The Arab Spring| A Revolution of the Imagination

Tarik Ahmed Elseewi

Abstract


The new forms of cultural articulation we are seeing in the uprisings of the Arab Middle East are inseparable from the recent history of mediated culture in the region. In the production, distribution, and consumption of satellite television, as well as in the use and consumption of the global Internet, a new role for the work of the imagination has transformed culture and placed individuals at the centers of their own narratives in profound ways. This has led to the rejection of the tired, official narratives that have long dominated official mediated production in the Arab Middle East, and it continues to encourages Arabs to imagine themselves as subjects (and not, as the official narratives would have it, objects) of history.

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