As the revolutions across the Arab world that came to a head in 2011 devolved into civil war and military coup, representation and history acquired a renewed and contested urgency. The capacities of the internet have enabled sharing and archiving in an unprecedented fashion. Yet, at the same time, these facilities institute a globally dispersed reinforcement and recalibration of power, turning memory and knowledge into commodified and copyrighted goods. In The Arab Archive: Mediated Memories and Digital Flows, activists, artists, filmmakers, producers, and scholars examine which images of struggle have been created, bought, sold, repurposed, denounced, and expunged. As a whole, these cultural productions constitute an archive whose formats are as diverse as digital repositories looked after by activists, found footage art documentaries, Facebook archive pages, art exhibits, doctoral research projects, and ‘controversial’ or ‘violent’ protest videos that are abruptly removed from YouTube at the click of a mouse by sub-contracted employees thousands of kilometers from where they were uploaded. The Arab Archive investigates the local, regional, and international forces that determine what materials, and therefore which pasts, we can access and remember, and, conversely, which pasts get erased and forgotten.
Edited by Donatella Della Ratta, Kay Dickinson, and Sune Haugbolle
Authors: Hadi Al Khatib, Mohammad Ali Atassi, Mitra Azar, Enrico De Angelis, Donatella Della Ratta, Kay Dickinson, Sune Haugbolle, Ulrike Lune Riboni, Soursar_mosireen, Mark R. Westmoreland.
Copy-editing: Meredith Slifkin
Cover design: Katja van Stiphout
Design and EPUB development: Tommaso Campagna
Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, 2020
ISBN: 9789492302557
This publication is licensed under the Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International.
Get the book here