Blogs Literature Activism

Social criticism has been a pervasive element in modern Arabic literature since its beginnings. This book is concerned with social criticism in blog narratives against the background of a long tradition of criticizing society through literary expression in the Egyptian national framework. It is also about ways in which the Arabic literary heritage, classical and contemporary, is put to work and recycled in Egyptian Arabic-language blogs. Readers will become aware that a number of the same societal and political problems that have been and still are treated in literature are brought up in Egyptian blogs. While social criticism will be shown to be a common thread in literary expression and blogging in Egypt, a central question is how bloggers use their cultural and literary heritage to advance their goals of changing social and political reality. The bloggers give voice to core problems with which an early blogging generation was and continues to be concerned. Some were discontented with the inability of the government to provide them with the democratic liberties they requested. Others emphasized the necessity to solve the urgent problems of poor governance, corruption and poverty. The book concludes that if the root problems are not addressed and the old order not removed, real change cannot take place. The question is what picture literature and social media including blogs will present to us henceforth: one of a society taking steps towards real change, or one reflecting the status quo with circumscribed individual liberties and lack of social reform.

What do activists know? Learning Activism is designed to encourage a deeper engagement with the intellectual life of activists who organize for social, political, and ecological justice. Combining experiential knowledge from his own activism and a variety of social movements, Choudry suggests that such organizations are best understood if we engage with the learning, knowledge, debates, and theorizing that goes on within them. Drawing on Marxist, feminist, anti-racist, and anti-colonial perspectives on knowledge and power, the book highlights how activists and organizers learn through doing, and fills the gap between social movement practice as it occurs on the ground, critical adult education scholarship, and social movement theorizing. Examples include anti-colonial currents within global justice organizing in the Asia-Pacific, activist research and education in social movements and people's organizations in the Philippines, Migrant and immigrant worker struggles in Canada, and the Quebec student strike. The result is a book that carves out a new space for intellectual life in activist practice.

Liz Van Den Sandt's ex-husband, Max, an ineffectual rebel, has drowned himself. In prison for a failed act of violence against the government, he had betrayed his colleagues.Now Liz has been asked to perform a direct service for the Black Nationalist movement, at considerable danger to herself. Can she take such a risk in the face of Max's example of the uselessness of such actions? Yet ... how can she not?

During the 2000's, online literature in Arabic language was popular among a larger readership. Writings on subjects dealing with politics, globalization, and social matters gained are well-received. While mapping the genre, this monograph shows literary developments in print and digital during these peak years to provide a historical context for the material. Online literary culture is linked to social, economic, and political developments within the last two decades. This book presents the differences between online and print literature as it relates to writer-readership interaction, literary quality, language and style, critical reception, and circulation. The geographic location of the analysis focuses on Gulf countries featuring a comparative study of Egypt and Lebanon.

Girls’ Feminist Blogging in a Postfeminist Age explores the practices of U.S.-based teenage girls who actively maintain feminist blogs and participate in the feminist blogosphere as readers, writers, and commenters on platforms including Blogspot, Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr. Drawing on interviews with bloggers between the ages of fifteen and twenty-one, as well as discursive textual analyses of feminist blogs and social networking postings authored by teenage girls, Keller addresses how these girls use blogging as a practice to articulate contemporary feminisms and craft their own identities as feminists and activists. In this sense, feminist girl bloggers defy hegemonic postfeminist and neoliberal girlhood subjectivities, a finding that Keller uses to complicate both academic and popular assertions that suggest teenage girls are uninterested in feminism. Instead, Keller maintains that these young bloggers employ digital media production to educate their peers about feminism, connect with like-minded activists, write feminist history, and make feminism visible within popular culture, practices that build upon and continue a lengthy tradition of American feminism into the twenty-first century. Girls’ Feminist Bloggers in a Postfeminist Age challenges readers to not only reconsider teenage girls’ online practices as politically and culturally significant, but to better understand their crucial role in a thriving contemporary feminism.

Six years before the Egyptian revolution of January 2011, many young Egyptians had resorted to blogging as a means of self-expression and literary creativity. This resulted in the emergence of a new literary genre: the autofictional blog. Such blogs are explored here as forms of digital literature, combining literary analysis and interviews with the authors. The blogs analysed give readers a glimpse into the daily lives, feelings and aspirations of the Egyptian youth who have pushed the country towards a cultural and political revolution. The narratives are also indicative of significant aesthetic and political developments taking place in Arabic literature and culture.

Thirty years of interviews with the author of The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, Beloved, and other novels

Uniquely examining the link between Australian writers and social change, this study investigates the motives behind literary figures who strive to become activists and social intellectuals. Exploring this intimate connection, this resource asks what such a bond reveals about Australian literature and the power of the written word. With fresh insight, this guide delves into the activism, careers, and writings of Judith Wright, Patrick White, Oodgeroo of the tribe of Noonuccal, Les Murray, Helen Garner, David Malouf and Tim Winton.