Dale F. Eickelman, Jon W. Anderson (eds.): New Media in the Muslim World. The Emerging Public Sphere, 2nd ed. (2003)

This second edition of a widely acclaimed collection of essays reports on how new media—fax machines, satellite television, and the Internet—and the new uses of older media—cassettes, pulp fiction, the cinema, the telephone, and the press—shape belief, authority, and community in the Muslim world. The chapters in this work, including new chapters dealing specifically with events after September 11, 2001, concern Indonesia, Bangladesh, Turkey, Iran, Lebanon, the Arabian Peninsula, and Muslim communities in the United States and elsewhere. The extent to which today’s new media have transcended local and state frontiers and have reshaped understandings of gender, authority, social justice, identities, and politics in Muslim societies emerges from this timely and provocative book.

Publisher Indiana University Press, 2003
Indiana series in Middle East studies
Edition 2
ISBN 0253216052, 9780253216052
213 pages

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Red Thread, 1-6 (2009-) [English/Turkish]

“The project Red Thread is envisioned as an active network and platform for exchange of knowledge and collaboration of artists, curators, social scientists, theorists and cultural operators from the Balkans, the Middle East, the Caucasus, North Africa, and beyond. It aims to create and widely disseminate new knowledge about paradigmatic socially engaged art practices in a wide geopolitical context, thus challenging the predominance of Western narratives in official art histories and exhibition making. Through initiating research, meetings, panel discussions and an active online site for exploring both historical and contemporary approaches that deepen and challenge broader relations of art and society, Red Thread intends to reopen the issues of joint modernist legacies and histories between various so-called “marginal” regions, and attempts to create new approaches to deal with questions of auto-histories, self-positioning and reinterpretation of art history.

The title of the project indicates a critical cultural and artistic engagement that has been present in the peripheral zones of the European modernistic project in different conceptual manifestations since the 1960s, when the crisis of the project of Western monolith high modernism in its relation to ideas of social progress became apparent. Metaphorical meaning of the expression ‘red thread’ suggests not only way out of labyrinth, but also a fragile, elastic link between different intellectual, social and artistic experimentations that share a desire for social change and the active role of culture and art in this process.

Red Thread is conceived as a possibility for starting a long-term communication and establishing new international platforms for artists and cultural workers from the regions considered to be part of supposedly shrinking but still corporeally very real geographical margins. Even if today one feels that there is no region excluded from the international art circuit, there still remains the issue of control, the unresolved and continuing play of inclusion and exclusion. In that respect, focusing primarily on regions of the Balkans, the Middle East, the Caucasus and North Africa, the project is conceived as an active site for rethinking the questions of production, definition, and presentation of the artwork and the artists’ identity in the globalized (art)world. It will explore the rules of conduct established in the Western art system, and question how the circulation and reception of information is regulated and how we can (and can we really) challenge it.”

Red Thread is initiated by WHW (what, how and for whom) and Osman Kavala in 2009 as part of 11th Istanbul Biennial.

Issue 1: HTML, PDF (2009)
Issue 2: “Sweet 60s”: HTML, PDF (2010)
Issue 3: HTML, PDF (2011)
Issue 4: Disposessions, Solidarities, Deintegrations, HTML, PDF (2017)
Issue 5: Alt-Truths and Insta-Realities: The Psychopolitics of Contemporary Right, HTML, PDF (2020)
Issue 6: Remembering in Circles, HTML, PDF (2023, added on 2024-1-18)

Naomi Sakr (ed.): Women and Media in The Middle East. Power Through Self-expression (2004)

Is today’s changing media landscape in the Middle East empowering women? This is the first book to address the dynamics of media ecology and women’s advancement in the contemporary Middle East. The book spans both the region and media forms, from Iran’s women’s press, via Maghrebi women filmmakers and Egyptian political films, Palestinian TV and Hezbollah’s TV station, Al-Manar. It takes as its starting point the diverse experiencees and multi-layered identities of women and treats media institutions and practices as part of wider power relations in society. By analysing media production, consumption and texts, it reveals where and how gender boundaries have been erected or crossed.

Publisher I.B.Tauris, 2004
Volume 41 of Library of modern Middle East studies
ISBN 1850435456, 9781850435457
Length 248 pages

publisher
google books

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