Media Communication

“Becoming-animal” is a term used by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their work, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia which at times can designate a movement towards denigration. With a “becoming,” a threshold is, invariably, crossed and the boundaries that have existed between the animal and the human become blurred. Moreover, “becoming” challenges an existing order. Deleuze and Guattari suggest that at times, it could function as a source of creativity. In this paper, I propose to show otherwise. This paper examines the process of “becoming-animal” in J.M. Coetzee’s novel, Waiting for the Barbarians, and José Saramago’s novel, Blindness, and how this process invariably is one of degradation. This paper will also be discussing the issue of blindness and how in Saramago’s novel it functions as the catalyst behind the becoming.

In his seminar, Specters of Marx, Jacques Derrida discusses how one of the essential qualities of the specter is his ability to appear incessantly. The inability to know when the specter may appear, however, not only enforces its haunting quality but also conveys a despairing sense of what Derrida refers to as empty Messianism from which emits “a curious taste of death” (Derrida 169). Derrida also contends that with the empty Messianic wait lies the possibility of hope. In a number of Coetzee’s novels, the characters feel they are possessed by demons or ghosts, from which at times they try to flee or control, as such presences summon memories of a past better forgotten or a future at best dreaded. In this paper, I discuss the roles of two mythological deities, Baal and Thoth that symbolically acquire the role of specters in Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg and Disgrace, respectively. In Coetzee’s novels, these ancient gods, no longer assume their original mythical role, but instead evolve as premonitions of evil and death.

The paper outlines the portrayal of the Arab in film, before examining the point at which the images of the reel Arab and the real terrorist interconnect through a study of a number of terrorist images vis-à-vis these reel portrayals, and ultimately show how the images of terrorists aired in the news media have not deviated from these preset stereotypes.

In her treatise on abjection, Julia Kristeva argues that the abject is located outside the self, remaining in a state of repulsion that threatens to destroy the self. Abject representations are prevalent in the way terrorists have been portrayed in the Western news media post-September 11, 2001. These images of abjection are problematic, as they consolidate the images we have seen in Hollywood films representing Arabs. Furthermore, these depictions have eroded the fine line between the real and the unreal. This article examines the point at which these issues intersect, by analysing individual images vis-à-vis film portrayals of the Arab and, ultimately, how the framed images of terrorists aired on TV screens have conformed to previously accepted notions of the Arab.

The changes that have been witnessed by media in the Arab world have redefined media's initial role as a source of information. With the advent of satellite television new realities, namely the dismantling of communication boundaries, have emerged. At first, such advancements posed a challenge to government bodies, specifically in the Arab region; however, the issue has been resolved in what has eventually resulted in government-controlled media, independently owned broadcasting stations with ties to ruling bodies, and the mushrooming of little private ventures owned by businesses or religious/sectarian groups, transmitting globally. Not only did this not translate into political or social freedoms in the Arab world, but it also failed to challenge pre-existing notions of gender. The current media have inadvertently consolidated traditional stereotypes of the female in spite of their claim to be a liberating force. In this essay I propose to argue that a detailed study of female representation on Arab television would reveal an immature and regressive medium, solely interested in commodifying and in enfeebling the Arab female. Moreover, an interpretive discourse with postcolonial theory and an analysis of what constitutes the Arab identity will reveal why such female representations persist.

In his discussion of Dante’s Inferno, Edward Said writes that “Maometto” or Mohammed occupies the eighth circle in the nine circles of Hell, belonging to “a rigid hierarchy of evils.”  According to Said, “Maometto” is “endlessly being cleft in two from his chin to his anus,” a punishment in Dante’s belief is well deserved because of Maometto’s sensuality and “pretensions to theological eminence.”  Such graphic description of torment evokes scenes of torture we have of late witnessed in Abu Ghreib and Guantanamo.  Prisoners, not only, were subjected to physical abuse but were also subjected to acts of sexual perversion as was revealed by the photos.  Furthermore, the latter showed those who partook in these actions seemed to be enjoying the power that the exercise of torture gave them.  Robert J.C. Young states that Colonialism “was not only a machine of war … but also a desiring machine.”  This poses the question as to whether torture does allow for the enactment of repressed desire by allowing it to surface by providing it with a venue in which it becomes acceptable.  Moreover, does Colonialism in its previous or in its current form, only sustain itself fundamentally through constant violence, of which perversion is a vital component as these practices are playing into the repertoire of the evil East, or is the perversion an extension of a suppressed Oedipus complex?

On many occasions cinema has chosen to shoot movies in locales other than the ones in which the events of the films are supposed to take place in.  This could be due to various reasons, namely cheaper production costs, or inability to gain access to the original place.  The choice of location, however, tries to provide a mirror image of the original country.  In portrayals of Arab lands and namely in Hollywood films, this rarely holds true. Irrespective of the country in which the action takes place, the landscapes are the same, and the depiction willfully ignores the actual geographical make-up of the country at play.  Instead, the Arab countries are always presented as an unidentified mass of scorching deserts, and here the emphasis is on the wild, harsh, and inhabitable terrain on which sporadic barbarian nomads roam, as only they can belong to such landscapes.  Such landscapes can only be tamed by a superior force.
These presentations are not restricted to cinema but are also abound in certain fictional romances, in which the truth is rarely sought; a typical scenario is a blonde heroine landing at an Arab airport in a major Arab capital and as soon as the passengers disembark, camels are described roaming around the planes, etc ....  However, these immature and uninformed presentations persist to this day in film.  Given that the world is becoming more in McLuhan’s term a global village, such misrepresentations are not acceptable.  Furthermore, countries like the USA, have maintained and especially since September 11th, 2010, that they want to erase misunderstandings between the Arab world and the West.  Such representations are reinforcing misconceptions.  One image of the Arab city exists.  In this chapter, I choose to analyze the reason behind these false portrayals from a postcolonial and postmodern perspectives drawing on Albert Memmi, Edward Said, Frantz Fannon and Jean Baudrillard, reflecting on films such as The Siege, Syriana, Body of Lies, Disney’s Aladdin on the one side and City of Lights and Captain Abu Raed on the other.

This chapter analyzes the role Social Media Sites has played in the current protests that are taking place in Jordan by concerning itself with three youths’ movements, “Jayeen,” “Shabab 24March” and “April 15,” which have actively used Facebook to mobilize people in peaceful protests in order to present their demands.  This chapter will also attempt to analyze what actually transpired following the March 24th and 25th, 2011 demonstrations,  and looks at the role of the Jordanian monarchy, and specifically Queen Rania’s Facebook and Twitter pages as they respond to the protests calling for reforms that have spread throughout the kingdom.

Code switching is a practice exercised by multilingual speakers. Linguists define the term as the simultaneous use of more than one language. Code switching is prevalent in postcolonial countries in which the colonial language has continued to exist alongside the native language. In the past, code switching in the Arab world has been confined to those educated in the missionary schools set up by the colonial powers. However, with the changes of media, its domain has grown to include a larger number of people. The linguistic-anthropologist Edward Sapir's hypothesis of linguistic relativity has stressed the important role that language has played in the formation of the individual. I partly look at the role of the Arab media and its effect on identity formation drawing on postcolonial theory to situate the practice of code switching historically.

In his introduction to Mourid Barghouti novel, I saw Ramallah, Edward Said refers to the Palestinians as a displaced and a misplaced people.  Regardless of the nationalities they carry or countries they live in, they carry with them the trauma of events that led to the loss of their homeland, and the grief of this loss and endless displacement.  In a conversation between a father and a son in Mahmoud Darwish’s Journal of Ordinary Grief, the son enquires of the father as to why he is picking up pebbles, to which the father answers that these are petrified pieces of his heart; it is a loss he is searching for as he refuses to get lost in his loss, which is the loss of his homeland.  The sense of displacement and loss pervade modern Palestinian literature.  In his novel, I was born there, I was born here, Barghouti describes the pain as a historical one that refuses to go away.  One way of dealing with this pain is to be able to tell one’s story.  But as Barghouti rightly remarks, Palestinians are forbidden to tell their stories, as their story is often narrated by their enemies, as the conflict over the land becomes the struggle to tell the story.  The absence of the story leads to the absence of the people, especially when the name Palestine is no longer on the world map, and its only mention is in the news as number of casualties or dead.  Palestinians embody this absence and presence. In this paper, I would like to look at Barghouti’s I was Born There, I was Born Here, and Deborah Rohan’s The Olive Grove: A Palestinian Story as the protagonists revisit what is left of the historic Palestine, to make sense of this absence by trying to pass on their stories and address the trauma that has marked their lives.

In Mahmoud Darwish’s semi-autobiographical prose work,  Journal of Ordinary Grief, the son enquires of the father as to why he is picking up pebbles, to which the father answers that these pebbles may be the petrified pieces of his broken heart; the father searches for the pebbles that look like his heart and with his fingers try to transform them into the words that can put him in touch with his homeland; this exercise he tells his son is to avoid getting lost in the loss.  The father is, in fact, resisting the eradication of his country that has turned him into an absence, as his story was usurped and told by another.  As with the poet Darwish, the father is resisting the codification by the other that has turned him into ‘a refugee’, ‘an absent-presence’, ‘a stateless person’, and his story becomes the story with a hole and will always be the wrong story.  In his 1964 poem, “Bitaqat Hawwiyah,” [Identity Card], the protagonist demands that the person inscribe that he is an Arab, in defiance to the non-existence that has become to define his being.  On the other hand, in Life and Times of Michael K, Michael K is described by the medical officer as a pebble that has existed for a long time, unaware and indifferent to its surroundings, evading any form of classification, unfortunately in a country whose system thrives on categorizing and classifying everyone. The authorities feel they have to fill the hole in Michael’s story, but unfortunately their story of him becomes the wrong story.  In this paper, I would like to look at Michael K’s reluctance to be fixated and pigeon-holed in a category, as others try to tell his story, and I would juxtapose this against the cry of the protagonist in Darwish’s  “Bitaqat Hawwiyah,”  who urges his vanquisher to allow him to document his own story, and the protagonist’s desire to be heard in both Darwish’s Journal of Ordinary Grief and Absent Present.

Although Plato's Utopia or ideal city is the non-place that holds the promise of perfection, it remains the place in which citizens are categorized by a rigid structure. José Saramago, on the other hand, introduces us to a dystopia in his novel Blindness, in which one event leads to the ruin of a city. Yet, as with Plato's Utopia, a similar desirable separation by the higher authorities is enacted. When a strange ailment leads to the blindness of some of the citizens, we begin to witness the disintegration of both the human and the city. In The Cave, which reverberates with Plato's “Simile of the Cave,” Saramago provides an unrelenting criticism of a city's landscape that is changed by a blind capitalist system. In this unnamed city, imitation is more valued than the real. In the simile, Plato questions what would become of the dwellers of the cave if one were to see beyond the screen. In Saramago's novel, the lone potter is the one who is able to see beyond the shadows.

In the past, Palestinian cinema was dominated by a nationalist discourse revolving around refugee ideology, resulting from the trauma of the lost homeland. As the past is generally static, revisiting it became an exercise in nostalgia. The last decade, however, has seen the emergence of a number of transnational Palestinian films telling stories of those who remained in historical Palestine post-1948. This late depiction is no longer one of reductionism but a visual narrative that exposes the daily challenges individuals face under occupation, as they fluctuate between a diminishing homeland and a lost one. These latest films have relied on a personal angle to tell the story, contrary to earlier film portrayals that favoured depictions of a mythical homogeneous society rooted in nationalist, heroic and revolutionary discourse. This article examines two internationally acclaimed films by Palestinian director Hany Abu-Assad, Al Janna Al Aan/Paradise Now and Omar. In both, Palestinians hover between security walls, refugee camps and occupied space, as they deal with issues of betrayal, frustration, martyrdom and treason, portrayals that ultimately demythologize the Palestinian individual.

Jean Baudrillard sees in today’s simulation the model ‘of a real but without origin or reality: a hyperreal’. With the hyperreal, the individual is unable to distinguish what is real and what is not. In this article, I argue how the pervasiveness of media, in the form of mobile phones, tablets with their applications and social networking sites, singularly or in unison create and sustain the existence of the hyperreal. They succeed at once through an imagined call for urgency and an implosion of meaning that cannot be contained. This type of media is a priori a form of simulation, and has not only erased the boundaries that exit between the real and the unreal but has also developed as a site accountable for continual deference of the being-in-theworld, forcing on the latter a perpetual existence in the hyperreal.

"We are haunted and hunted, made to feel and act like fugitives in our own land.”

In the above quotation from A Rift in Time Travels with My Ottoman Uncle, Raja Shehadeh is lamenting that not only do the Palestinians no longer feel safe in their ancestral land but are also increasingly feeling like strangers in a land that they can no longer recognize. For more than four decades, the Palestinian author and human rights activist has been documenting the lives of ordinary Palestinians living under occupation. Whether it is through his non-fiction diaries at times of war and curfews or through his walks in a forever-diminishing landscape, Shehadeh’s work exposes a deep sense of estrangement in a land that is becoming more alien with the passage of time.  Confined within endless borders, checkpoints and an omnipresent separation wall, this feeling of alienation intensifies; in a recent essay, the author states how even the language used to describe the Palestinians has changed from ‘citizens’ to ‘terrorists’ over the decades.  Shehadeh who faithfully maintains a diary has published non-fiction works documenting what life under an unrelenting occupation means. The fragmented and claustrophobic existence of the Palestinians living in the occupied territories, which Shehadeh acutely and at times cynically portrays, at once exposes paradoxically a sense of disillusionment and a struggle to endure.  Theodor Adorno ironically states, “"it is part of morality not to be at home in one's home," while Edward Said compares exile (internal or external) to “death but without death's ultimate mercy.” In this paper, I analyze Shehadeh’s Occupation Diaries and When the Bulbul Stopped Singing, works that embody within them what it means to become the stranger in one’s homeland.

Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot ends in both acts with the two tramps not moving in spite of agreeing that they should leave. Even though Vladimir and Estragon realize the futility of their wait, they remain adamant in the hope that Godot may arrive. Likewise, the Unnamable who cannot go on chooses to go on. What essentially translates in both Beckett’s play and his novel is the insistence of holding on to a hope even though this relentless wait brings in its fold more of pain, hardship and failed promises. For the most part, Beckett’s work has been viewed as bleak and pessimistic, hardly following the conventions of storytelling, which demand that a work should have a beginning, middle, and end. In Beckett, as meanings in life have broken down, they result at best with severed communication, and with endings that are a priori silent in defiance to conventional norms. The endings in both his plays and novels generally leave the readers suspended. To a large extent, the same is true of J.M. Coetzee’s novels. Endings in Coetzee’s novels, on the whole, provide no answers or resolutions, and as with Beckett’s work, the novels are seen as dark renditions of the human existence, silent in their impasse.

The Nakba not only resulted in the loss of the homeland, but also caused the dispersal and ruin of entire Palestinian communities. Even though the term Nakba refers to a singular historic event, the consequence of 1948 has symptomatically become part of Palestinian identity, and the element that demarcates who the Palestinian is. Palestinian exile and loss have evolved into cultural symbols that at once help define the person and allow the person to remember the loss. Although accounts of the Palestinians’ experience of the expulsion from the land are similar, the emblems that provoke these particular memories differ. Certain mementos, memories or objects help in commemorating the homeland.
This book looks at the icons, narratives and symbols that have become synonymous with Palestinian identity and culture and which have, in the absence of a homeland, become a source of memory. It discusses how these icons have come into being and how they have evolved into sites of power which help to keep the story and identity of the Palestinians alive. The book looks at examples from Palestinian caricature, film, literature, poetry and painting, to see how these works ignite memories of the homeland and help reinforce the diasporic identity. It also argues that the creators of these narratives or emblems have themselves become cultural icons within the collective Palestinian recollection.
By introducing the Nakba as a lived experience, this book will appeal to students and scholars of Middle East Studies, Cultural Studies, Literature and Media Studies.

'Giving a Face to the Silenced Victims: recent documentaries on Gaza' Often described as an open-air prison, the citizens of the Gaza Strip have long resisted a subaltern existence. Conditions in Gaza, and specifically since the Second Intifada of 2000, have increasingly worsened. With the advent of Hamas in 2006-2007, a complete blockade was imposed on the Strip. A deafening silence by the world has resulted in a marked increase in documentaries from within and has also attracted international filmmakers who want to tell the Gazan story. In these productions, Gazans convey their stories to the outside world and demand that their humanity is acknowledged. My analysis of a number of recent documentaries demonstrates how Gazans emphatically reject the role of victim but rather want to tell their stories and to be heard directly. They want to be tellers of their stories. Despite their misfortunes, Gazans remain resilient, aspiring for life. This need has become more urgent since the 2014 war.

In his introduction to Palestinian Walks, Raja Shehadeh remarks that in spite of the great number of travelers to Palestine, travel literature, for the most part, willfully ignored the living experience and existence of the land’s inhabitants. Often, Palestine was the imaginary place that
was continuously invented to confirm religious and political beliefs. The Biblical imagination, along with the orientalist gaze, informed the accounts, and anything that did not correspond to the preconceived repertoire was quickly discarded. The native inhabitants were the first victims. At best professed the savage other, they were not considered the land’s rightful owners. Palestine was symbolically colonized in the Western imagination long before the British mandate. This vanishing homeland is a subject that dominates Shehadeh’s nonfiction narrative. Accounts of his walks expose parts of his homeland’s beauty and rewrite the Palestinian presence in its place, providing a counter-narrative to the Biblical imagination.

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