CairoComix: Excavating the political

12 October 2015, Mada Masr By Jonathan Guyer “All comics are political,” wrote Allen Douglas and Fedwa Malti-Douglas in their seminal 1994 study Arab Comic Strips. But whether for children or adults, the forms of political expression in comics are never straightforward. Translated editions of Superman project cultural imperialism as well as the human need for heroes and villains. A comic advertising Stella beer

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Gallows Humor: Political Satire in Sisi’s Egypt

Guernica, 15 May 2014 By Jonathan Guyer The country’s cartoonists find creative ways to defy censors. His face is almost everywhere. With a stoic gaze and a stately uniform, Field Marshal Abdul-Fattah Al-Sisi looks out from magazine covers displayed at Cairo’s corner newsstands and posters decorating gas stations in sleepy Red Sea towns. Following the military’s ouster of the Muslim

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The Writing on Egypt’s Walls

14 August 2013, The New Yorker By Jonathan Guyer   n Egypt, political cartoons leap off the page and into public places, from street art to high-class galleries, on leaflets and TV programs. At the Muslim Brotherhood’s sit-in at Rabaa al-Adawiya, in the Nasr City neighborhood of Cairo, where protesters spent more than a month protesting the ouster of President

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Picturing Egypt’s Next President

22 May 2014, The New Yorker By Jonathan Guyer Everybody knows who Egypt’s next President will be. Elections are scheduled for May 26th and 27th, almost a year after Mohamed Morsi was ousted in a coup led by the retired general Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi, in what has been painted as a second revolution. With campaigning in overdrive, Sisi met with

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Translating Dissent: Voices from and with the Egyptian Revolution

ICWA: Institute of Current World Affairs Jonathan Guyer has contributed a chapter to Translating Dissent: Voices from and with the Egyptian Revolution, a forthcoming book from Routledge. His chapter focuses on the translation of Arabic political cartoons. Here is Jonathan’s abstract: This chapter reflects critically on the translation of Arabic political cartoons, both in broad and narrow terms. The questions I

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A Conference in Cairo

Yasmin El-Rifae June 12th, 2015, Muftah I walked through downtown Cairo on a quiet Friday morning in March 2015, late to a conference I had helped organize and a little bit anxious. The conference was about the political importance of translation – of language and concepts – in connecting protest movements to one another and allowing them to be narrated

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Globalizing dissent, Egyptian civil society, and the limits of translation

By Ahmed Refaat Mada Masr, 15 March 2015 I first heard Mona Baker two months ago in a workshop organized by the Imaginary School Program at Beirut, the art space not the city. It was called: “Prefigurative politics and creative subtitling.” During the three-hour event, Baker briefly summed up what she discusses more elaborately in her research project, “Translating the Egyptian

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Arab Comics: Fit for Academic Exploration

Soraya Morayef / 18 Nov 2014 Comic magazines Samir, Lulu and Mickey Geeb (Pocket-sized Mickey) and Arabic translations of Tintin, Superman and Asterix and Obelix have been read and loved by generations of Arabs. Editorial cartoons are fundamental parts of every daily newspaper. But comic art remains an often unexamined and under-supported part of Arab artistic effort. A new initiative is intent on changing that. In September, the American

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The mysterious fall and rise of the Arab crime novel

Marcia Lynx Qualey Last updated: 28 September 2014 Why are gentleman-thieves and murder mysteries making a comeback in Arabic popular fiction? When Egyptian novelist and photographer Ahmed Mourad was asked earlier this year, why so few Egyptians were writing crime novels, he said that the genre was new, “and anything new is usually accompanied by a lot of attack and criticism”. Then

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The Arab whodunnit: crime fiction makes a comeback in the Middle East

  The neo-noir revolution in the Arab world might be seen as nostalgic, but it allows writers to act as ombudsmen in the current political climate Jonathan Guyer Friday 3 October 2014 From Baghdad to Cairo, a neo-noir revolution has been creeping across the Middle East. The revival of crime fiction since the upheavals started in 2011 should not come

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