Vanessa Branson stands, hands on hips, her loosely hanging skirt tails give her the figure of a Western women making modest concessions to the predictable inquisitive gaze of an Arabic polis. Her trainers are burnished gold — a playful note — and what you wouldn’t be forgiven for calling “ethnic jewellery” is slung around her […]
On May 18th, Slavoj Žižek, Mamdouh Habashi, Samir Amin, David Harvey and Zygmunt Bauman participated in a roundtable entitled “Meaning of Maghreb?” during the Decolonization: New Emancipatory Struggles conference in Croatia. Largely focused on Egypt (the moderator explained the “unexpected” uprisings had caught them by surprise, necessitating its inclusion in the discussion), Samir Amin kicked off […]
Is the new narrative of Arabs and north Africans simply “replacing the long held ‘Arab Exceptionalism’ narrative, which held sway for decades and argued that Arabs because of sociological and cultural reasons are ‘immune’ to democracy and democratization”? This new all-encompassing story imposed on the “so-called ‘revolution’ and more broadly the Arab world is being constructed […]
