The Aftermaths of Revolutionary Defeat: Arab Cultural Interventions from Exile
My PhD project takes as concern how the aftermaths of revolutionary defeat following the Arab Spring are being interrogated through cultural interventions within the fugitive geography of exiled and diasporic Arab communities in Berlin. I ask: how do cultural workers (writers, visual artists, filmmakers, publishers) who self-identify as Arab in Berlin, creatively explore and translate the aftermaths of revolutionary defeat, namely ongoing state and imperial violence, in their work? What creative and archival modes of knowledge are assembled to create discursive interventions that speak to such political realities? By extension, what socio-political and theoretical traditions are such interventions potentially situated within, or in service of, and what do they achieve? Through sociological and ethnographic work in Berlin, including the cultural analysis of creative works (literary, visual art, theatre), as well as interviews with artists, writers, pioneering collectives, and organisers of cultural spaces, this project attempts to address the questions outlined above, while exploring the extent to which such interventions animate a collective subjectivity that confronts different facets of the contemporary ‘Arab’ postcolonial condition.
