Book review: The Naked Blogger of Cairo: Creative Insurgency in the Arab World

By any standards, Marwan M. Kraidy’s book The Naked Blogger of Cairo: Creative Insurgency in the Arab World (Harvard University Press, 2016) is exceptional. It is bound by neither simple categorizations nor academic labels.

Kraidy investigates digital media activism in a post–Arab Spring world. In recent years, digital activism has stimulated interest among scholars not only in media and communication studies but also in political science and sociology. The Occupy Movement, WikiLeaks, the 2009 Iranian Green Movement, the Arab Uprisings, the Spanish Indignados Movement and rising digital activism in Indonesia have all challenged scholars to re-think the complex intersections between media technology, civic engagement and political protest across local and global contexts and frameworks.

Kraidy’s work contributes to this research track in a distinct manner. He investigates digital activism through the lens of bodily engaged symbolic communication. In his thinking, symbolic body politics is best understood as a profoundly contextual communicative practice that is deeply embedded in historical, cultural, religious and social landscapes of the studied empirical realities. In Kraidy’s book, these analyses are carried out in geographic contexts such as Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and Tunisia.

Kraidy’s work is built around the idea of ‘creative insurgency’. The concept of creative insurgency refers to a type of political communication in which symbolic meanings, bodily activities and digital technologies create a powerful means to protest and resist the oppression of rulers. Creative insurgency is carried out through practices such as chanting slogans, burning one’s body, spraying graffiti, circulating jokes or, as in the case of the naked blogger in Cairo, undressing – which inspired the title of Kraidy’s book. In Kraidy’s thinking, creative insurgency ‘rejects the distinction between mind and body, persuasion and compulsion, symbolic and physical violence’ (p. 16).

I read this book as an endeavour to endorse human agency, courage and creativity and to defend human dignity against political oppression. In this sense, Kraidy’s approach resonates with Sara Ahmed’s (2014) work, Willful Subjects. Creative insurgency, as examined in Kraidy’s book, cannot be discussed without thinking about suffering and pain done to the human body. Violent death through self-immolation stands out as an extreme example of creative insurgency. In Kraidy’s thinking, there is no space for naïve technological fantasies in digital activism. This book does not fall into the trap of the ‘Modern Myth’, as John Gray (2003) and many others would put it.

The Naked Blogger of Cairo: Creative Insurgency in the Arab World is written in a style of thick narrative ethnographic description. The book is arranged into six chapters that centre on ethnographic stories, such as Burning Man, Laughing Cow and Virgins and Vixens, that illustrate works of creative insurgency. Stories of creative insurgency travel vividly from one Middle Eastern country to another, but may not always easily reveal themselves for a reader who is unfamiliar with the cultural and symbolic histories of these locations and the frameworks studied.

Although inspirational and insightful in its theoretical orientation, the theoretically informed analogues presented in this book – exploring historical ideas about the king’s two bodies in order to study medieval Europe and the more contemporary compositions of power between the ruler and his subjects – raises critical questions about the adaptability of theories as they move from one historical and cultural context to another.

The Naked Blogger of Cairo: Creative Insurgency in the Arab World resists numerous superficial intellectual categorizations. It refuses to discuss digital activism and political communication in any simple, rationalist, cognitivist, Western-biased theoretical framework and does it relish the celebration of cultural differences in order to gain broader recognition.

Rather, this is a book about digital activism, politics and cruel power struggles. It is written in a communicative framework that places burning bodies, blood and menstrual fluid alongside laughter and humour to tell stories about resistance, wilful creativity and the passionate desire to resist oppression and defend human dignity. We need more books of this kind if we want to advance our understanding not only of the digitally connected Middle East but also of the world.