As a tribute to Ingmar Bergman, the Swedish peer-to-peer activists who created the Pirate Bay (a Bittorrent tracker web site) have set up a tracker site to help people download Bergman's films via Bittorrent: http://bergmanbits.com/ Ben
Last year I posted the following question[1] on this list: > A lot of work surely went into giving the West positive associations > with Latin America. Perhaps literature professors helped by getting > their students to read Latin American writers.... Perhaps > someone here knows more about the history of that process. I was asking whether that process, whatever it was, might be repeated for regions that Westerners tend to have negative associations about, like the Arab world. Nobody replied, but I've recently come across an explanation of why Middle East studies (and thus Middle Eastern literature, film, music, etc.) receives very institutional support in the West, compared to other area studies. In Walter Armbrust's introduction to the book _Mass Mediations: New Approaches to Popular Culture in the Middle East and Beyond_ (2000) [2], he argues that in the US, the reasons for this discrepancy can be found in national economic interests and in the politics of domestic demographics: > In the past decade those who have written about Latin America, > Africa, or Asia have benefited from institutional investment that is > massive compared to investment in Middle East?oriented > knowledge.... Latin American and Asian markets and, increasingly, > productive capacity are important to the economic future of the > United States.... Of course, the United States has commercial > interests in the Middle East as well. But from a national policy > perspective--regardless of any considerations of such issues as > human rights or sound economic development--U.S. Middle East > policy could not be more successful than it is now.... > > Commercial interest... could still conceivably revive the fortunes(Continue reading)
Ben, I doubt both these explantions. First, they are two, not one, becuase educational institutions try to satisfy potential students these days by offering them the familiar and comforting, namely studies of their own cultures. This has little or nothing to do with helping merchanidsers find what will sell to them. On the hand, since the Middle East is rich with oil money, it offers a fertile potential market for merchandisers. It makes no sense from that standpoint to ignore cultural studies of the region, if such considerations had much to do with with the matter. Academia in the US has long emphasized European culture and languages, which nicely encompasses Latin America, at least as far as the dominant Spanish and Portuguese cultures. Arabic, Persian, Turkish and other languages spoken by large Islamic communities on the other hand are much more rarely known or studied in most universities or by most faculties. They have little ability therefore to judge the quality of scholars in such fields, and a lazy disinclination to get involved in selecting good ones. These countries have also been quite resistant to western, christian missionaries, unlike the far east in the 19th c. Missionary efforts areone of the main reasons that there is an American tradition of studying Chinese and Japanese at university levels. Best,(Continue reading)
2007/8/2, Michael H Goldhaber <mgoldh@...>: > First, they are two, not one, becuase educational institutions try to > satisfy potential students these days by offering them the familiar and > comforting, namely studies of their own cultures. This has little or > nothing to do with helping merchanidsers find what will sell to them. The two are related; if you read the rest of Armbrust's text, you'll see that one of his main points (which I didn't quote) is that despite globalisation, national interests, rather than transnational ones, are determining priorities in educational funding. > On the hand, since the Middle East is rich with oil money, it offers a > fertile potential market for merchandisers. That's a substantial overgeneralisation. The Middle East is a region containing a great deal of poverty and stark economic inequalities, even in the oil-exporting Gulf countries. Oil wealth is very unevenly distributed, and it seems to me that those who can afford expensive lifestyles tend to be happy to buy the same luxury items consumed by their Western counterparts. An elite shopping mall like City Stars here in Cairo, for example, is full of the same stores you'd find in a comparable mega-mall in the US, selling exactly the same goods. I suspect a few Egyptian employees are all that's needed to put together the local marketing. > Academia in the US has long emphasized European culture and languages, which > nicely encompasses Latin America, at least as far as the dominant Spanish > and Portuguese cultures. Arabic, Persian, Turkish and other languages > spoken by large Islamic communities on the other hand are much more rarely(Continue reading)
Re: <nettime> the fate of Middle East studies
Heiko Recktenwald <uzs106@...>
"Benjamin Geer" <benjamin.geer@...>
Heiko Recktenwald <uzs106@...>
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Date: Fri, 03 Aug 2007 10:50:56 +0200
From: Heiko Recktenwald <uzs106@...>
Subject: Re: <nettime> the fate of Middle East studies
Hi,
Benjamin Geer wrote:
> 2007/8/2, Michael H Goldhaber <mgoldh@...>:
>
>
>> On the hand, since the Middle East is rich with oil money, it offers a
>> fertile potential market for merchandisers.
>>
>
> That's a substantial overgeneralisation
Yes. Local gouvernements can ignore their populace because they are not
dependent on tax collecting. The oil is enough income to run the state.
9/11 has shown that the Middle East is more than economy. So, while the big
companies may concentrate on the rich, there is also much more activity. The
(Continue reading)
Re: <nettime> the fate of Middle East studies
"Benjamin Geer" <benjamin.geer@...>
Heiko Recktenwald <uzs106@...>
"Benjamin Geer" <benjamin.geer@...>
Heiko Recktenwald <uzs106@...>
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Date: Fri, 3 Aug 2007 21:50:57 +0300
From: "Benjamin Geer" <benjamin.geer@...>
Subject: Re: <nettime> the fate of Middle East studies
2007/8/3, Heiko Recktenwald <uzs106@...>:
> Maybe they are "buying" the masses and controlling the elites?
There's a lot of poverty in Egypt (44% of the population lives on less
than US$2 per day[1]), real wages have been declining in
manufacturing, and the informal sector accounts for about 40% of
employment[2]. The cost of housing and essential goods has increased
dramatically since the structural adjustment policies and
privatisation begun under Sadat in the 1970s. Many people are clearly
struggling to get by.
As for intimidation, the only opposition party with any significant
popular support is illegal. Anyone who follows the opposition press
in Egypt, or international human rights groups' reports on Egypt, will
be aware that the judicial system is a farce, that demonstrations have
often been ruthlessly crushed, that the ruling party uses massive
(Continue reading)
Subject: Re: <nettime> the fate of Middle East studies
"Benjamin Geer" <benjamin.geer@...>
Heiko Recktenwald <uzs106@...>
Heiko Recktenwald <uzs106@...>
"Benjamin Geer" <benjamin.geer@...>
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Date: Sat, 4 Aug 2007 11:13:02 +0300
From: "Benjamin Geer" <benjamin.geer@...>
Subject: Re: <nettime> the fate of Middle East studies
2007/8/4, Heiko Recktenwald <uzs106@...>:
> IMHO it is not the business of Arabs to make the West listen to them.
Which brings us back to my original question: who persuades Westerners
to listen to people in the rest of the world? Who persuaded them to
listen to Latin Americans? Maybe academics...
> Maybe the business of Western journalists in Egypt etc to report what is
> really happening. In Gaza etc.
OK, but how do you define "what's really happening"? A friend of mine
was working recently for Associated Press in Cairo, and I asked her
why most Western news reports about Egypt are about discoveries of
Ancient Egyptian artefacts or about violence, while there's very
little about the basic realities of life in Egypt today. She said
that unfortunately, a story only becomes "news" when an event with
(Continue reading)The Postanarchist Reader Call for Papers Post-structuralist anarchism, or what more often has been referred to as postanarchism, never quite received the attention that it deserved from the anarchist community at large. Nor has it to any great extent been met with sympathy. Part of the reluctance, I suspect, results from the empty spaces occupying the bookshelves of universities, alternative bookstores, and radical lending libraries across the world today all of which are awaiting the publication of this volume, The postanarchism reader: writings at the intersection of anarchism and poststructuralism. But, most ironically, this problem has arisen simultaneously with a proliferation of related articles across disparate disciplines; a tradition built around such heterogeneity runs the risk of erecting its own tombstone. It would seem that there is a double necessity here, one of maintaining a transdisciplinary approach while also ensuring that the tradition remains bounded. A body of thought such as this should allow itself the dignity to live on as the vital condition of a contemporary anarchist politics, as a volume of work which, though explicitly multivocal, nonetheless inherently shares a sense of community and responsibility. In this sense, the articles that will be presented in The postanarchism reader, constitutes a community of sorts, even before their binding. To my knowledge, other than the humble contributions offered in the Reader, only three book-length works (Todd May's The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism was introduced in 1994, followed by Saul Newman's From Bakunin to Lacan: Antiauthoritarianism and the Dislocation of Power and Lewis Call's Postmodern Anarchism in 2001 and 2004 respectively) explore this subject in any sort of depth.(Continue reading)
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/08/07/giroux A recommended interview with Henry Giroux on the state of US academic life. Joe Lockard ------------------------------------------------------------------- Joe Lockard Assistant Professor 209 Durham Languages and Literatures Bldg. English Department POB 870302 Arizona State University Tempe, AZ 85287-0302 Tel: (480) 727-6096 Fax: (480) 965-3451 E-mail: Joe.Lockard@... http://www.asu.edu/english/who/lockard.htm Antislavery Literature Project http://antislavery.eserver.org/
REVIEW: Second Person, Role Playing in Story and Playable Media, by David Cox http://newmediafix.net/daily/?p=1529 http://newmediafix.net Second Person: Role Playing in Story and Playable Media edited by Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin Publisher: The MIT Press (February 28, 2007) ISBN-10: 0262083566 ISBN-13: 978-0262083560 Review by David Cox, MA Second Person: Role Playing in Story and Playable Media elucidates many of the techniques, approaches and philosophies of role playing based games, media and art. It is a dense and well put-together compendium of working notes, essays and from-the-trenches accounts from designers and artists working in media which place the identity of the user/player/audience at the very front and center of the work. It is an amazing collection of ideas, scintillating, diverse and rich, each separate writer¹s account shedding light on what it is that makes a memorable interactive title compelling and immersive. The contributors each provide well illustrated, well written insights into exactly how games and playable media¹ are conceptualized. Individual case studies describe role-playing related works from academia, the publishing world, the fine arts and the normally hyper-secret inner sanctum of the games industry. Discussed in fascinating detail are such canonical genre classics as ³Dungeons and Dragons² a role-playing game whose solid emphasis upon the(Continue reading)
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