This book studies contemporary Arab political poetry, providing insights into how modern Arab media forms are shaped by language and culture. By examining lives and works of individual poets, singers, and audiences, it shows how tribalism is a resource for critical reform when expressed in tropes of community, place, person, and history.

Music in Arabia extends and challenges existing narratives of the region's distinctive but understudied music to reveal diverse and dynamic music cultures rooted in centuries-old heritage. Contributors to Music in Arabia bring a critical eye and ear to the contemporary soundscape, musical life, and expressive culture in the Gulf region. Including work by leading scholars and local authorities, this collection presents fresh perspectives and new research addressing why musical expression is fundamental to the area's diverse, transnational communities. The volume also examines music circulation as a commodity, such as with the production of early recordings, the transnational music industry, the context of the Arab Spring, and the region's popular music markets. As a bonus, readers can access a linked website containing audiovisual examples of the music, dance, and expressive culture introduced throughout the book. With the work of resident scholars and heritage practitioners in conversation with that of researchers from the United States and Europe, Music in Arabia offers both context and content to clarify how music articulates identity and nation among multiethnic, multiracial, and multinational populations.

Did digital media really "cause" the Arab Spring, or is it an important factor of the story behind what might become democracy's fourth wave? An unlikely network of citizens used digital media to start a cascade of social protest that ultimately toppled four of the world's most entrenched dictators. Howard and Hussain find that the complex causal recipe includes several economic, political and cultural factors, but that digital media is consistently one of the most important sufficient and necessary conditions for explaining both the fragility of regimes and the success of social movements. This book looks at not only the unexpected evolution of events during the Arab Spring, but the deeper history of creative digital activism throughout the region.

How did a new, irresistible brand of television emerge from the Lebanese Civil War (1975–91) to conquer the Arab region in the satellite era? What role did seductive news anchors, cool language teachers, superheroes, and gossip magazines play in negotiating a modern relationship between television and audiences? How did the government lose its television monopoly to sectarian militias? Pretty Liar tells the untold story of the coevolution of Lebanese television and its audience, and the ways in which the Civil War of 1975–91 influenced that transformation. Based on empirical data, Khazaal explores the rise of language and gender politics in Lebanese television and the storm of controversy during which these issues became a referendum on television’s relevance. This groundbreaking book challenges the narrow focus on present-day satellite television and social media, offering the first account of how broadcast television transformed media legitimacy in the Arab world. With its analysis of news, entertainment, and educational shows from Télé Liban and LBC, novels, periodicals, and popular culture, Pretty Liar demonstrates how television became a site for politics and political resistance, feminism, and the cradle of the postwar Lebanese culture. The history of television in Lebanon is not merely a record of corporate technology but the saga of a people and their continuing demand for responsive media during times of civil unrest.

A collection of analyses focusing on popular culture as a profound discursive site of anxiety and discussion about 9/11 and demystifies the day's events.

Humanities studies on the Arabian Peninsular including anthropology, archaeology, architecture, art, epigraphy, ethnography, history, language, linguistics, literature, numismatics, theology, and more, from the earliest times to the present day or, in the fields of political and social history, to around the end of the Ottoman Empire.

What does it mean to connect as a people through mass media? This book approaches that question by exploring how Moroccans engage communicative failure as they seek to shape social and political relations in urban Fez. Over the last decade, laments of language and media failure in Fez have focused not just on social relations that used to be and have been lost but also on what ought to be and had yet to be realized. Such laments have transpired in a range of communication channels, from objects such as devotional prayer beads and remote controls; to interactional forms such as storytelling, dress styles, and orthography; to media platforms like television news, religious stations, or WhatsApp group chats. Channeling Moroccanness examines these laments as ways of speaking that created Moroccanness, the feeling of participating in the ongoing formations of Moroccan relationality. Rather than furthering the discourse about Morocco’s conflict between liberal secularists and religious conservatives, this ethnography shows the subtle range of ideologies and practices evoked in Fassi homes to calibrate Moroccan sociality and political consciousness.