Dina Matar

Diverse Diasporas, One Meta-Narrative: Palestinians in the UK Talking about 11 September 2001

This paper considers the implications of 11 September 2001 and its mediation in UK and Arab/Muslim news media for the ways Palestinians in Britain, as an ethno-national minority and diaspora, think through questions of identity and difference, exclusion and inclusion, memory and belonging. Despite great differences in the socio-economic, religious/secular and educational backgrounds of my informants, one over-arching discourse dominates their interpretation of the attacks, as well as understandings of their causes and consequences—the historical and ongoing conflict between Palestinians and Israelis. This constitutes a meta-narrative and ethical-political framework through which mediations of September 11 are interpreted. This meta-narrative also happens to be the dominant ethical-political framework of Arab news media, Al-Jazeera especially. This article explores how an apparent consensus was formed between the Arab/Muslim media and its Palestinian diaspora audience about the root problem of conflicts between the Western and Arab/Muslim worlds. Tackling the root problem effectively through political action is also perceived to hold the key to a solution and to greater prospects of future security and peace.

Contextualising the Media and the Uprisings: A Return to History

The 2011 Arab uprisings have called into question the assumptions and questions that have defined much of the scholarship on the media of and about the Arab world and its various publics. Much of this scholarship remains largely shaped by the ‘political’ agendas of the dominant analytical paradigms prominent in the 1970s, including the modernisation paradigm. Furthermore, many studies consider mediated cultures as being of the ‘here’ and the ‘now’ rather than a product of ongoing historical processes and conjunctures. This short intervention calls for rethinking the broad assumptions about the role of media in the ongoing protests. While not ignoring the role of media, it suggests broadening our conceptual and research agendas to incorporate a historical perspective that would also seriously consider the material and immaterial ‘geneaologies’—particular histories of nation-states, religion(s), capitalist class formations, national, regional and international politics as well as cultural and discursive formations.