Reality Television and Arab Politics
Contention in Public Life

This book analyzes how reality television fuelled heated polemics over cultural authenticity, gender relations, and political participation in the Middle East.

Marwan M. Kraidy (Author)

9780521769198, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 26 October 2009

270 pages, 1 b/w illus.
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.9 cm, 0.57 kg

'This important book introduces a much needed internationally comparative dimension to the analysis of the global trade in reality television formats, as well as providing a detailed, nuanced, and exhaustively researched account of the production and consumption of reality TV in the Arab world. Marwan Kraidy demonstrates the dramatic socio-cultural impact of reality TV in this context, outlining a far more complicated and politically contingent role than is usually understood by Western accounts of the format.' Graeme Turner, University of Queensland, Australia

What does it mean to be modern outside the West? Based on a wealth of primary data collected over five years, Reality Television and Arab Politics analyzes how reality television stirred an explosive mix of religion, politics, and sexuality, fuelling heated polemics over cultural authenticity, gender relations, and political participation in the Arab world. The controversies, Kraidy argues, are best understood as a social laboratory in which actors experiment with various forms of modernity, continuing a long-standing Arab preoccupation with specifying terms of engagement with Western modernity. Women and youth take center stage in this process. Against the backdrop of dramatic upheaval in the Middle East, this book challenges the notion of a monolithic 'Arab Street' and offers an original perspective on Arab media, shifting attention away from a narrow focus on al-Jazeera, toward a vibrant media sphere that compels broad popular engagement and contentious political performance.

Introduction: beyond al-Jazeera
1. Screens of contention: the battle for Arab viewers
2. Voting Islam off the island? Big Brother in Bahrain
3. The Saudi-Lebanese connection
4. Contesting reality: Star Academy and Islamic authenticity in Saudi Arabia
5. Gendering reality: Kuwait in the eye of the storm
6. A battle of nations: Superstar and the Syrian-Lebanese media war
7. The 'new Middle East'? Reality television and the 'independence intifada'
Conclusion: performing politics, taming modernity
Appendix.

Subject Areas: Media, information & communication industries [KNT], Comparative politics [JPB], Media studies [JFD]