Sabry Tarik

What is 'Arab' about Arab subcultures? This is the first book to set out to delineate different ways of studying and theorising Arab subcultural groups and practices, including film, graffiti, music, live art performances, Arab techies and youth cultures. Contributors tackle a number of questions including: How is the study of Arab subcultures to be theorised? How are we to analyse such creative processes in a new worldliness characterised by trans-temporality and trans-subjectivity? Arab Subcultures effectively opens up a critical and interdisciplinary dialogue about Arab subcultures with different fields of enquiry, including anthropology, philosophy, art criticism and cultural studies, at the heart of which lies the key intellectual task of re-imagining the uneasy relation between aesthetics and politics in the age of revolutions.

In this groundbreaking book, Tarik Sabry is seeking out the terrain for best understanding the experience of being modern in transitional societies. He adopts a dynamic, ethnographically based approach to the meanings of 'modernness' in the Arab context and, within a relational framework, focuses on structures of thought, everydayness and self-referentiality to explore the process of building a bridge that rejoins the 'modern' in Arab thought with the 'modern' in Arab lived experience. In bringing together modernity as a philosophical category with the bridging spaces of Arab everyday life, Sabry is offering fresh methods of comprehending the question of what it means to be modern in the Arab world today.