Tarek El-Ariss – Leaks, Hacks, and Scandals: Arab Culture in the Digital Age

Events

Tarek El-Ariss – Leaks, Hacks, and Scandals: Arab Culture in the Digital Age

Wednesday, February 26, 2020

5:30 – 7:00 p.m.

Joukowsky Forum, Watson Institute
111 Thayer St.

Watch webcast

Emerging from Tarek El-Ariss' recently published book, Leaks, Hacks, and Scandals: Arab Culture in the Digital Age (Princeton University Press, 2019), this talk explores the way modes of confrontation, circulation, and exhibitionism shape and engender knowledge production and critiques of power in the digital age. Focusing on a new generation of authors, leakers, and hackers from the Arab world and beyond, Tarek El-Ariss reveals a genealogy of digital activism and writing genres by connecting Wikileaks to The Arabian Nights, Twitter to mystical revelation, and cyberattacks to pre-Islamic tribal raids.

Organized by Emily Drumsta, assistant professor of comparative literature.

Lectures

Tarek El-Ariss is professor and chair of Middle Eastern Studies at Dartmouth College. His research interests include Arabic literature, culture, and art, nahda and modernity studies, and critical theory. He is the author of Trials of Arab Modernity: Literary Affects and the New Political (Fordham, 2013) and Leaks, Hacks, and Scandals: Arab Culture in the Digital Age (Princeton, 2019), and editor of The Arab Renaissance: A Bilingual Anthology of the Nahda (MLA, 2018).