Vicki Mayer—who alerted me to the work of Hans Joas—Michael Curtin, and Toby Miller have been key interlocutors on issues related to this chapter. I also thank Katerina Girginova for research assistance on creativity, Michael Curtin and Kevin Sanson for their useful feedback on the first draft of this chapter, and Marina Krikorian for editorial help.
1 Media stories and academic publications celebrating Arab revolutionary rap and graffiti have become so commonplace that we could talk of a Revolutionary Graffiti Index or an Arab Rap Index, following what Miller, referring to Richard Florida’s work, calls the Technological and Gay Indexes (Toby Miller, “A View from a Fossil: The New Economy, Creativity and Consumption—Two or Three Things I Don’t Believe In,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 7.1 [2004]: 60).
2 Clearly, this is only a small part of revolutionary labor at large, which includes demonstrating, confronting policy and security personnel, building barricades, feeding revolutionaries, tending to the wounded, and so on.
3 Marwan M. Kraidy, The Naked Blogger of Cairo: Creative Insurgency in the Arab World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016).
4 James M. Jasper, The Art of Moral Protest: Culture, Biography and Creativity in Social Movements (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
5 Vicki Mayer, Below the Line: Producers and Production Studies in the New Television Economy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).
6 Hans Joas, The Creativity of Action (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
7 Maurizio Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labour,” in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, ed. Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 133–147.
8 For example, Benjamin Shephard, Play, Creativity and Social Movement (New York: Routledge, 2011), pivots around the notion of play; while Glenda Ballantyne, Creativity and Critique: Subjectivity and Agency in Touraine and Ricoeur (Leiden: Brill, 2007), focuses on subjectivity and agency. The “culture-jamming” literature does not apply in this context because it concerns relatively low-risk subversion of consumer culture in relatively stable, relatively democratic, industrialized countries.
9 Jasper, Art of Moral Protest, 378–379. Jasper identifies four basic dimensions that artful protesters use: resources like technology and money; strategies, individual and group tactics; culture, shared aspects of mental worlds and their physical representations; and biography, individuals’ mental worlds, conscious and subconscious.
10 Ibid., 375.
11 Jasper uses creativity and innovation somewhat interchangeably, though definitional differences emerge in his discussion. The sociologist Doug McAdam has done extensive work on tactical innovation. For a summary introduction, see Doug McAdam, “Tactical Interaction and Innovation,” The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social and Political Movements, ed. David A. Snow et al. (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).
12 Jasper, Art of Moral Protest, 65.
13 Ibid., 159.
14 Ibid., 219.
15 Ibid., 99. For an argument about upbringing and social support as key biographical enablers of creativity in famously “creative” people, see Howard Gardner, Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity Seen through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi (New York: Basic Books, 2011).
16 Political with a capital P connotes issues of state power and resistance to it, as opposed to cultural politics.
17 Media, cultural, and music production scholars have addressed labor issues, though mostly focusing on the exploitation of labor by those industries. See Toby Miller et al., Global Hollywood: Issue 2 (London: British Film Institute, 2004); Mark Andrejevic, Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004); Matt Stahl, Unfree Masters: Recording Artists and the Politics of Work (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013). The emerging literature on digital labor also focuses on the increasingly exploitative nature of capitalism; see Christian Fuchs, Digital Labour and Karl Marx (London: Routledge, 2014). This literature’s socio-economic focus is helpful, but only indirectly, for studying a revolutionary setting.
18 Mayer, Below the Line, 33.
19 Ibid., 32.
20 Miller, “A View from a Fossil.”
21 Mayer, Below the Line, 43.
22 Ibid.
23 See their YouTube channel at www.youtube.com/user/MasasitMati.
24 Mayer, Below the Line, 44.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid., 47–51.
27 Jasper’s definition of creativity as an “extreme form of flexibility” (The Art of Moral Protest, 94) has a matter-of-fact resonance in a revolutionary setting.
28 Mayer, Below the Line, 58.
29 Ibid., 56–57.
30 Ibid., 58.
31 Ibid., 59.
32 Michael Curtin, Playing to the World’s Biggest Audience: The Globalization of Chinese Film and TV (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
33 One aspect of the compatibility of revolutionary work with digital labor is that they are both unpaid. Though Lazarrato’s elaboration of “immaterial labor” focused on the remunerated kind, there has been an active discussion of unwaged labor in the digital era at least since Terranova’s 2000 article: Tiziana Terranova, “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy,” Social Text 18.2 (2000): 33–58. Andrejevic’s critique of reality television highlighted the unpaid “work of being watched” (Reality TV, 2004). Most recently, see the special issue of TripleC, “Philosophers of the World Unite! Theorising Digital Labour and Virtual Work—Definitions, Dimensions and Form,” ed. Christian Fuchs et al.; especially Brian A. Brown, “Will Work for Free: The Biopolitics of Unwaged Digital Labour,” TripleC: Communication, Capitalism and Critique 12.2 (2014): 694–712, www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/538.
34 Marwan M. Kraidy, “No Country for Funny Men,” Al-Jazeera America, February 26, 2014, http://america.aljazeera.com/opinion...-funnymen.html.
35 For more details, see Kraidy, The Naked Blogger of Cairo.
36 Joas, The Creativity of Action, 71 (emphasis in original).
37 I suspect that a systematic, theoretical, and comparative examination of “action” and “labor” would unearth fascinating overlaps and differences, but this falls outside the purview of this chapter.
38 Jasper, Art of Moral Protest, 154.
39 Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labour,” 139.
40 Marwan M. Kraidy, “The Revolutionary Body Politic: Preliminary Thoughts on a Neglected Medium in the Arab Uprisings,” Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 5.1 (2012): 68–76; “The Body as Medium in the Digital Age: Challenges and Opportunities,” Communication and Critical-Cultural Studies 10.2–3 (2013): 285–290; “The Politics of Revolutionary Celebrity in the Contemporary Arab World,” Public Culture 27.1 (2014).
41 Mayer, Below the Line, 41–42.
42 I initially elaborated it in Marwan M. Kraidy, “Governance and Hypermedia in Saudi Arabia,” First Monday 11.9 (2006), http://firstmonday.org/issues/specia...idy/index.html. For an application of the concept in the context of political activism before the Arab uprisings, see Marwan M. Kraidy, Reality Television and Arab Politics: Contention in Public Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
