Marwan M. Kraidy

The global, the local, and the hybrid: A native ethnography of glocalization

International communication processes have been alternately understood as part of an overriding world process of globalization, or in terms of a polarity, between local audiences and global media, whose terms are disputed by the cultural imperialism and active audience formations. Departing from an interdisciplinary literature coalescing on cultural hybridity, I argue that hybridity is a pervasive but evasive cultural condition. I then theorize and utilize native ethnography to empirically examine how Maronite youth in Lebanon articulate local practices and global discourses to enact hybridity. Hybridity is construed as a space of oblique signification where power relations are dialogically reinscribed. Demonstrating that hybridity is not the negation of identity but its quotidian and inevitable condition, I advocate native ethnography as an epistemological approach and cultural hybridity as an ontological grounding for the ongoing internationalization of media and cultural studies. Finally, the concept o...

Arab Television Industries

Introduction 1 A Short History of Arab Television 2 Pan-Arab Entertainment Channels 3 Niche Channels and Socio-cultural Change: Youth Women and Religion 4 Pan-Arab News Channels 5 Ramadan: Drama, Comedy and Religious Shows in the Arab Sweeps 6 Television Policy and Regulation in the Arab World Appendices Bibliography Index

Broadcasting regulation and civil society in Postwar Lebanon

Providing a regulatory framework for dozens of unlicensed wartime radio and television stations has been an arduous task for postwar Lebanese governments. Based on Lebanese media monitoring, a review of the Lebanese press, and interviews with media people in Lebanon, this study traces the development of broadcasting in prewar Lebanon, describes wartime changes, and discusses postwar broadcasting regulation in the country within the framework of civil society. Examining the factors that shaped regulation and the forces opposing it, this article calls for a more inclusive regulatory framework preserving national stability and media freedom.

Neo-Ottoman Cool: Turkish Popular Culture in the Arab Public Sphere

In the past decade, Turkish television drama has enjoyed popular success in the Arab world, fueling wide-ranging controversies in the pan-Arab public sphere. Such popularity is at first sight puzzling. After all, Arabs lived under Ottoman rule for 400 years, and for most of the 20th century Turkeys foreign policy neglected Arab interests. Why, then, would Turkish drama be popular with Arab audiences, especially at a time of unprecedented vibrancy in Arab cultural production? This article grapples with that question via a systematic analysis of pan-Arab discourse about Turkish popular culture, concluding that some Turkish dramas conjure up an accessible modernity while others enact a counter-hegemonic narrative that puts Middle Easterners in the role of heroes. The rise of Turkish television drama in the Arab public sphere offers insights into the geopolitical underpinnings and geocultural consequences of transnational media flows.

Transnational Advertising and International Relations: US Press Discourses on the Benetton ‘We on Death Row’ Campaign

This article analyzes Benetton’s 2000 ‘We on Death Row’ advertising campaign as a site of cultural production where ideological differences on capital punishment between the United States and Europe are played out. We examine the massmediated public discourse framing the campaign in the US prestige press. More specifically, we conduct a textual analysis of news stories and editorials about the campaign in the Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Chicago Tribune. Our analysis uncovered three themes, denigration, commodification and othering, that the press uses to discredit the campaign. The discussion focuses on how national hegemonic media frames ‘domesticate’ foreign social ideals.

State Control of Television News in 1990s Lebanon

Since the official end of the war in 1990, Lebanese news media have been affected by several regulatory, political, and economic factors. This article analyzes state attempts to control television news and political programs in postwar Lebanon. Internal factors motivating control include media regulation and political struggles between the regime and its opponents, and between government branches. External factors include the strategic position of Lebanons media in the Arab world, Lebanons political and economic dependence on some Arab regimes, and the advent of pan-Arab satellite broadcasting. Direct and indirect forms of control are discussed.

The projectilic image: Islamic State’s digital visual warfare and global networked affect

Islamic State’s (IS) image-warfare presents an auspicious opportunity to grasp the growing role of digital images in emerging configurations of global conflict. To understand IS’ image-warfare, this article explores the central role of digital images in the group’s war spectacle and identifies a key modality of this new kind of warfare: global networked affect. To this end, the analysis focuses on three primary sources: two Arabic-language IS books, Management of Savagery (2004) and O’ Media Worker, You Are a Mujahid!, 2nd Edition (2016), and a video, Healing the Believers’ Chests (2015), featuring the spectacular burning of a Jordanian air force pilot captured by IS. It uses the method of ‘iconology’ within a case-study approach. I analyze IS’ doctrine of image-warfare explained in the two books and, in turn, examine how this doctrine is executed in IS video production, conceptualizing digital video as a specific permutation of moving digital images uniquely able to enact, and via repetition, to maintain, visual and narrative tension between movement and stillness, speed and slowness, that diffuses global network affect. Using a theoretical framework combining spectacle, new media phenomenology, and affect theory, the article concludes that global networked affect is projectilic, mimicking fast, lethal, penetrative objects. IS visual warfare, I argue, is best understood through the notion of the ‘projectilic image’.

Contention and Circulation in the Digital Middle East: Music Video As Catalyst

This article explores music video as a catalyst of public discourse in the digital age through an analysis of heated online controversies fueled by Wa‘d ‘Arqoub (WA), a video featuring a romantic relationship against the backdrop of the plight of Iraq under U.S. occupation. It puts forth the argument that music videos stimulate public discourse because of their capacity to (1) promote ideas and make them visible, (2) conjure up several meanings and interpretations, and (3) circulate through “hypermedia space,” a communicative space created by networked broadcast, mobile, and online platforms. The analysis of the circulation of contentious public discourse around WA leads to the conclusion that music videos are best understood as instruments of visibility in a symbolic economy that suffers from attention scarcity.

The Body As Medium in the Digital Age: Challenges and Opportunities

This essay glosses an attempt to capture communication in the Arab uprisings through the prism of the human body. Such an approach to communication and revolution entails several challenges and opportunities. Challenges include tension between biopolitical approaches and a perspective that considers the body as an instrument of practice, the tendency in scholarship that restricts discussions of the body to discussions of gender and sexuality, and not politics at large, and the glossing over of issues of social class and geographic location, all crucial when considering the body as an instrument of communication. Opportunities afforded by using the body as a focal point include a fuller consideration of human agency that eschews technological determinism when studying power and resistance, a historically grounded analytical approach that preempts an uncritical dalliance with presentism, the body being in effect the “oldest medium,” and an analytical advantage whereby the body functions as a heuristic eye of the needle through which all empirical materials, and theoretical considerations are filtered, considered and interpreted.

Terror, Territoriality, Temporality: Hypermedia Events in the Age of Islamic State

Considering the group that calls itself Islamic State (IS) as a “war machine,” an ever-shifting combination of humans and technology, this article articulates, from a Deleuzian perspective, terror, territoriality, and temporality as constitutive of events. It explores terrorism as a hypermedia event that resists conceptual containment in Dayan and Katz’s three categories of “contest,” “conquest,” or “coronation.” It builds on work that recognizes the globality of media events. The article uses the rise of IS to explore events as a peculiar articulation of space and time, and draws on the global “network-archive” that IS created (its digital footprint), the referentiality of which means that we experience IS depredations as one continuous “global event chain.” In this analysis, media events are a productive force that articulates territoriality and temporality through affect.