Event Announcement! Leaks, Hacks, and Scandals: Arab Culture in the Digital Age - A Talk by Tarek El-Ariss (6 November, Merten Hall 1203)

 

Exploring hacking, leaking, and scene-making as writing and political practices, as well as conceptual tools for understanding Arab culture in the digital age, this talk examines affective forms of protest, incivility, digital consciousness, fiction, and knowledge production. Focusing on a new generation of activists and authors, and leakers and hackers from the region and beyond, El-Ariss connects Wikileaks to The Arabian Nights, Twitter to mystical revelation, cyberattacks to pre-Islamic tribal raids, and digital activism to the affective scene-making of Arab popular culture.

 

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Tarek El-Ariss is Associate Professor and Chair of Middle Eastern Studies at Dartmouth. Working across disciplines and languages, his research interests include contemporary Arabic culture, literature, and art; new media and cyber culture; digital humanities; Nahda literature, language, press, and literary theory; travel writing and the war novel; film and television studies; sci-fi and utopia studies; 18th- and 19th-century French philosophy and literature; gender and sexuality studies; and psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and affect theory. He is author of Trials of Arab Modernity: Literary Affects and the New Political and Leaks, Hacks, and Scandals: Arab Culture in the Digital Age, and editor of the MLA anthology, The Arab Renaissance: A Bilingual Anthology of the Nahda. He's the editor of a series on literature in translation entitled, Emerging Voices from the Middle East.