Tag: counter-maspero

Visualizing ideology: Movies, politics and the working class

Posted on By 3arabawy

Labor Vs. Capital in the Age of Silent Film:

Visual images can often be far more powerful than words. Back in late 1800s, when New York City’s infamous Boss Tweed was asked why he had offered cartoonist Thomas Nast $500,000 to stop drawing caricatures of him and his cronies, Tweed replied: “I don’t care so much what the papers write about me–my constituents can’t read; but they can understand pictures.”
The same is true today. Movies and mass media most impact us in the areas we know the least about.

Battleship Potemkin

Bloggers against torture

Posted on By 3arabawy

Negar Azimi interviewed me, for an article she wrote in The Nation:

Hossam el-Hamalawy runs arabawy.org, a blog that has been central to documenting what he has dubbed Egypt’s very own Videogate. “We’re exploding,” he tells me. “The government didn’t see it coming, and it’s creating a domino effect. You read bloggers in Tunisia, Yemen, Libya, and they take pride in the Egyptian gains. Once you get this far, there’s no going back. You can’t take the plug out.” As recently as January 2005, there were only about thirty blogs in the country. “My dream is that one day there will be a blogger with a digital camera in every street in Egypt.”