Mona Baker This chapter maps out the space of translation within the political economy of contemporary protest movements, using the Egyptian Revolution as a case in point and extending the definition of translation to cover a range of modalities and types of interaction. It identifies themes and questions that arise out of the concrete experiences of activists mobilizing and reflecting on what it means to work for justice, both within and across borders, and to attempt to effect change at home while conversing with others who are fighting similar battles elsewhere.
Why Riot?, video by Mosireen Video Collect, 2013.
“The revolution is not a thing of the past, the revolution is still in process.” Philip Rizk stated as we began our discussion of his text “2011 is not 1968”, whereby he challenges the dominant narratives of the January 25th Revolution as a youth lead revolution. He argues that the radicalizing factor of the uprising was an underclass without leaders.
Voices Across Borders
The Blog of the Race and Resistance Research Network at TORCH
Posted by: Josh Aiken and Nicole Nfonoyim-Hara
Date: 26 February 2015
Ferguson: Transnational Activism and The Academy
The following is a transcript of presentations at the Race and Resistance seminar on 30th January 2015, at which Master’s students Josh Aiken and Nicole Nfonoyim-Hara reflected on the relationship between their studies at Oxford, transnational solidarity movements, and their activism protesting the killing of Michael Brown.
Video recording of presentation by Marianne Maeckelbergh at the Prefiguration in Contemporary Activism Workshop, 4 December 2014, University of Manchester.
Abdul Hadi El Gazzar’s - The Theatre of Life and Hunger (1952) (Courtesy of The AMCA Project's Pinterest Account) By: Sultan Al Qassemi 31 October 2014
Egyptian artists were deeply involved in spearheading, capturing, and influencing the January 2011 uprising. In fact, the artistic community lost one of its own when 32-year-old Ahmed Bassiouny died in the early days of the uprising while taking part in the protests. For four days, the contemporary digital artist and experimental musician documented the protests in videos, which were then posted online each evening.
A CTIS/CIDRAL Workshop: 4 December 2014 Keynote Speaker: Marianne Maeckelbergh (Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology, Leiden University, Netherlands; Co-founder of Global Uprisings)
Click here for programme and abstracts
Prefiguration, or ‘prefigurative politics’, involves experimenting with ways of enacting the principles being advocated by an activist group in the here and now, rather than at some future point when the conditions for the ‘ideal society’ have already been created, thus collapsing the traditional distinction between means and ends.
Graffiti in Cairo depicting a television with the text "Go down to the streets" Sep 05 2014 The 2011 revolutionary uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa abruptly captured global attention as the world was drawn breathlessly into the tumult with a profusion of media content, from Tweets to amateur video footage. Amidst the media blitz, analyses yielded two conflated and reactionary narratives of events. One contended that the popular protests of the so-called “Arab Spring” were wholly unexpected, a shocking diversion from the familiar politics of the Middle East in a seeming contravention of the reigning global political apathy at the turn of the millennium.
[Image from Hossam El-Hamalawy] by Hannah Elansary Sept 01 2014 The graffiti and street art of revolutionary Egypt have been researched many times over by now.Journalists and scholars have explored the phenomenon in its many aspects—as evolving visual text, as political rhetoric and as an act of protest in its own right. The claims about the protest street art and graffiti that have proliferated across public Egyptian walls since 2011 have been many, and include: the spread of revolutionary graffiti in Egypt was a sign and act of citizens reclaiming public space from the regime; street art worked to raise awareness and build community and solidarity among people; street art served as a tool by which citizens could (re)claim agency, assert identity, and create their own historical narratives.
A three-day conference to be held in Cairo, 6-8 March 2015 Funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council, UK Organized by Mona Baker, Yasmin El Rifae, and Mada Masr http://globalizingdissent.wordpress.com Activists from various regions and countries connect with and influence one another through practices involving various types of translation, including video subtitling, written translation, and oral interpretation. The Egyptian Revolution and the activists and collectives who have worked to move it forward have been highly visible to other protest movements in large part through such practices.
