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!
So we're down to Voices?
Posted by: praktike | January 01, 2006 at 01:19 PM