Webinar “Creative Radicalism in the Middle East: Culture and the Arab Left After the Uprisings” Caroline Rooney — Online, 16/11/2021

Caroline Rooney (University of Kent)
Date: 16 November 2021Time: 5:30 PM
Finishes: 16 November 2021Time: 7:00 PM
Venue: Virtual Event
Type of Event: Webinar
Registration

Abstract
In her recent account of the Arab uprisings, Caroline Rooney outlines the importance of aesthetic strategies and creative expression in the left’s critique of authoritarian and Islamic extremist discourse during the revolutions. Using a wide array of texts and sources, both Arab and non-Arab, the book engages affect theory to show how a poetics of disappointment, despair and distrust, to dignity, solidarity and reconfigured senses of the sacred, offered a way for the left to reclaim ethical and progressive ‘radical’ values co-opted by political leaders and extremists in the Middle East. In so doing, the book offers an original conceptual framework for differentiating ‘radicalization’ from the creative radicalism of the Arab avant-garde.

About the speaker
Caroline Rooney is Professor of African and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Kent (UK). She works mainly on liberation struggles and their expression in the arts and popular culture, and she is currently the Co-I on an ESRC-funded research programme entitled: “The Crime-Terror Nexus from Below: Criminal and Extremist Practices, Networks and Narratives in Deprived Neighbourhoods of Tripoli.”

Registration
This webinar will take place online via Zoom. Click here to register

* The webinar will also be live-streamed on our Facebook page for those that are unable to participate via Zoom.

Chair: Dina Matar (SOAS) and Narguess Farzad (SOAS)
Organiser: SOAS Middle East Institute
Contact email: smei[at]soas.ac.uk

More information: SOAS website