why don’t you want me to criticize?’ ” (Kandeel, 2016)

8
Theatre writer Lenin Al-Ramly
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133 To many of my participants, the Arab uprisings constituted a break between past and
present, a moment with which they delineated their before(s) and after(s). With a lack of a clear
opponent at which to direct criticism, previously revered childhood texts became an arena of
struggle between a generation that saw a rekindling of hope with the Arab Spring, and another
that viewed the protests as a threat to their well-established views on politics and society.
Childhood texts became the souvenirs, yet ones that were reminiscent of war rummage. While
the cherished childhood object partly reminded them of an uncomplicated childhood, it also
exemplified many of the things that the uprisings, itself an object of nostalgia, set out to make
right.
Memes and Remix Videos: Tools of the Anti-fan
Biologist Richard Dawkins credited for coining the word meme used it to describe the
viral-like spread of cultural artifacts and ideas (Howley, 2016). This semblance, however, can be
quite problematic in the context of internet users as it implies passivity on part of users as they
helplessly ‘catch the germ’ of the viral content (Jenkins, 2009a). In the context of online media,
Milner (2012) defined memes as “amateur media artifacts, extensively remixed and recirculated
by different participants on social media networks.” A meme can be a captioned image that
consists of “a picture and a witty message and a catchphrase” (Grundlingh, 2017, p. 9). It can
also be used as a form of non-verbal communication. One of the most popular types of memes, is
the “reaction shot” which could contain just an image (a facial expression, gesture, etc.) (p. 2)
People employ memes for a variety of reasons, primarily jokes and entertainment
(Grundlingh, 2017), but also for the “reappropriation of news discourse and popular culture to
critique, resist or challenge political and symbolic authority.” (Howley, 2016, p. 164) As a blend
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134 of popular cultural and politics (Shifman, 2013), memes can act as ‘visual shortcuts’ that can
bridge to “complex narratives about times past that bear upon the present” (Hristova, 2013, p.
93). For example, Howley (2016) noted, how the “I Have a Drone” meme drew on King’s “I
have a dream” to challenge the rhetorical equivalence suggested by the media between two
African American leaders, thereby signifying a popular opposition to Obama’s drone wars.
The exchange of memes both implies and establishes a common understanding between
the sender and receiver. Grundlingh (2017) noted that for individuals posting memes, they “must
assume that the addressee shares the same codes and that he/she will interpret the meme in a
specific way before choosing which meme to use.” (p. 11). Therefore, memes, argued De La
Rosa-Carrillo (2015) and Grunlingh (2017), have come to constitute a particular kind of
vernacular among internet users who “share or remix digital content to communicate jokes,
emotions and opinions” (p. 13).
From a culture jamming perspective, memes can be viewed as a continuation of the
detournment tactic, whereby anti-consumerist movements used to disrupt or subvert mainstream
cultural signs. In their present reincarnation, they are “updated to reflect the capacity for
networked communities to rapidly produce and circulate” (Jenkins, 2017) remixed images of
current events passing visual critiques and suggesting alternative interpretations for reality.
Most of the creative content on Egyptian Facebook sarcastic pages revolves around
memes which are technically easier to create than remix videos. A meme is a creative
embodiment of both past and present, where creators see a parallel between an image in their
memory and the present reality they are attempting to criticize. The reframing of the realistic
situation through a popular culture comic frame, allows viewers to indirectly see and discover
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135 the absurdity of the real situation. The lure of the meme is its low technical requirements, yet in
finding the exact frame in the popular text that matches the situation requires a significant
amount of time-consuming effort on part of the creator. This all points to the affective labor fans
and creators put into these creative productions.
Like memes, Remix is practiced by activists and creative content producers from around
the world for a variety of purposes such as commenting and critiquing, usually by highlighting
aspects of existing media content (images, sound, video, etc.), and repurposing it into new
content. Video remixing, as a form of appropriation and activism, signals a shift from passive
reception to creative production of new, sometimes subversive, meaning: a Read/Write culture,
in the words of Lawrence Lessig. Unlike memes, remix videos can deliver a point using a
progression of shots, sometimes placed in a narrative, which requires a lot more effort and more
advanced technical capabilities, but with an outcome that is usually more layered than a two
dimensional meme.
Methods
At the turn of the digital era, more texts of fandom have become publicly available and
accessible to both the public and researchers alike—whether those researchers can insert
themselves into a deep seated fandom is another issue nevertheless. Therefore textual analysis,
digital ethnographies and netnographies are often combined with interviews to glean the various
layers of meaning texts take on. Gray’s (2005) investigation of the TWoP forum (Television
Without Pity), along with Abigail De Kosnik (2008) investigation of the Clinton fans’ blog posts,
and Whitney Phillips reading of the “Troll 2” reviews are few examples of researchers utilizing
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136 the openness of digital technologies to enhance our understanding of the different dimensions
and shades of fandoms.
Facebook pages that utilize memes and remix videos can be seen as the digital
continuation of Egyptians love for puns and playful, potentially subversive, jokes. To gain
insight into the negotiations and digital practices of anti-fandom for satirical creative Facebook
pages, I interviewed twelve of the most popular creative content producers (with followers
ranging from 200,000 to 14 million) and page admins, and eight of their fans: a total of twenty
in-depth interviews lasting from 1 to 2 hours each; I combined the data from these interviews
with textual and visual analyses of the Facebook pages. The content on these pages included
memes, GIFs, and remix videos, with topics extending from sports, global and local popular
culture, to social and political commentary. The pages analyzed, though different in their scope
or niche, all use satire and popular culture to pass social or political critique of youth’ lived
realities. Those pages were: Asa7be Sarcasm Society, Tamat Al-Targama (Translation Was
Done), Dubsmash Egypt, Mohammed Khamis, Hesham Afifi, Seif Al-Mosalamy, Fatma Abd-
ElSalam, The Girl from Egypt, The Legend of Low Art, The Engineer Creature, Born in the
Eighties, The Mo7n Is. Page admins were reached via their pages’ instant messaging feature and
interviews were mostly conducted on Facebook messenger or Skype. Interviews were conducted
in Arabic and transcribed in English; transcriptions were thematically analyzed using Braun and
Clark (2006) method of thematic analysis. Looking at those pages through the lens of anti-
fandom allows us to see the various levels of engagement youth develop with the texts of both
semiotic and physical authorities, their changing relationships and negotiations with these texts,
and how their participatory practices work to develop a new collective identity around the shared
practices of anti-fandom. Thematic analysis revealed three main themes that capture Egyptian
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137 youth’ transformation of subjectivity from that of the Arab spring subject present in squares to
the developing anti-fan in the digital world. The themes reveal how Egyptian satirical pages
functioned as sites of anti-fandom for critiquing established institutions through a complex mix
of both nostalgia and negotiation, developing media literacies and critical thinking skills, and
enacting participatory practices that work to produce a new collective identity centered around
perceptions of creative autonomy.
Findings and Analysis
Negotiating Nostalgia through Anti-fandom
One of the first people to set a trend for video blogging and online political satire was
Bassem Youssef, whose audience was mainly comprised of youth (Durham, 2014); his satire
relied heavily on snippets from mainstream media, which provided him with a rich resource for
both satire and ridicule. This choice was not coincidental, for decades state media has been all
this generation was offered in terms of entertainment content. The schism, however, became
particularly salient when state media along with private satellite channels owned by Mubarak
cronies started demonizing the “Revolutionary youth”, and discrediting them with accusations of
“disrespect”, “foreign agency”, and “anarchism”. This was paralleled by a general
disappointment on part of youth in popular religious clerks choosing to emphasize the law and
order aspects of their religion (both Muslim and Christian) over those of social justice. On the
political front, they were also demoralized by popular political groups—both left and right—
choosing to prioritize their partisan leverage over the general benefit of the Egyptian people.
Therefore as we saw in Chapter 1, state media, became a rich resource for creative producers to
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138 pass critique not only at media but also at the various institutional influences that direct their
rhetoric, from political parties, to religious institutions, and state.
Previously venerated religious figures, also became objects of satire, something that was
generally frowned upon prior to the uprising. Amr Khaled, a once popular televangelist among
youth, named by the Times magazine as one of the most 100 influential people in 2007 (Nomani,
2007), became the object of their ridicule when he was initially neutral about the uprisings and
later embraced the military takeover in 2013 (Ibrahim, 2015).
Wearing a mock mustache and characteristic upbeat tone of Khaled, Mahmoud Khazbak
took aim at Khaled in his parody videos which went to suggest that Khaled’s job was to appease
the youth. Khazbak pointed out the irony of Khaled’s new show Smile of Hope post Arab Spring
by replicating Khaled’s promo utilizing the same stylistic elements, yet replacing Khaled’s
picture with his and the word “smile” with “disappointment” (Figure 5). In his parodies, he
juxtaposed Khaled’s characteristic uplifting and optimistic voice with dystopian elements from
the reality of Egyptian youth, hinting at how out of touch and irrelevant Khaled’s rhetoric has
become. Using the same tone and speech style characteristic of Khaled, Khazbak addressed
Khaled’s audience,
From my position here, I am sending a message to every young man and woman, that we
should not be silent. Stand up and resist! then close your doors and windows, lower the
heat on the food so it won’t get burned, and come sit here next me, so we can work right
next to the wall [an expression for “staying out of trouble”] (DrHakeem Hassan, 2015).
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139
Figure 5 (Left) Amr Khaled Promo for Smile of “Hope ”, (Right) Mahmoud Khazbak Parody "Disappointment"
Childhood texts, however, remained one of the most generative sources for satire in
youth creative productions. In a mockumentary collaboration between vloggers Mohammed
Khamis and Hesham Afifi titled “Confessions after 30” (Afifi, 2016), Khamis sat behind a desk
delivering what appeared to be a personal confession at a background of melancholic music
(Figure 6). In the video, he related his frustration as a child of the early eighties, how he did not
get a chance to watch Space Toon, how the cartoon time was thoughtlessly placed very early
between 8 am and 11 am during his summer vacation, and how he had to watch instead entire
shows that were distasteful to him as a child because they were what was available. Many of
these shows, he explained, ended up traumatizing him. He mentioned the names of some of the
Egyptian TV shows and actors who dramatized the lives of Upper Egyptians, set in rural areas
that were irrelevant or not sensible to him as a child in Cairo. The video segment was clearly
directed at the eighties generation. Using a shared language and memory, the comedy stemmed
from the contrast between the serious melodramatic music and acting and the ostensible frivolity
of the source of his trauma: the lack of “Space Toon” in his childhood. The video itself was shot
through with statements that in and of themselves were both true and serious: “These are not just
children’s programming. They are the imagination and the dream”. The core message of the
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140 video was that kids programming was considered inconsequential, and that children did not
matter, but most importantly that they did not possess any control over what to watch and when.
Therefore, the video left commentators divided between those who laughed at the apparent
sarcasm and those who reflected on their childhood and identified with its traumatized
protagonist.

Figure 6 Mohammed Khamis in his video “Confessions a fter 30”
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141 Figure 7 Friday of the Land Meme
Even politics as usual became a target of youth sarcasm, and constituted yet another form
of their complex transformed relationships with objects of past fandom. In one of the very few
mass protests that erupted
following the military takeover in
2013, Egyptians came out to
protest the transfer of sovereignty
of two Egyptian islands to Saudi
Arabia— a deal struck by Sisi to
guarantee more cash flow to
Egypt—protests came out on
Friday and were named “Friday of
Land”. While several of their posts asserted the Egyptian sovereignty over the two islands in a
sarcastic frame, other posts signaled a general apathy towards engaging in protests (and politics
as usual) and whatever they lead to of arrests and forced disappearances. One of these memes
(Figure 7) read,
A: Come along Taha, call Khaled and Islam and let’s go out…
B: They were arrested in the Friday of ‘Land is honor’…
A: There’s no God but Allah (expression of disappointment mixed with resolve) May Allah
grant them freedom…
A: So call Kareem and Mahmoud and let’s go out then…
B: Kareem was taken from the coffee shop yesterday and Mahmoud was taken on his way home
from a microbus at a checkpoint
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142 A: Them too… So if we want to start a round of estimation (a popular card game), how can we
complete four players!!
Ostensibly, the post shows a concern for playing cards more than a concern for the protest and
the safety of their arrested and disappearing friends, yet it can also be read as an allusion to how
prisons are filled with youth, that they cannot even gather enough players for a game.
Previously venerated texts, became objects of critique and sometimes ridicule, even those
intersecting with religion and history. This marked a general disenchantment with myths of the
past, and a vibrant requisitioning of every inherited facet of their social lives. This was manifest
in both their words and their artistic creations. In one of the most watched childhood texts, a
historical saga titled Qutuz, documenting the life of Seif Aldin Qutuz, a mamluk leader who
defeated Hulago, remix artists took aim not at the highly venerated text, but at the way it was
acted and executed. They particularly singled out overly dramatic scenes and pointed out their
exaggeration, which they commonly referred to as “A-vowara [or over-doing]”. One of those
scenes was the closing scene of the series, where Qutuz is assassinated by a fellow mamluk
leader and friend Baibars who suddenly feels remorseful after killing Qutuz. Remix artists,
Khaled Mokhtar and Mohammed Khamis, collaborated on remixing this scene to point out its
exceptionally long dramatization of Qutuz’ death, and titled it “Qutuz never dies” (Lord Egypt,
2016). They played on Baibrars’ reactions of guilt over killing Qutuz to make it as if he’s
surprised at how long it was taking Qutuz to die; they cut Qutuz’ long monologue at the time of
his death to make him fall to the ground and come up again to say yet another line several times
(Figure 8).
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143
Figure 8 Stills from YouTube Remix "Qutuz Never Die s"
On one hand, videos like this can be read as a celebration of creative youth’ maturing
technical ability, but they can also be read as a subversive rewriting of the original texts to
highlight their frustration while experimenting with their control over the outcome. This
reinvention of the text exemplifies their “ability to transform personal reaction into social
interaction, spectator culture into participatory culture” (Jenkins, 2006). This action is what
transforms them from being regular viewers to becoming a fan, in our case anti-fans,
by translating that viewing into some kind of cultural activity, by sharing feelings and
thoughts about the program content with friends, by joining a ‘community’ of other fans
who share common interests. For fans, consumption naturally sparks production, reading
generates writing, until the terms seem logically inseparable. (Jenkins, 2006, p. 41)
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144 In their remix rewrites, Egyptian anti-fans were redefining “the politics of reading, to view
textual property not as the exclusive domain of textual producers but as open to repossession by
textual consumers.” (Jenkins, 2006, p. 60).
Part of their changing relationship to childhood texts was their own personal growth and
their development of media literacy skills. According to Khaled Mokhtar, admin of “Tamat Al
Targma (Translation has been done)”,
My relationship to [these childhood texts] before, is what motivated me to talk about
them now, because I grew up watching them. As I matured and started understanding
media, I could now see their flaws, and that I can get laughs out of these flaws; the
current generation is not the same as before, it’s a generation that is very tech savvy. So I
discovered that Ahmed Abd El-Aziz [famous childhood actor] for example, comes out
only slapping Kamal Abou Rayya [another childhood actor] more often than not in a TV
series—which is not true [an exaggeration]; the series had a lot more than just slaps, it
had a plot and acting and all—but I combine several of these shots in a [remix] video and
call it ‘The King of Farhada [colloquial for beating someone until they are toast]’, it got
two million views.
He nevertheless did not want to override his previous or ongoing fascination with those texts,
emphasizing that
I don’t make fun of it as a plot or a story, which I personally like—I grew up liking [the
text]. But I make fun of a specific point, that if Ahmed Abd El-Aziz were to watch it
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145 himself, he would laugh at it, without ruining the personal image of the actors or directors
themselves. And this is the goal of sarcasm, to bring out the humor in a flaw.
Karim Hashkobly, another popular remix artist with over a hundred thousand followers,
remixed a song by the former Egyptian National Democratic Party (specifically Gamal
Mubarak’s organization for youth career development) that originally featured Egyptian aspiring
youth venturing into careers while wearing optimistic smiles (Figure 9, Left); he remixed the
video in 2016 to show the same youth, some of which apparently disappeared, others seemingly
dead, possibly alluding to Egypt’s highly problematic forced disappearance and extrajudicial
killing under Sisi’s military regime (Figure 9, Right). Juxtaposed with the name of the
organization that produced the song “Future’s Generation”, Hashkobly’s un-dubbed remix
delivers a message that is ostensibly entertaining, yet political at heart.

Figure 9 (Left) Original song "Youth of the Nile", (Right) Dystopian Remix by Hashkobly
However, like Mokhtar, Hashkobly did not disown his previous admiration of cultural
texts; he rather went through the same process of metacognition whereby he developed new
layers of engagement with the old texts he grew up with. Speaking of his videos that varyingly
remixed old songs and dancing scenes, he noted,
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146 I started going back to the songs I listened to as a child, I found flaws that could be made
into jokes. The jokes could be about clothes, way of talking, dancing, or graphics… I
realized that the jokes already existed in these songs but were waiting for someone to
point them out in some way. These artists are essentially my heroes; I grew up listening
to their songs. This made me feel entitled to make jokes about them, they were like my
family.
His target audience, Hashkobly noted, were not cynical people but rather eighties-born
individuals like himself: “nostalgic people… interested in the videos related to the past with the
added humor”. His parodies, he concluded, were his way of “showing love” to those works. Like
the ‘So bad it’s good genre’ (Philips, 2013), Hashkobly and his fans derived pleasure from
mocking products they genuinely liked.
While the group of creative vloggers and remix artists was a tightly knit one, it
nevertheless was one with porous boundaries facilitated by the creative breaks on their pages and
maintained by the constant, somewhat capitalistic drive, to maintain a collaborative relationship
with their audience all while remaining relevant and vibrant. There were instances of crossover
where most of the comedy vloggers, meme and remix artists I interviewed happened to work in
one or another popular comedy show on mainstream TV. Their social media popularity was their
gateway ticket to becoming script writers in comedy workshops of several of these shows. At the
same time, as Jenkins (2006) suggested, “they [employed] images and concepts drawn from
mass culture texts to explore their subordinate status, to envision alternatives, to voice their
frustrations and anger, and to share their new understandings with others” (Jenkins, 2006, p. 60)
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147 However, their relationship to mainstream TV remained more or less antagonistic, even
for those who collaborated on mainstream shows. Aziz, admin of Asa7be, pointed out that in
many cases, “Mainstream TV plagiarized [their] creations in full, a whole album [of memes] for
example, and possibly created an entire sketch out of it on TV without even acknowledging
[their] rights.” Social media to them was about regaining control; Mohammed Khamis suggested
that social media, though still ‘largely underground’, can be a way to pressure the mainstream:
I feel somewhat angry about the situation. [Example of the imposter doctor] is the
mainstream while social media is pretty much underground so no matter how much I
express my opinion, it will never be mainstream, but I want to increase the base of the
underground until it reverberates to the mainstream, reaches him [the doctor] personally
and makes him think about his audience and respect their minds.
He nevertheless, viewed mainstream media as a dying industry,
I worked with [satirical TV show] that was mainstream. I could have stayed mainstream,
but I love life underground. I like new media; I believe the future is digital and I don’t
want to be in TV which is both a dying industry and a killer of talent. It’s been 10 years
since I last watched it. I cannot support this dying technology. I get offers from
mainstream TV, but I would never go to a dying structure? It kills talent to talk 40
minutes about a topic. Now there’s a direct way to deliver your message…. [In the
future] Everything will be arranged, I would know who to follow, and my kid would
follow another, and that’s how things would be.

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148 Being-in: the making of the anti-fan
Jenkins (2006) described participatory culture as one “in which members believe their
contributions matter, and feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least
they care what other people think about what they have created” (p. 4). Fan communities are
known for their highly participatory cultures. Fiske (1992) noted that,
Fans are very participatory. Sports crowds wearing their teams’ colors or rock audiences
dressing and behaving like the bands become part of the performance. This melding of
the team or performer and the fan into a productive community minimizes differences
between artist and audience and turns the text into an event, not an art object. (p. 40)
While the sarcastic Facebook pages of Egyptian youth do not quite resemble a fandom in the
sense that there is no central fan object, and an ambivalence as to whether the page participants
are fans or followers, they nevertheless exhibit a lot of characteristics of what Henry Jenkins
refers to as Participatory Cultures. Jenkins (2015) summarized the role of participatory cultures
as, supporting peer-to-peer mentorship, encouraging and scaffolding participants as they refine
their skills and develop greater confidence in their own voices.
Asa7be sarcasm society has almost 14 million followers. While it has its core team of
meme creators and remix artists, as many of the pages examined—teams they have formed from
amateurs over time—they continuously publish memes and remixes created by their page
members crediting them with their names. According to Aziz,
all of our admins used to be followers… there were people who started off with pitching
ideas only and now they are editing videos, since we gave them the motivation, they
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149 improved on themselves… some of them are as young as 13 years old, and they created
videos with thousands of views … What would a 13 year old kid do online, chat?! The
fact that they’re producing [memes and videos] pleases me personally… we have two
teams, a beginners teams and a more professional team, where beginners are rewarded
with points and upgraded to professionals
Page members often responded to posts with their own memes, where memes have come to be
the shared language among fans of these pages, expressive and equally ambiguous to outsiders.
Page admins made sure to respond to comments, and reply–with sarcasm as well–to angry
posters. Khaled Mokhtar of Tamat Al Targma, related how the difficulties he had faced in
building a following and learning to create memes and videos, have motivated him to help others
in his old position,
There came a time, whenever someone wanted to do something and people did not know
him, I would collaborate with them, so people would know them… On one hand I am
making use of their talent, and on the other hand, people start to know them… because
nobody gave me this chance before.
It is a common practice for these vloggers to share a video of an aspiring vlogger and point out
their unique qualities and why people should follow them, such that their fan base are
immediately transferred to the endorsed rising star. Hashkobly, a remix artist, alongside Khaled
Mokhtar went a step further than simple endorsement by creating videos detailing how they
make their mems and remixes. One of Hashkobly’s videos (Figure 10), shows how to create a
video with three concurrent animations of himself.
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150
Figure 10 Hashkobly Remix Tip Video
Participatory practices, however, were most evident in activities that involved the
community of both creative artists and their fans. This was exemplified by their practice of
‘partying’, which often grew into creating ‘trends’ that span multiple creative pages. “Partying
[ta’hfeel]”—which borders trolling— starts off with a tweet, Facebook post, or a meme, that
resonates with people, and to which fans would subsequently reply with tweets, memes or
comments with their own twist. While fans usually reply using the same medium, sometimes
there is a cross-over between platforms. Some of these parties may be read as a sign of dystopic
cynicism, however, they could also signify maturing sensibilities that reject any attempts at
misleading them into their previous complacency, be it televangelist Amr Khaled, self-
proclaimed moralist and 90’s star, Mohammed Sobhy, or even the highly ridiculed “human
development” social media trend replete with advice and motivational quotes about careers and
relationships. Sisi’s speeches were rich sources for such “parties,” which are usually tipped with
a tag-line from one of his speeches that soon turns into a hashtag or meme, to which people keep
adding to: extending the lifetime of the tagline and their playfulness with it. Khaled Mokhtar
related the initiation of the ‘tahfeel’ practice to the incident when a man made an open request to
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151 people on the internet to Photoshop his finger over the Eifel tower; people responded playfully to
his request, by doing things such as photo shopping him in place of the Eifel tower itself. “They
did not do what he wanted in the first place, so this was the party”, he explained. The joy in this
practice, argued Mokhtar, stems from the “shared sarcasm”.
Another example of ‘tahfeel’, transpired hours following
the politically charged posts of April 9
th
, 2017, following the
church bombings; the Facebook posts of Dubsmash Egypt soon
turned sarcastic again, when the Egyptian president Sisi enforced a
state of Emergency for three months. The law legitimated the
search of phones and social media websites. To admins and their
youth fans, this was ironic. Egyptian authorities were already
regularly persecuting people and searching their homes and devices
without legal search warrants. It was common knowledge that all
social media posts on Facebook and Twitter were already being
surveilled. In response to news of the emergency law, Dubsmash
admins responded by posting a picture that featured Sisi on a smart phone’s lock screen (Figure
11). Likewise, fans responded in comments with pictures of Sisi surrounded with hearts and
flowers (akin to the pictures exchanged by Sisi’s admirers, and who apparently are the object of
ridicule to those youth) (Figure 12). They followed that by changing their profile picture to a side
portrait of Sisi, captioned “We love you Sisi”. To an outsider, the lock screen post did not have
any captions associated with it. It, along with the following posts, was highly contextual and tied
to the ephemeral event of the emergency law announcement. Only fans of the page (people who
were immersed in this page) would understand the joke behind the lock screen, indicating a
Figure 11 Lock Screen with Sisi's Picture
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152 shared (yet hidden) understanding of dissent masked by an apparent complacency at physical
public spaces and police checkpoints.

Figure 12 Two Dubsmash posts after announcement of 2017 Emergency Laws with similarly themed comments
Asa7be soon joined the trend, and commented on the emergency law with several
sarcastic posts around the same idea of hidden dissent masked with ostensible support which
went to show how powerless they perceived authority to be in controlling their unspoken dissent.
One post had a character from a popular movie scene depicted as frantically saying “There’s an
emergency law in the country; they can stop us anywhere!” to which another character
nonchalantly responded “I wouldn’t miss that idiot! I made arrangements from the outside… and
the inside” (Figure 13).
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153
Figure 13 Meme: Arrangement from the Outside and the Inside
These examples point to anti-fans’ development of a ‘tacit capacity’ or ‘implicit knowledge’
(Polyani cited in Moustakas, 1990) among the followers of these pages, based on their
immersion in the culture of these pages and their collective realization of the stakes of openly
voicing their dissidence. They exhibited this ‘tacit capacity’ in their common enjoyment of an
‘inside joke’ and their contributions to making it a ‘trend’.
Kristina Busse (forthcoming) suggested that context matters in interpreting fanfic, given
the shared memory, assumptions and language amongst the fans. Fan fic is ephemeral because it
is the shared practice of production that matters in these communities more than the final
product: the mutual shared enjoyment. She interestingly described these practices as a pool party,
a description that is very similar to the concept of ta’hfeel used by Egyptian anti-fans. Partying is
an expression that reveals the pleasure they take in ridiculing their object of fandom, but also
their power over the text/person, and their ability to collectively share a joke at their expense,
subverting their initial intent of a speech, video, or picture. In political “partying”, the
ephemerality of these occurrences is protection, so is the shared vocabulary, mostly in memes,
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154 that usually builds on previous “parties”. To an outsider, it may be hard to keep track of all these
ephemeral events, or what might be referred to as ‘trends’, and the evolving language that has to
remain in motion, for also its motion is protection. Trends, however, were short-lived; partying,
nevertheless, worked not only to create community but also to build media literacies.
Building capacities for media literacy and critical thinking
Despite the “Just for Fun” disclaimer in the About sections of several of these sarcastic
pages, the goal of their satire was not always the pleasure resulting from the shared laugh. It
more often than not, was a collective outcry of resistance against a growing trend in society, such
as mainstreaming mediocrity. Khamis recalled,
I once posted a video of a fraud doctor talking about how to increase the size of your
buttocks that I thought was simply ridiculous. When I posted it by itself, people did not
pick up on how surreal it was, that a person like this, speaking about that, is taken
seriously by mainstream TV. People have tolerance for such things, they don’t notice, it’s
ridiculous! So I thought I should explain in another video why I think it is not normal…
the standard I measure up to is common sense; people just need someone to point out that
something like that should not be on TV!
He later explained his intent behind making those videos—dissecting what he viewed as
‘ridiculous’—suggesting that
I see the future as people starting to develop their critical thinking skills, such that they
don’t have tolerance for such banality and seek substantial content instead, so content
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155 producers like [the imposter doctor] would adjust themselves or die out, and leave the
space for more creative people who are able to create good content.

Building awareness through satire was a common thread connecting these pages’ widely
varied genres and techniques. Zaki from Dubsmash, emphasized that they aim to raise awareness
by pushing against taboos through satire, yet he added in the same breath: “We are very trivial.”
Fatema, a female vlogger, famous for her video exposing the gendered dynamics underlying
detergent TV ads that target women, further explained, “the daily routine makes people not want
to overwork their brains, or change their habits. So, it’s our job, people whose job is to imagine,
to help them pause and see the things they do not see.”
Developing new media literacies has been closely linked to participatory and sometimes
pleasurable practices. According to Jenkins et al (2009b), “participatory culture shifts the focus
of literacy from one of individual expression to community involvement. The new literacies
almost all involve social skills developed through collaboration and networking”. Alongside the
pleasure fans found in the participatory practice of ‘tahfeel’ or ‘partying’, it also worked to create
a new layer of engagement or meta cognition whereby recipients of social media content would
question their past automatic shares and likes of ‘undeserving’ media figures. Ahmed
Mohammed, the admin of “The Legend of Low Art” which critiques low quality scenes in
movies, suggested that the goal of their page was to disembody the TV idols from ‘the bad plot
or execution’, such that people can start criticizing their idols.
In response to the rise of popularity, especially among Egyptian women, of a social
media figure named Waleed Khairy who wrote about love and relationships, Khamis announced
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156 in a post, “I am going to write about love” (in a clear response to Waleed’s self-proclaimed
knowledge about love and relationships). Compared to Khamis’ more serious well-thought-out,
yet funny, posts, his Facebook posts about love were intentionally banal, combining his picture
in a suit with a tag-line posted under the hashtag “talk_about_love”; they used the same font, and
quotation marks style utilized by Khairy. One read “There are people whose hearts have lisps in
the letter of Love,” while another read, “Don’t be a period in a girl’s life, after which she’s
relieved” (Figure 14).

Figure 14
Khamis’ posts clearly resonated with his followers, who quickly identified Khamis’ target. They
responded with comments along the same lines, or reposted Khamis’ original picture with
Waleed Khairy’s characteristic beard over Khamis’s face (Figure 15).
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157
Figure 15 (Left) A quote by Waleed Khairy (Left), ( Right) Fan-made Waleed beard for Khamis
In less than two weeks’, Khamis fans responded with their own take on banal-love using
rhyming metaphors from their professions, under the hashtag “We_are_the_Love”, which were
posted by Khamis on his page crediting their creators. One post was made by a dentist reading,
“if her molar once hurt her, make her a root canal that will pamper her” (Figure 16). Another was
made by a computer engineer, read “A woman’s heart is like a RAM-A, shake it and you will
suffer Ya-ma (Arabic for ‘so many days’)” (Figure 17).

Figure 16 Figure 17
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158 Intentionally banal, the messages in those memes were not valuable in and of themselves;
however, the practice of being-in on the joke was the actual value those fans aspired to. Like
Jenkins suggested for fans, they were redefining “the politics of reading, to view textual property
not as the exclusive domain of textual producers but as open to repossession by textual
consumers.” (Jenkins, 2006, p. 60). Hence, the original text, be it that one speech or quote,
“shatters and becomes many texts as it is fit into the lives of the people who use it, each in her or
his own way, each for her or his own purposes…” (Jenkins, 2006, p. 60). As Bourdieu (1993)
similarly noted,
it is significant that breaks with the most orthodox works of the past, i.e. with the belief
they impose on newcomers, often take the form of parody… where the newcomers “get
beyond” the dominant mode of thought and expression not by explicitly denouncing it,
but by repeating and reproducing it in a sociologically non-congruent content, with the
effect of rending it incongruous or even absurd, simply by making it perceptible as the
arbitrary convention it is. (31)
Nadia, a young fan of Khamis and other sarcastic pages emphasized how she found the most
pleasure “when one meme starts and everyone adds upon it and I can relate to them, everyone as
in fans and followers.” Interestingly, she noted, how that same trend soon starts to show as a pun
in her own conversations: “when I use the same punch line I saw in a meme/comic”
Ethics and Authenticity. Media literacies developed through the practices of anti-
fandom, however, raise a set of ethical concerns, especially when the object of anti-fandom is
often human and not necessarily a text, and the anti-fan is not merely someone interpreting a text
with dislike but sometimes actively producing texts of their own. Emma A. Jane (2014) raised
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159 these concerns in light of her study of vitriol targeting cheerleaders, suggesting that describing
this vitriol as anti-fandom downplays the sexist and misogynistic features of the text which can
subsequently cause harm to real individuals. The ethics of studying anti-fans was also
approached by Bethan Jones (2016) who questioned the difference in power structure between
fandom and anti-fandom, the rights of text ownership and need for permissions in republishing
anti-fandom texts. She suggested using a ‘sliding scale ethical approach’ to studying anti-
fandom, noting that when the fandom or anti-fandom is directed at a text and does not draw on
the poster’s lived experience or poses potential harm to a person or a group, there would be no
need to obtain permission to quote the work.
While at the outskirts, it might seem that the vloggers and their fans were exhibiting
participatory practices in what would appear like “trolling”, those practices, nevertheless, can
also be read as a collective resistance to what they viewed as a culture of state-sanctioned
mediocrity. Waleed Khairy, for example, was also a member of the state-run Egyptian national
council on women, and a regular host for mainstream TV shows. Though Khamis’ posts were
effortlessly done, the context and timing of his posts and the unlikely rallies behind his posts
were all a clear indication of how his anti-fan message resonated with many. Unable to clearly
criticize the political authority, anti-fans took aim at what they perceived to be the low-hanging
fruit of its failed system that promotes and perpetuates mediocrity and is threatened by authentic
(possibly) political talent.
This became clearer when Khamis pointed out to me, that while he criticized people like
the fraud doctor, the Sisi or Sadat look-a-likes (who have been given a platform and interviewed
by mainstream TV just for their mere resemblance to authority figures), there were certain jokes
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160 that he refrained from. In other words, he balanced his critique with a value-based judgement,
that did not target people’s character or show them in an unflattering light other than what they
intended. Khamis explained,
In making the video about the Sadat look-a-like, I removed parts of it in the montage,
because they were close shots on his face that I thought might embarrass him… I don’t
want him to feel that I am bullying him but that I am joking along with him. I always
think that this can reach the person or his family. And I don’t want them to feel bad about
it. Objectively, it should not make them feel bad.

Anti-fandom and the Search for the Authentic
With the political square lost, popular culture taste has come to constitute the new arena
for struggle over who gets access to youth consciousness. The rejection of the fraud is essentially
a search for the ‘authentic’. Fiske (1992) argued a la Bourdieu’s theory of taste and cultural
capital, that “fans discriminate fiercely: the boundaries between what falls within their fandom
and what does not are sharply drawn”. Fans particularly discriminate by selecting the texts that
offer them opportunities to “make meanings of their social identities and social experiences that
are self-interested and functional.” (p. 35). Authenticity is one particular criterion of
discrimination that fans use. Despite of it being “a criterion of discrimination normally used to
accumulate official cultural capital”, it is one that “is readily appropriated by fans in their
moonlighting cultural economy.” (p.36). The Facebook page “The Legend of Low Art”, for
example, was not only about criticizing low quality acting scenes but also progressed to pointing
out what was good about higher quality ones,

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161 We decided to show people the difference between low quality and high quality art, so
like we were analyzing low quality movies, we started analyzing higher quality ones, and
so we developed a new type of following of people who not only watch to laugh at the
mediocre but ones that also seeks good quality bits that pertaining to their daily lives
Authenticity, however, carries different meanings for different groups. In case of fan
fiction for example, Busse (forthcoming) argued that “fan fiction challenges many attempts at
traditional aesthetic valuation”. While most of the fan-produced texts are crude and intentionally
banal, “the event itself, the fan engagement is often more important than the actual product, i.e.,
the few sentences of fictional prose”.
The ability to become political, or to appropriate popular culture content, better ridicule
it, have come to be the new criterion of authenticity, and the new rites of passage for aspiring
content creators and subsequently anti-fans. Therefore by understanding these practices in their
“fannish context” and as a “performative act”, argued Busse (forthcoming), we can understand
fan fiction as both a “literary work” and/or a “cultural engagement”.
Fans or Followers
While in the digital realm, fans are called followers, the emotional investment of some of
those fans make one hesitant of ascribing the technologically-determined label of “follower” to
them. This qualitative difference shows in participants’ responses to posts on Egyptian Facebook
Sarcastic pages, who not only respond with liking, or sharing (which are also valuable to an
extent), but they also respond with their own amateur memes, puns and jokes that sometimes
gets incorporated by the page admins in their stream of posts credited to those participants’
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162 social media profiles. As Shifman (2013) noted for memetic videos, these pages “spread the
notion of participatory culture itself: a culture based on the active spread and re-creation of
content by users” (p. 89)
Egyptian sarcastic Facebook pages are at the heart of Jenkins’s convergence argument:
“Both a top-down corporate-driven process and a bottom-up consumer-driven process. Corporate
convergence coexists with grassroots convergence.” On one hand, they are the abandoned
children of a failed uprising which redirected their energy towards creative spaces, and hence the
ongoing ebbs and flows of the political in their works. On the other hand, they stumbled upon a
substantial source of revenue within the steadily declining economy of Egypt post-Arab spring.
Though not all of the pages mentioned are revenue generating, many of them who have a
following of millions are.
According to the admins of these pages, once their pages start to gain traction, they are
approached by corporations for creative ad-placement. In one of his vlogs, Hesham Afifi
revealed that a PR company handles their interactions with YouTube. Therefore, it would be
hard to tell whether their participatory practices are motivated by revenue or shared anti-fandom.
Nevertheless, as Aziz and Hesham Afifi noted, if revenue was the most important objective, it
would not be enough to keep them going, given the intensive effort and time they dedicate to
thinking about and editing their creative content. Hima Ali, admin of “Born in the Eighties”
related how he was offered a large sum of money exceeding 100,000 L.E. for the page, yet he
added, “I could not sell it. Because I am able to make people I don’t know happy!” In another
vein, Khamis noted, he was not so much interested in creating a following as much as he was
interested in finding a venue for expressing his opinions.
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163 Hence, Capital is not only monetary, but also cultural, as Jenkins (2015) noted,
Fan communities may present alternatives… they are alternative in that they represent
different structures of knowledge, status and reputation, or norms and values. Someone
who has very little power at home might emerge as a guild leader in an online game
world… these are not resistant in that they overturn existing structures. But they may be
alternative in that they provide participants with the social capital or self-esteem needed
to survive other constraints they confront (p. 16)
Khamis, a creative vlogger and remix artist, distinguishes between the creative community and
his followers, suggesting,
My benefit from social media, was not so much from the fan base as much as it was in
connecting with the media community in Egypt. People who do things like me. I like it
when they like my work. I don’t have the concept of fan, I was never a fan of anyone. I
get attracted to content... I like the creatives–we have a sort of community, we go out and
talk about what we do… Fans are harmful, not a healthy phenomenon, because they limit
the possibility of the creative person; If I keep on answering and meeting people, I can’t
possibly move forward with this trail/meteor dragging behind me. I can’t let fans hold me
back.
While seemingly less accepting of the idea of fans, Khamis was also likely expressing a disdain
for Facebook’s lack of intimacy through the faceless followers as opposed to the sense of
community and appreciation he receives from this closed circle of creative producers, where they
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164 themselves constitute a community of anti-fans. Many of them, however, were followers turned
fans, a distinction akin to that between anticipatory and acclimated anti-fans (Scott, 2012).
Conclusion
Popular culture, especially among a certain cohort or age group constitutes a common
language, and a shared mythological reference among youth of various backgrounds. In
politically repressed settings, it is also a way of tapping into wider themes of social justice
without necessarily becoming political (i.e. targeting political leadership). Punathambekar
(2011) argued that we need to take “the sociable and everyday dimensions of participation in
and around popular culture more seriously while remaining attuned to the possibility that such
participation might, in rare instances, intersect with broader civic and political issues and
movements”. This plea makes sense when considering the Egyptian context as well, where
there is no space for the practice of open or a so-called “serious” politics which results in ebbs
and flows of the political in various forms and intensities over time. This blurring of the
boundaries, however, no longer rests change on the shoulders of influential leaders or big
events, but rather “through a descent into the ordinary " (Veena Das, 2006, 7)
Though pages like Asa7be and Dubsmash capitalized on instances of public outrage to
turn political and express rejection of state policies, they nevertheless equally harbored a
resentment towards politics as usual that bordered on cynicism. This does not seem surprising
given the many cycles of protests they witnessed start and end with no considerable outcome,
and the pricey sacrifices of youth which did not translate to political gains—only to establish a
system that was even more tyrannical than the one they set out to remove. Their disenchantment
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165 might be read as cynicism, but it can also be read as their resistance to a version of local politics
that is unable to grapple with a vicious state oppression.
Asa7be’s partly grown beard, imperfect teeth, and sarcastic smile (Figure A.1, see
Appendix), all worked to relay the image of a regular Egyptian who was apparently nonchalant
about all that was going around in Egypt (however complicated and fast-paced it may have
been). This average Joe came to exemplify a general predicament of a generation, whose
formative years were those of the revolution, from enchantment with the heroes of the revolution
to disenchantment with everything that was seemingly sophisticated, heroic, or expert-like.
Alternatively, it preferred a true-to-himself “asa7be” that while afraid of authority and
punishment, was battling poverty, price inflation, and crowdedness on daily basis. He, the
character, was nevertheless able to pass economic, political and social critiques through humor
using images from their own seemingly pedestrian popular culture. Their approach might have
been their way of reimagining a politics that was neither bloody nor immediate, yet one that
worked to break the oppressive institutions bit by bit, through the progressive development of an
anti-fan. Aziz suggested that the role of a page like Asa7bi was that
It made it easier for people to express their opinion. It broke some of the taboos. We all
know that politicians, and the president, he is ‘baba’, you can’t tell him anything, and this
has been broken. Now through social media, people can change ministers… Socially,
clerks and their fatwas, people could not talk about that before. Sarcasm made people
think about that… Sarcasm and this page, made a difference.
Many anti-fans do not start as anti-fans; if they are not what Scott (2012) described as
“anticipatory anti-fans” (who dislike a text before seeing it), they can develop a dislike to the text
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166 overtime, a dislike she called “acclimated anti-fandom”. The issue of anti-fandom becomes
especially revealing when considering its intersection with politics, how someone’s relationship
with a text, can be a reflection of their developing self-understanding of the meaning of
citizenship, especially when a text exemplifies the tropes of power and power relations. As De
Kosnik argued in her study of Clinton fans, the lens of fandom can reveal affective relationships
that are otherwise invisible—though with very visible effects—if otherwise studied through the
lens of rationalized political and social analyses.
While they may not see themselves as fans, Egyptian online satirists and amateur
remixers share a lot with the anti-fans described by Gray. Yet unlike Gray anti-fans, their anti-
fandom is a reflection not of their unequivocal aversion but rather of a complex relationship that
they have formed over the years with state-sanctioned TV texts, which can themselves be a genre
for their combined hatred and ridicule. Like African American viewers and othered minorities,
their relationship to the popular text is at many times ambivalent (Wanzu, 2015). Looked at
through Jenkins’ description of fandom, a mix of both fascination and frustration, they are a mix
of growing frustration and waning fascination. Through a process of negotiation, fans and anti-
fans alike develop different relations “with texts, characters, producers, and other fans over
time”, argued Henry Jenkins (2016). Instead of a shared fandom of a media-text, the reviled
media-text of power be it Egypt’s military president, Sisi or his propaganda or their parents’
generation media productions, becomes the meeting point of their anti-fandom, where they
define themselves not around the media-text but in everything else that this media-text is not. As
Gray (2006) noted, “people can often define themselves just as strongly by what they dislike as
by what they like”.
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167 This dislike, however, is recently formed, if not still forming: one of the many
reverberations of the Arab Spring uprising. The Arab spring was the rupture that triggered their
growing re-questioning and signaled their maturity at a very early age. Hence their dislike is one
that is not devoid of feelings of familiarity, and partly nostalgia. Growing up, these texts
constituted their source of unquestioned, and sometimes mandatory, fandom. Hence in their
ridicule, they are partly acknowledging and owning the continuities that these texts are:
sometimes their binding fabric and the inside-joke of their generation. Though they may not have
an idea of who they are exactly, they nevertheless, share a very clear understanding of what they
are not.
Egyptians sarcastic pages functioned as sites of anti-fandom critiquing established
institutions through a complex mix of both nostalgia and negotiation, developing media literacies
and critical thinking skills, all while enacting participatory practices that work to produce a new
collective identity. This identity is not defined along ideological lines, but centered around
perceptions of creative autonomy. While not capable of directly critiquing authority itself,
Egyptian anti-fans were able to laugh at its ideological devices, its past and present texts. They
diligently located childhood texts of the past to question their present and make sense of it, to
taunt the objects that have forever shaped them. As Stewart (1984) noted, “such objects allow
one to be a tourist of one’s own life, or allow the tourist to appropriate, consume, and thereby
“tame” the cultural other” (p. 146). Their ridicule signifies their maturity, their ability to rise
above those objects. However, this diligence is also a tireless search for sociality, for people who
speak their language: a common generational language that binds them into both frustration and
collective enjoyment of a joke that they alone can understand. It is a form of social movement
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168 organizing yet in the cultural spaces of digital technologies that inadvertently (or not) works to
build a collective identity over the most innocuous of human interactions.

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169
CHAPTER 4:
POST-SPRING AND THE FORMING OF NEW REVOLUTIONARY SENSIBILITIES

On October 21
st
, 2017, the World Youth Forum, sponsored by the administration of
Abdul-Fattah El-Sisi launched a video titled “We Need to Talk” to promote its November
conference in Sharm El-Sheikh. The video was captioned “if your ideas can change the world,
develop a country, cure a disease… we need to talk”. To many Egyptian youth and activists the
video was more ironic than engaging, especially when contrasting the deteriorating human
rights’ situation in Egypt with the video’s statements about respect for difference and freedom of
expression. To them, it was ironic that the Egyptian government would endorse statements like
“If you face discrimination because of your race, gender, color or beliefs, we need to talk”, when
a 2017 report by Thompson and Reuters indicated that Cairo was the most dangerous megacity
for women due to sexual harassment, or “if you are afraid to express your opinion or forced to
leave your country, we need to talk”, when human rights’ organizations estimate Egypt’s
political prisoners between 40,000 to 60,000 across the political spectrum (Hammer, 2017). The
response on Egyptian social media was overwhelmingly negative among creative and activist
youth alike. Some even first learned about the campaign through others’ subversions of the
slogan “We need to talk”. Some responses were written in the form of Facebook posts or tweets,
but most were in the form of memes or cartoons featuring pictures of state security human rights
abuses to youth and captioned with the words “We need to talk” (Figure 18). The invitation to
talk narrated by a native British accent, was apparently neither sincere nor directed at Egyptian
youth, who retaliated with another telling hashtag: #NoOneToTalkTo. This incident among
many, was symbolic of a juncture point in Egyptian politics that signaled a detour from the
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170 politics-as-usual of organized action, to a politics of creative requisitioning and reformulation of
what youth perceived themselves to be and what tools of change they had access to.

Figure 18 Examples of memes/comics addressing The W orld Youth Forum’s “We Need to Talk” 2017 campaign

Youth creative productions exhibited unmistakable signs of experimentation with
challenging dominant narratives from politics to tradition while utilizing artistic means of
expression, such as humor, music and creative arts. While youth were mostly forced out of
public squares back to the digital spaces from which they began their 2011 mobilization, they
reinvented themselves in ways that were highly ambiguous to both their parents’ generation and
the elderly ruling regime. Ranging on a spectrum from outspoken to hidden political content
(depending on where the speakers physically resided), these spaces worked to 1) negotiate
tradition, national and cultural identities, 2) form a new digital collective through participatory
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171 practices that build on a common biographical history comprised of their subversive
achievements in “trend parties” and jokes, 3) and develop media literacies and critical thinking
skills. By freeing ourselves from conceptualizations that limit agency to political action, we are
able to trace its manifestations across both time and space and through a variety of subjectivities
that do not fit squarely into either predefined political or class categories. These subjectivities are
rather defined through the practices those youth engage in and the new collectivities they choose
to form and belong to.
Revolution as Rupture
Agency as a temporal process engages both the past, present and future in an interactive
response to the problems posed by changing historical situations (Emribayer and Mische, 1998).
The conditions that gave rise to the 2011 uprisings instigated such a response and subsequently
rupture in the flow of time (Harris, 2004); this rupture was one between the past (pre-Jan 25th)
and present (post-Jan 25
th
). The uprisings became a point of reference through which this
generation of youth (whose formative years were those of 2011 and what followed) documented
their transformation before and after the revolution. To many, ‘the revolution’ was a prized, yet
painful memory that they sought to both distance and appropriate. Asked about the past, Aziz,
page admin of Asahby, recounted how his past and present were delineated by onset of the
revolution:
Before and after the revolution; this has changed my personality completely, we changed
our use of the internet from photo-shopping, playing, designing celebrity pictures, and the
old fights on the internet, to doing something more meaningful… that we want to do
something to the country and all that… past is the revolution and all those beautiful
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172 things we lived through… this period will never leave our minds. There are times when
you feel you are doing something useful and you don’t care about the outcome, you know
something could happen to you but you keep your eyes on something beautiful that
everyone is looking up to… of course it ended with depression and drama, but it
represented that.
As Susan Stewart (1984) noted, in order to entertain such an antiquarian sensibility,
a rupture in historical consciousness must have occurred, creating a sense that one can
make one’s own culture other-distant and continuous. Time must be seen as concomitant
with a loss of understanding, a loss which can be relived through the reawakening of
objects and thereby, a reawakening of narrative. (p. 142)
However, to Aziz and many of this generation of youth, recalling the revolution was a painful
process. He added,
I have no problem doing it all again… but I don’t like to remember it. When Facebook
memories come up and I see what I have written five years ago, I sometimes delete it. I
don’t want to see it. Though I would do it all again! … we had hope that we could change
people and help them understand; ‘they sure don’t understand’, we used to say… I
learned that people are so rash, they could commit something very vengeful and then
think later about the consequences.
Likewise many of my focus group and interview participants chose to distance the revolution by
choosing not to re-listen to its songs or videos, yet others viewed these products as a means of
documenting and making sense of their present situation, especially those with young children.
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173 Aziz distanced his Facebook memories by deleting them, yet he continued to revisit the
past through his comics and remix videos. Therefore, rather than recalling the revolution, youth
negotiated their past by revisiting their pre-revolution souvenirs in light of their growing
sensibilities in a process of making sense of their evolution through revolution rather than
attempting to remember particularly painful memories. Their relationship to the past was one of
reflective nostalgia. Unlike restorative nostalgia which “takes itself dead seriously” Boym
(2001), noted, reflective nostalgia is “ironic and humorous [and] reveals that longing and critical
thinking are not opposed to one another, as affective memories do not absolve one from
compassion, judgment, or critical reflection” (p. 15). Through the analysis of creative digital
content of Egyptian and Arab youth, this dissertation has shown that the creative digital spaces of
social media allowed the youth to both negotiate their past as well as project and forge their
future through
a) collective identity formation in shared fandom and participatory practices, and
b) the building of new media literacies and critical thinking skills

a) Negotiating the Past
Part of the acclaim that the Arab Spring uprisings received from western media analysts
and commentators was not only inspired by its promises of political reforms, but also—what
some viewed—as a promise of subsequent social reformations to an inherently flawed ‘other’.
However, an uprising against an old order did not necessarily imply an uprising against its
heritage and tradition, it could simply imply a rejection of one appropriation of that tradition and
not the other. For example, while traditional religious spaces may have been viewed as part of
the institutions social movements were trying to resist, this resistance may only have been to the
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174 state-abiding aspect of such institutions; other aspects such as the religious rituals or promotion
of social justice and advocacy may continue to be sources of inspiration to some of the activists.
Furthermore, the lack of a clear definition of what constitutes political legitimacy in
Islamic history (a confusion dating back to the time of the first Muslim caliphates which often
resulted in ongoing tensions between the Shiites-claiming religious authority and Sunnis-
claiming state authority), prevented Islamic religious scholars/Imams (apart from Iran) from
attaining church-like authorities such as that of the Middle ages (Alaa, 2016). Therefore, Shadi
Hamid (2015) noted that such discussions of religious reformations, trying to replicate the
Christian reformations, are both patronizing and counterproductive and have little to do with the
communities these populations live in. In Middle Eastern societies, Hamid (2015) argued, “the
spectrum is so skewed in a conservative direction that in countries like Egypt, even so-called
secularists say and believe quite illiberal things”. Likewise, Reed (2005) observed for the Civil
Rights movement that
Western tradition as embodied in the English language makes a series of reductive
oppositional concepts that make little sense in the context of the civil rights movement.
Practical/idealistic, transcendent/immanent, sacred/secular, spiritual/political, these
oppositions make little sense in a movement where transcendence, idealism, and
spirituality generated great, immanent, practical, earthly power. (Reed, 2005, p. 27)
Therefore, in discussing tradition in the Arab Spring movements, this study invoked
concepts of negotiation rather than rejection, and employed an understanding of agency in dialog
with both the past, present and future. According to Emribayer and Mische (1998), there are
three constitutive elements of human agency: iteration, projectivity and practical evaluation.
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175 Hence, every social action is reproductive (of past patterns) but transformative at the same time.
The past though reminiscent of the Mubarak era with its nationalistic undertones, and state-
controlled religious and media podiums, also comprised the childhood texts and memories that
the Jan 25
th
generation consumed and defined itself through. Stewart (1984) noted that even a
purchased souvenir (something that is seemingly cheap and inauthentic) takes on a new value
within the ‘authentic’ context of the site itself, “when it appears as a kind of private experience
as the self recovers the object, inscribing the handwriting of the personal beneath the more
uniform caption of the social” (p. 138). Therefore, youth appropriations of childhood texts—
nostalgic to the warm childhood experience yet feeling resentful and distanced from its public
meaning—could be seen as their reclamation of childhood utilizing their newly developed
sensibilities in a privatized past. These appropriations represent a form of reflective nostalgia that
instead of recreating the lost home, “foster the creation of aesthetic individuality” (Boym, 2001,
p. 15).
The 2011 uprising worked to not only discredit political authority but also its supporting
apparatuses of state-appointed religious and media figures. Therefore, the two main targets of
youth creative subversions after political authority were state media and prominent pre-
revolution religious figures. Subversions, however, were not only about rejecting these texts at
face value, but rather took on a more complicated form of engagement. On one hand, rejections
were complex and multi-layered taking place at the moral, rational-realist, and aesthetic levels
(Gray, 2005). On the other hand, sometimes these rejections were interwoven with nostalgia,
where such texts constituted part of their childhood memories and common history of cultural
references. Therefore, youth relationship to texts of the past were continually negotiated, rather
than rejected. This relationship was also the starting point for a newly forming digital identity.
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176
b) Forging the Future
2.1 Collective Identity Formation through Participatory Practices
One of the most observable effects of the uprisings was the severe polarization it created
between not only political parties but networks of friends and families (“State Repression,”
2015). While the pre-figurative identity of the square worked to temporarily mask these
differences (see chapter 2), they became more evident as the political process set forth following
Mubarak's ouster. The effects of this polarization were reflected in the cultural productions of
youth in the two years following the revolution, where there were clear distinctions between the
types of humor and references utilized by conservative and liberal youth for example (see
Chapter 1). Later productions, however, replaced outspoken politics with ambiguous hints
masked in humor and creative art that worked to build a new digital collectivity with a shared
history based in trends and inside jokes (see Chapter 3). These trends, though ephemeral and not
always effective, worked to create new common experiences that were not so much influenced
by partisan politics (somewhat masked by the military dictatorship) as much as they were
focused on contributing to their inside-joke of subverting authority. As Talal Asad (2000) and
Saba Mahmoud (2005) noted, the development of agency need not necessarily be for an
emancipatory goal but could well reside in ritualistic practices and biographical achievements.
Partying, or ‘tahfeel’, was a ritual in its own right whereby social media users built on
each other’s jokes or perpetuated them, seeking to subvert the target of their joke at least in the
symbolic world. The collective ritual also signified a shared language that was cognizant of their
surveilled context; hence, the cultural engagement was more important than the product itself as
Kristina Busse (forthcoming) argued. Young fans such as Nadia noted how they found pleasure
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177 in trends that were collectively added upon and that would soon find their way to their cohort’s
conversational culture. On the longer run, these, piece-wise achievements, Scott (1999)
suggested, are enough to build social unrest.
2.2 Building Media Literacies and Critical Thinking Skills
Most often, the ostensible goal of many of the Egyptian and Arab creative Facebook
pages or YouTube channels was “to entertain” and “to have fun”. Interviews, textual and visual
analyses of these pages’ posts and practices, however, revealed a more reflexive approach,
whereby creators sought to push the boundaries of criticism through ambiguous humor,
evocative music and non-verbal creative visuals. Sometimes the target was clearly the cultural
authority of parents or religious figures, or a particular tradition or practice but more often than
not, language was used as a prop to stretch the boundaries of what can and cannot be said
without a specific target, such as joking about bodily functions or normalizing curse words.
Some vloggers and creative producers explicitly sought to gradually train their audience to
express themselves and question their past automatic acceptance of mediocre or state sponsored
media productions. In the less-censored period of 2011-2013, music and humor were used as a
back channel to counter state-media accusations and arguments against youth activism and
continued protesting (see Chapters 1 & 2). As freedom of expression became more constrained
following the military takeover in 2013, political expression took on more clandestine and
sporadic forms that were not necessarily political nor conscious, but were nevertheless
subversive. The prevalent practice of dissecting TV and movie scenes or music videos of the 80s
and 90s might have been used to draw more laughs and views, but it was also used to point out
“behind the scenes” production processes and details regarding creative decisions as well as
celebrate this generation’s growing sensibilities (see Chapter 3).
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178 Yara, a fan participant, also noted this double function of comedy through posts, memes
and videos. When asked about the value of humorous creations, she suggested:

It’s sort of a release, those youth are trying to release their anger and they have no other
means to do so. So at least they create sarcasm. I used to wait for the “Thursday News
Brief” [a comedic Facebook summary of Egypt’s most absurd news by Mahmoud
Hegazy] every Thursday. I think the goal was for us to stay aware. So that we won’t
completely lose hope and think we don’t even want to know the news. When [creative
youth] make fun of news, they grab my attention in a certain direction: I would not have
known and searched for it, unless my attention was grabbed through their comedy.

By virtue of their existence online, social media creative pages also provided a space for
two generations to interact around the same digital culture artefacts, therefore providing another
layer of knowledge and experience transfer. Several of my (page admin) creative participants
who were able to access a statistical breakdown of the age and gender of their followers, noted,
for example, that there were two different generations following their content: the 80s-90s
generation and youth in their early twenties from across the Arab world. According to Ahmed,
page admin of “The legend of low art,” these two generations processed content differently:

The younger generation is quite eccentric. A lot of them interact with what we point out
of high art in a way much different from those older. The 80s and 90s generation’s
interaction is not free of nostalgia to the past and a fondness with something that they
have lived through and were attached to. The younger generation, on the other hand,
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179 appreciates content for the value of it, a value that we did not really appreciate when we
were their age watching those scenes. In my opinion, that’s partly due to the fact that
since they were young the world was already open to them and they were concurrently
watching global productions.
Authenticity: Then and Now
In all three chapters, authenticity was a persistent concern to youth. The uncertainty
concomitant with the uprisings resulted in wavering positions from state media, as well as
political and religious pundits. Therefore, it was not surprising that authenticity became a central
concern in youth’ evaluations of creative productions and their decisions of who to follow on
social media. One of the very telling examples of how revolutionary standards replaced other
more abstract standards for assessing authenticity, was Mohammed Sobhy, the famous TV
comedian and stage actor and this generation’s childhood sensation. Yara (fan participant),
chuckled at the mention of his name, recalling:

I used to say: I want to marry Wanees [the father character in one of Sobhy’s memorable
family sitcoms]. I memorized his plays word for word… He used to be an icon but now
it’s broken. It was a great shock to all of us. Where is the idealism? the opposition? or
what he brought us to believe about himself? It seemed to us that he was a man of
principles; in his plays, a lot was said between the lines in “Mama Amerika”, “the
Savage”—I know they were written by Lenin El Ramly, but still—they all used to make
allusions [to the local and global political situation]. I truly believed he was oppositional
and idealistic especially from his interviews which used to give an impression of his
intellectualism alongside his talent. Until the revolution happened… even after the
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180 revolution. When Morsi came, he was with Morsi, when Morsi left, he turned against
him. It’s all brownnosing… When youth made fun of his call to restore ethics to Egyptian
society, like myself, they no longer believed him: you cannot talk about how society is
ruined when you are a main cause for its ruin. Ethics are no longer what Wanees [the
idealistic father character] used to talk about in his episodes, “don’t lie”, “don’t
backbite”; right now they are, “don’t suck up” to the state.

With a stifled political climate during the time of Mubarak, most artists’ political positions were
assumed. As Zaki (admin of Dubsmash Egypt Facebook page) mentioned about Mohammed
Moneer, a famous Nubian singer widely listened to by youth, “I used to think Moneer was
revolutionary. And I used to make excuses for him, like he has to play along and so on, but he
turned out to be a hypocrite too… unfortunately I still listen to his songs”. With the slight break
in freedom of expression following the 2011 uprisings, those assumptions were put to the test
and many of them ended up failing the criteria of being in support of the 2011 uprising, which
became the new marker of authenticity post-2011. Yasser, another fan participant who also
stopped admiring Sobhy, however, thought it was part of growing up to not expect revolutionary
things from non-political figures, suggesting: “To support the revolution is a matter of personal
safety; I cannot ask him to take a certain position. I think it’s immature to connect my
appreciation of his art with his political positions.”
Overall however, youth were quite forgiving to problems pertaining to audio or visual
quality of contemporary artists known for their support of the uprisings. Therefore, consistency
in the support of the January 25
th
uprising and its demands were valued more in youth’
evaluations of creative productions and their creators. Most importantly, their evaluations of
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181 these productions were no longer isolated from the context and timing of their release. While the
soccer fans continued to enjoy and cheer for their soccer teams, they did so while recognizing
how it could be used by regimes to distract them from other major political events. The same
could be said for state or corporate funded music videos such as “A Good Omen” or “With you
in your dreams” (see Chapter 2), which despite exhibiting professional quality in both music and
chirography, were patently identified on social media as propaganda songs seeking to mask the
systemic practices of illegitimate persecution of dissenters and fraudulent elections.
Conclusion
Afifi, a prominent vlogger who has been steering away from politics for most of his
satirical vlogging career, was compelled by the World Youth Forum’s video to address the
#WeNeedToTalk campaign in a vlog; He started the video by saying, “I am doing this video
because ‘I really do need to talk’, and I hope to talk without being kidnapped, or locked and that
I stay safe among my family; that’s not sarcasm, that’s a real demand Mr. President.”
Commenting on the trailer’s plea for youth to express their opinion, he said,
we are all afraid to express our opinions. If I made a show to express my opinion or even
make fun of something, I will be sued for 1000 million pounds or I may be kidnapped
from my family and my body would be found in the desert after undergoing torture by
unknown parties. Or at best everyone would try to use my video to push for their own
agendas… all that because I talked... Some brands that seek me, would be afraid to work
with me… because I just talked. If we really had freedom of expression, you would have
found a lot of people making a video like me, but unfortunately they are all afraid of
ending up in a room 1 meter x 1 meter with a small ventilation hole, exchanging sleep
positions with other cell mates for lack of space. One or two hashtags might call for my
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182 release, but I will be soon forgotten... because I just talked… so do we really need to
talk?! Mr. President, you don’t need to talk, because those who love and support you,
blindly follow you… and you once said ‘no one talks to me about these issues
9
,’ so you
don’t need to talk and I sincerely hope that’s not my last chance to talk.
The slew of youth’ creative productions utilizing a variety of modalities post 2011 were all an
indication that this generation of youth and young adults needed to talk or at least be listened to.
However, their chosen method of delivery and intended audience were not those desired by their
states or their elderly. Their experiences with the authoritarian state and its chosen paternal
rhetoric compelled them to search for other physical and symbolic channels, whereby they could
congregate, yet through ephemeral trends, and talk openly, yet through shared understandings
that were nevertheless ambiguous to a watchful older public. The bloody retaliation and political
oppression experienced by the Jan 25
th
activists, have left many thinking like Khairy, a fan
participant,
Many people are playing the game of time. Egypt’s demographics are in favor of the
younger generation. There seems to be common agreement that radical change would do
more harm than good and that it has to be gradual. So, a lot of people are in survival
mode right now.
Yet this survival mode was not one of stasis, but rather one of vibrant requisitioning and
forming of new sensibilities and alliances. As Boym (2001) noted, the “creative rethinking of
nostalgia was not merely an artistic device but a strategy for survival, a way of making sense of
the impossibility of homecoming” (p. 14). More importantly, youth online creative spaces were a
rite of passage from the 80s and 90s generations who mobilized for the 2011 uprising to the

9
In more than one occasion, president Sisi shot down questions about Tiran and Sanafir (the two Egyptian islands
that were handed to Saudi Arabia) and the undergoing developmental projects in the purported new administrative
capital, by saying “No one talks to me about this”
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183 younger generation who has transformed the political uprising into a cultural movement. This
cultural movement tackles the underlying social and cultural myths and norms that ostensibly
beset the 2011 political uprising.
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204 APPENDIX

Chapter 1 List of Referenced Videos

Albernameg. (2011a, October 8). I’lam Aldarabuka [Media of darbuka] [Video file]. Retrieved
from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1CxK9Osmy4
Albernameg (2011b, December 23). Al-malal Al-thawry [Revolutionary boredom] [Video file].
Retrieved from
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPK76v3IfnY&index=56&list=PLFD93F16A202E2
EF1
Albernameg (2011c, December 24). Al-zan ‘al Wedan [Nagging] [Video file]. Retrieved from
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mxGAUGu-
sw&list=PLFD93F16A202E2EF1&index=57
Albernameg. (2012a, January 20). E’tebro Abok ya Akhy [Consider him your father fella]
[Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uv3ixTnfOaM
Albernameg (2012b, February 10). Ma’ Bassem Youssef [With Bassem Youssef] [Video file].
Retrieved from
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Albernameg. (2013, February 8). Episode 12 [Video file]. Retrieved from
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ArabComics. (2014, July 20). Kawabonga: Al’onsoreya [Racism] [Video File]. Retrieved from
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5fcOaUSbYZw9&index=23
JoeTube. (2014a, April 29). JoeTube fel-Geish [JoeTube in the army] [Video file]. Retrieved
from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z97EVHFViVE
JoeTube. (2014b, May 6). Ehna Asfeen ya ‘askar [We are sorry military] [Video file]. Retrieved
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JoeTube. (2014c, September 30). Kazab Fel-Omam Almotaheda [A Liar in the UN] [Video file].
Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfsHxExsAiU
JoeTube. (2014d, November 4). Sina Reg’et Lehom [Sinai returned to them] [Video file].
Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8CAzhCbGyU
JoeTube. (2014e, November 18). Da’esh ‘andena [Da’esh is here] [Video file]. Retrieved from
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6SGdeJ6muo
JoeTube. (2014f, November 25). Ya Fashel Ya Fashel [Loser loser] [Video file]. Retrieved from
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3FahlHnkBQ
N2OComedy. (2011a, August 21). Al-Om [The mother] [Video file]. Retrieved from
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnokgmEdf9E
N2OComedy. (2011b, October 9). Zakhat Ra’deya [Thunderstorm showers] [Video file].
Retrieved from
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1dVqdq70bo&index=27&list=RDBSdNroMpJ3Q
N2OComedy. (2011c, November 2). Alla’na [Damn it] [Video file]. Retrieved from
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIJtdPL0Xow
EMBARGOED-not for circulation
206 N2OComedy. (2011d, November 24). Al-Ab [The father] [Video file]. Retrieved from
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGDWJNq34tc
N2OComedy. (2012a, September 8). Almokhabrat taktahem N2O [Intelligence infiltrates N2O]
[Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0S1NYwRkqQU
N2OComedy. (2012b, August 15). Alreyada [Sports] [Video file]. Retrieved from
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlUL9iMzePw
N2OComedy. (2012c, September 8). Alnasah’a Fan [Overweight is an Art] [Video file].
Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwMMrE-tPx4
N2OComedy. (2012d, November 20). Al-Rabi’ Al-Araby [Arab Spring] [Video file]. Retrieved
from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FllWhBnRvfg
N2OComedy. (2013a, December 19). Ayam Almadrsa [School days] [Video file]. Retrieved
from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNlNP2xt434
N2OComedy. (2013b, January 21). Kasak ya Watan [your glass O’nation] [Video file].
Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQpcjYP90iw
N2OComedy. (2014, May 15). Ma-fe Amal Shabab [There’s no hope guys] [Video file].
Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rl7q0pXsX-s

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207 Chapter 2 List of Referenced Songs

Ahmed Mekky. (September, 2011). 25 January (S. O’Keefe Trans.) Revolutionary Arab Rap:
The Index. Retrieved from
http://revolutionaryarabraptheindex.blogspot.com/2011/09/ahmed-mekky-25-
january.html
Ahmed Rock & Revolution Records (November, 2011). Mamnou’ men El Taghyeer [Change is
Forbidden] (S. O’Keefe Trans.) Revolutionary Arab Rap: The Index. Retrieved from
http://revolutionaryarabraptheindex.blogspot.com/2011/11/ahmed-rock-revolution-
records-change-is.html
Cairokee & Aida Al-Ayouby. (November, 2011). Ya’l Midan [Oh the Square].
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umlJJFVgYVI
Cairokee. (February, 2014). Nas Btor’os we Nas Btmoot [Some are dancing, some are dying].
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmpaSADK1mY
Arabian Knightz &. Shadia Mansour (February, 2012). Not Your Prisoner (S. O’Keefe Trans.)
Revolutionary Arab Rap: The Index. Retrieved from
http://revolutionaryarabraptheindex.blogspot.com/2012/02/arabian-knightz-ft-shadia-
mansour.html
Deeb & Edd Abbas. (May, 2014). Stand Up, Egyptian! [Rise up Egyptian!] (S. O’Keefe Trans.)
Revolutionary Arab Rap: The Index. Retrieved from
http://revolutionaryarabraptheindex.blogspot.com/2014/05/deeb-ft-edd-abbas-stand-up-
egyptian.html
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208 Hamza Namira. (December, 2014). Esma’ny [Listen to me!].
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38gWv8vozt4
Hany Adel. (March, 2017). Ma’ak fe Helmak [With you in your dreams].
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgFnnmBA2-k
Hussam Al Hakary (2012). We are the voice, when you like the world silent [Recorded by April
6
th
youth chapter of Haram and Faisal]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=782-
ZN1WDck
MC Amin. (May, 2014). Mabrouk Ya Sisi [Congratulations, Sisi] (S. O’Keefe Trans.)
Revolutionary Arab Rap: The Index. Retrieved from
http://revolutionaryarabraptheindex.blogspot.com/2014/05/mc-amin-mabrouk-ya-
sisi.html
Ramy Donjewan. (August, 2011). Ded El Hekouma [Against the Government] (S. O’Keefe
Trans.) Revolutionary Arab Rap: The Index. Retrieved from
http://revolutionaryarabraptheindex.blogspot.com/2011/08/ramy-donjewan-against-
government.html
Ramy Essam. (February, 2011). Erhal [Leave]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFTwl-
cEnE4&list=RDwFTwl-cEnE4&t=6
Revolution Records (November, 2013). El Hekaya [The Story] (S. O’Keefe Trans.)
Revolutionary Arab Rap: The Index. Retrieved from
http://revolutionaryarabraptheindex.blogspot.com/2014/04/revolution-records-story-el-
hekaya.html
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209 Sheikh Imam. (n.d.). Shayiid ‘Osorak [Build your palaces].
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4BrfDl84mI&list=RDv4BrfDl84mI&t=5
Ultras Ahlawy. (2012a). Hekayetna [Our Story]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Is6mqm-
Yck8
Ultras Ahlawy. (2012b). Horreya [Freedom]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdo_4fPCbf8
Ultras White Knights. (2012). Shams Al Horreya [Sun of Freedom].
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmHHU4fQ7ps

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210
Chapter 3 Selected List of Creative Facebook Pages

Asa7be (Asahbe or m’friend)
Asa7be started post the 2011 uprising and since then it has come to be the most popular
Sarcastic Facebook pages, with over 14 million followers. The main character in its comic was
nothing short of a regular “dude” that they refer to as “asa7bi”, colloquial Arabic for
“ma’friend”. Asahbi is a common word utilized by microbus drivers, the shorthand is used to
allude to their fast-paced vernacular, as suggested by the admins of this page (Rotana Masriya,
2012). Asa7be’s partly grown beard, imperfect teeth, and sarcastic smile, all work to relay the
image of a regular Egyptian who is apparently nonchalant about all that is going around in Egypt
(however complicated and fast-paced it may be). In answering a question about their target
audience, they suggested that their pages made politics easier which helped create a common
language among people of various backgrounds and educational levels (Rotana Masriya, 2012).

Figure A1. Asahbe

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211 Dubsmash Egypt
The 2
nd
most popular page for producing memes and remixes on Egyptian social media
pages is Dubsmash Egypt. With over 1.5 million Followers, Dubsmash Egypt is dedicated to
posting user’s dubs using the dubsmash lip sync app on Android phones. Like Asa7be, they also
create political and social memes and remix videos. Their main distinguishing factor however, is
their specialization in dubs that are a mix of talent and sarcasm. Noting that very few of them
possess true talent, Mena Zaki, its co-founder, emphasized that their intention behind this page
was to encourage people to “express themselves”.
Tamamt Al Targama (Translation has been done)
“Translation has been done”, is a sentence that was commonly associated with every
foreign movie translated into Arabic in the 80s and 90s. Khaled Mokhtar, admin and co-
founder of the page nearing 2 million followers, dedicated it to reimagining American movie
scenes or video clips in an Arab/Egyptian cultural context: what it would sound and look like.
Their works range from simply re-dubbing the video clips, to photo shopping the faces of
actors in a different context. By capitalizing on their cultural fluency they manage to create
satirical content that works to both critique their social reality—by enabling viewers to see the
ridiculousness of the context through the eyes of an outsider (the Western actor)— all while
affirming their desire to envision their favorite actors in their familiar local contexts. These
adaptations work on one hand to get the fans closer to the characters they love, while possibly
distancing themselves from what they might consider an unrealistic context.

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212 Vlogging Facebook Pages
While the above popular Facebook pages started off with a handful of admins, most of
them now hire a team of creative meme creators and video editors, who collaboratively take the
idea from inception to execution. Facebook pages of vloggers such as Mohammed Khamis, Seif
Elmoslamany, Hesham Afifi and Fatma Abdelsalam are based on the vloggers’ individual
creativity. They too, however, enact participatory practices in their creative process and
interactions with fans. Their vlogging videos are characterized by a detailed sarcastic analysis of
a text, possibly an object of fandom that is either contemporary or recalled from the past, where
each vlogger adds dimensions from their personal lives or talents to distinguish their videos from
others.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Elsayed, Yomna (author)

Core Title Modes of cultural resistance post-Arab Spring: humor, music and the making of a new digital identity

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Communication

Publication Date 06/28/2021

Defense Date 04/11/2018

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag agency,anti-fandom,cultural resistance,Egypt,fandom,humor,meme,music,OAI-PMH Harvest,participatory culture,remix

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Jenkins, Henry (committee chair), Castells, Manuel (committee member), Kraidy, Marwan (committee member)

Creator Email yelsayed@usc.edu,yomna.ali@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-13313

Unique identifier UC11671435

Identifier etd-ElsayedYom-6358.pdf (filename),usctheses-c89-13313 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-ElsayedYom-6358.pdf

Dmrecord 13313

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Elsayed, Yomna

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Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA