Voices of the New Arab Public

CUP publicity

Columbia University Press is currently featuring Voices of the New Arab Public on the main page of their catalog, alongside such luminaries as Julia Kristeva, Todd Gitlin, and Nick Lehmann. 

Cool!  I've also heard rumour of an excellent and well-placed ad in the new issue of Foreign Affairs, but haven't seen it yet. 

Very happy with their publicity efforts thus far... what a contrast to my first book, which - as befits a specialist academic book - had no real publicity and sales to match.   I'm hoping obviously that this book is different on both counts. 

I've been making the case to the press that blogs and the internet are where the action is these days, and that a book becoming a topic of blog debate is worth more than, say, an ad in a political science journal (of course, a full bag from our Diaper Genie is probably worth more than an ad in a political science journal... whoops, did I really just say that?). 

This isn't quite as crassly materialist as it sounds, though I'm not embarrassed about wanting to sell some copies of the book.  It just strikes me that blogs are where a good deal of what passes for public discourse in this country now takes place.   I've been really fascinated by some of the very high level 'book clubs' over at Josh Marshall's TPM Cafe (George Packer, for example) at Kevin Drum's Washington Monthly site (Paul Pierson and Jacob Hacker, for example), and at many other places - where the author of an academic but politically engaged book spends a week or so presenting the main arguments of the book, and responding to comments and intra-blog arguments.  How much more direct, visceral, and downright useful than just another review in a newspaper, perhaps followed by a letter to the editor - not that authors or publishers can do without the published reviews, those are obviously essential, but blogs allow a book to enter into a national, or even global, conversation in genuinely new ways.   

Which is a way of previewing perhaps, some forthcoming posts about the relationship between Voices and Abu Aardvark, and the ways in which Voices might be one of the first of what may well be many academic blog-books!

About 'the' title

Voices of the New Arab Public was not the original title of my book, and it's a title about which I'm still a bit ambivalent.   Don't get me wrong, I like it, but it raises some conceptual issues before the text even begins!

The original title was Sympathy for the Devil, a title which I absolutely loved.   Sympathy for the Devil was a legacy from an earlier book project about the Iraq sanctions, which tried to explain why the sanctions had lost support and efficacy over the years. Arab attitudes to the sanctions - a key part of the book which became Voices - made up only about one chapter of this earlier manuscript.  When I shifted over to the Voices project because I got swept up by the issues surrounding the Arab media, I initially wanted to hold on to the Sympathy title... but it got nixed when the publisher pointed out, reasonably enough, that it didn't actually fit the new book very well.  Alas.   The sanctions stuff, if you're interested, will eventually be published in another form - but that's a topic for another day.

The next working title was Arab Arguments, which I really liked and still do.  But that didn't cut it either.  So after long deliberations, we settled on Voices of the New Arab Public.   I think that it's a good title. I especially like that it puts forward right away the concept of a 'new Arab public,' which really is a central theme of the book.  But, as became particularly clear at a wonderful colloquium at the University of Chicago a few months ago, one word in the title is particularly problematic:  'the'.

The problem with 'the' is that it makes it seem like I'm claiming that there is only one, single Arab public - when in fact, the book argues precisely the opposite:  that the days of a monopoly of a single voice in Arab public discourse had been shattered.  The new public I'm writing about is a multiple one, diverse, transnational, and wildly contentious.   The story I tell does tend to trace the emergence of one of those multiple new publics:  the argument about Iraq, as it developed in various sites, and the rise of al-Jazeera in particular as a revolutionary new site of public debate.  But that was never meant to deny the existence of that multiplicity of new publics.  I think that the book makes that pretty clear, but the title might be misleading, and a red flag for some.

I'm sure that all the other words in the title raise potential objections, too.  "New", for instance - there were certainly distinctive public spheres in different stages of Arab history which might undermine the claims to novelty.  Or "Arab" - some will argue that the real story is the rise of national publics which challenge the 'Arabist' narrative, or of Islamist publics.   Or "Public" - some will refuse to accept that what we see in the Arab media today lives up to Habermas's lofty ideal of a 'public sphere', or will challenge the normative assumptions encoded in the concept itself   'Voices' - privileging the oral over the written, perhaps?  I think 'of' is okay, but I shouldn't get cocky!

Why I am I flagging all these potential objections to my title, and implicitly to my book?  Just to make life easy for critical reviewers?  No... because every one of these potential criticisms would thrill me.  They open up exactly the kinds of conceptual debates I want to be having.   I just hope that critics actually read the book before leaping to conclusions based on the title!

Announcing the Voices homepage

This is the new home page for my book Voices of the New Arab Public which is now officially available on Amazon.com.  I moved it from the Williams College servers partly because they always seem to be down, and partly because a blog format makes more sense for what I want to do here.

Rather than take up the main Abu Aardvark blog with constant discussion of Voices,  this secondary blog will be the primary venue for discussion of the book, as well as a place for me to respond to the reviews (positive and negative, published and on blogs - though published reviews probably won't appear until February due to some arcane set of book-reviewing rules). 

For now, I'll just quote from the official catalog copy to give you a sense of what the book is all about, as if you couldn't guess:

Al-Jazeera and other satellite television stations have transformed Arab politics over the last decade. By shattering state control over information and giving a platform to long-stifled voices, these new Arab media have challenged the status quo by encouraging open debate about Iraq, Palestine, Islamism, Arab identity, and other vital political and social issues. These public arguments have redefined what it means to be Arab and reshaped the realm of political possibility. As Marc Lynch shows, the days of monolithic Arab opinion are over. How Arab governments and the United States engage this newly confident and influential public sphere will profoundly shape the future of the Arab world.

Marc Lynch draws on interviews conducted in the Middle East and analyses of Arab satellite television programs, op-ed pages, and public opinion polls to examine the nature, evolution, and influence of the new Arab public sphere. Lynch, who pays close attention to what is actually being said and talked about in the Arab world, takes the contentious issue of Iraq-which has divided Arabs like no other issue-to show how the media revolutionized the formation and expression of public opinion. He presents detailed discussions of Arab arguments about sanctions and the 2003 British and American invasion and occupation of Iraq. While Arabs strongly disagreed about Saddam's regime, they increasingly saw the effects of sanctions as a potent symbol of the suffering of all Arabs. Anger and despair over these sanctions shaped Arab views of America, their governments, and themselves.

Lynch also suggests how the United States can develop and improve its engagement with the Arab public sphere. He argues that the United States should move beyond treating the Arab public sphere as either an enemy to be defeated or an object to be manipulated via public relations. Instead of wasting vast sums of money on a satellite television station nobody watches, the United States should enter the public sphere as it really exists.

So go buy the book already - and feel free to comment here!