Books by Nathaniel Greenberg
Edinburgh University Press, 2019
On January 27 2011 WikiLeaks released documents from a cache of US State Department cables stolen... more On January 27 2011 WikiLeaks released documents from a cache of US State Department cables stolen the previous year. The Daily Telegraph in London published one of the memos with an article headlined 'Egypt protests: America's secret backing for rebel leaders behind uprising'. The effect of the revelation was immediate, helping set in motion an aggressive counter-narrative to the nascent story of the Arab Spring. The article featured a cluster of virulent commentators all pushing the same story: the CIA, George Soros and Hillary Clinton were attempting to take over Egypt. Many of these commentators were trolls, some of whom reappeared in 2016 to help elect Donald J. Trump as President of the United States. This book tells the story of how a proxy-communications war ignited and hijacked the Arab uprisings and how individuals on the ground, on air and online worked to shape history.
In the wake of the 1952 Revolution, Egypt’s future Nobel laureate in literature devoted himself ... more In the wake of the 1952 Revolution, Egypt’s future Nobel laureate in literature devoted himself exclusively to writing for film. The Aesthetic of Revolution in the Film and Literature of Naguib Mahfouz is the first full-length study in English to examine this critical period in the author’s career and to contextualize it within the scope of post-revolutionary Egyptian politics and culture. Before returning to literature in 1959 with his post-revolutionary masterpiece Children of the Alley, Mahfouz wrote or co-wrote some twenty odd scripts, many of them among the most successful in Egyptian history. He did so at a time when film was the country’s second largest export commodity after cotton and the domestic film industry in Egypt the fourth largest in the world. Artistically, his screenplays channeled the ideology of the revolution, often raising themes of oppression and liberation, and almost always within a storyline of criminal transgression. But as he discussed in later articles and interviews, the capacity for film to enumerate the flow of life—through montage, jump cuts, lighting, and close ups—helped him to develop a darker, faster, and more complex vision of society. This technological revolution was followed by a literary one in the 1960s, a time when Mahfouz would generate through a series of short, trenchant, and often comedic novellas, a deeply measured meditation on the experience of collective upheaval and the interpersonal impact of political transformation.
Papers by Nathaniel Greenberg
This book tells the story of how a proxy-communications war ignited and hijacked the Arab uprisin... more This book tells the story of how a proxy-communications war ignited and hijacked the Arab uprisings and how individuals on the ground, on air and online worked to shape history
Studies in the Novel, 2019
In the wake of the 1952 Revolution, Egypt’s future Nobel laureate in literature devoted himself e... more In the wake of the 1952 Revolution, Egypt’s future Nobel laureate in literature devoted himself exclusively to writing for film. The Aesthetic of Revolution in the Film and Literature of Naguib Mahfouz is the first full-length study in English to examine this critical period in the author’s career and to contextualize it within the scope of post-revolutionary Egyptian politics and culture. Before returning to literature in 1959 with his post-revolutionary masterpiece Children of the Alley, Mahfouz wrote or co-wrote some twenty odd scripts, many of them among the most successful in Egyptian history. He did so at a time when film was the country’s second largest export commodity after cotton and the domestic film industry in Egypt the fourth largest in the world. Artistically, his screenplays channeled the ideology of the revolution, often raising themes of oppression and liberation, and almost always within a storyline of criminal transgression. But as he discussed in later articles and interviews, the capacity for film to enumerate the flow of life—through montage, jump cuts, lighting, and close ups—helped him to develop a darker, faster, and more complex vision of society. This technological revolution was followed by a literary one in the 1960s, a time when Mahfouz would generate through a series of short, trenchant, and often comedic novellas, a deeply measured meditation on the experience of collective upheaval and the interpersonal impact of political transformation.
International Journal of Communication, May 29, 2021
Media coverage of protests following the murder of George Floyd on May 26, 2020, tended to ascrib... more Media coverage of protests following the murder of George Floyd on May 26, 2020, tended to ascribe to the demonstrations two faces: One, presented by organizers and supporters, was a decentralized movement for peaceful change; the other was a violent conspiracy for the disruption of order. Good analysis has flowed into the question of domestic media bias in the coverage of Summer 2020’s historical events. Less attention, however, has been directed to the ways foreign media covered the protests. One of the most powerful voices in framing the story of the protests to a global audience was Russia’s statesponsored media behemoth RT. And nowhere was RT’s particular take on the demonstrations more pronounced than its Arabic-language broadcast RT Arabic or RT3. Through the lens of discourse analysis, I focus on a small sample of quintessential reports to explore how RT3 covered Summer 2020’s momentous events, what their reporting tells us about Kremlin disinformation strategies, and how RT3’s coverage of the protests factors into the Kremlin’s greater geopolitical agenda vis-à-vis the Middle East and North Africa.
The Journal for Cinema and Media Studies publishes translations of outstanding scholarly and crea... more The Journal for Cinema and Media Studies publishes translations of outstanding scholarly and creative work on cinema. The originals maybe in any language and come from any period or geographic region. We welcome two types of proposals: (1) a single text such as a journal article, book chapter, or self-contained section of a book that focuses on a particular topic in a unified, coherent way; and (2) a group of smaller texts that are linked thematically, geographically, or otherwise. The total word count of the introduction and translated text(s) should be between 8,000 and 10,000 words in English. One grant-in-aid of $1,000 will be paid to the translator(s) for copyright clearance and as honoraria. Proposals to translate one's own work will not be considered. SCMS members are invited submit proposals, prepared in accordance with the Chicago Style Manual, with the following: 1. Full bibliographical data of the original text(s). 2. The name and credentials of the translator(s). 3. ...
International Journal of Communication, 2020
Amid the bloodshed of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the Al-Qaeda affiliate known as the Islamic Stat... more Amid the bloodshed of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the Al-Qaeda affiliate known as the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) introduced into their repertoire a new tool of war: the handheld camera. Tracing the evolution of the ghazwa, or military expedition aesthetic, in ISI and later ISIS filmmaking, this article explores the way in which the organization’s primary organ of communication, Al-Furqan Media Foundation, expanded from its origins as a documentary film unit to become one of the world’s most potent vehicles of performative violence. Drawing on a comparative frame of reference with other active media units within the greater sphere of Al-Qaeda communications, including the Al-Andalus Establishment for Media Production of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and Al-Furqan Media in the Egyptian Sinai, this article examines the manner in which aesthetic prerogatives, intertwined with religious mythology, served to transcend and unite disparate political factions around a common “narrative ide...
Philosophy & Rhetoric, 2019
Philippe-Joseph Salazar's 2017 masterpiece Words Are Weapons poses a fundamental question: Sh... more Philippe-Joseph Salazar's 2017 masterpiece Words Are Weapons poses a fundamental question: Should we read al-Qaeda? Can we teach the aesthetics that made ISIS infamous? Or in studying the phenomenon do we perpetuate its influence? Government and media campaigns to counter falsehoods, take down propaganda, or superimpose interpretation seek to silence the enemy while preserving the presumed sensibilities of their intended audience. Yet such strategy leaves the door open to the infinitely more seductive power of mystery. Like Arendt's work on Eichmann, Salazar's book challenges us to confront the extreme violence of ISIS in its absolute form. What he finds is a mirror onto Western society—a culture of paralysis in the face of danger and indifference in the face of zealotry. The book is arguably the single indispensable work to date for understanding the psychological and communicative complexities of the war formerly known as the “Global War on Terrorism.”
Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 2018
Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, 2017
In the summer of 2014, on the heels of the declaration of a ‘caliphate’ by the leader of the Isla... more In the summer of 2014, on the heels of the declaration of a ‘caliphate’ by the leader of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), a wave of satirical production depicting the group flooded the Arab media landscape. Seemingly spontaneous in some instances and tightly measured in others, the Arab comedy offensive paralleled strategic efforts by the United States and its allies to ‘take back the Internet’ from ISIS propagandists. In this essay, I examine the role of aesthetics, broadly, and satire in particular, in the creation and execution of ‘counter-narratives’ in the war against ISIS. Drawing on the pioneering theories of Fred Forest and others, I argue that in the age of digital reproduction, truth-based messaging campaigns underestimate the power of myth in swaying hearts and minds. As a modus of expression conceived as an act of fabrication, satire is poised to counter myth with myth. But artists must balance a very fine line.
Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, 2017
This article examines a corpus of extremist Islamist texts for the period from 2007 to 2012, incl... more This article examines a corpus of extremist Islamist texts for the period from 2007 to 2012, including transcripts of audio and videos produced by al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghrib (AQIM). Utilizing narrative analysis, we examine the way AQIM used mythic discourse to disseminate its ideology to audiences and to defend its actions and focus on the deployment of longstanding culturally-embedded ‘master narratives’ in fragmentary forms as sense-making devices. In the process, we argue that narrative analysis can provide insights into ideologies and organizations in the Middle East and North African region that may elude other analytical methods.
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Books by Nathaniel Greenberg
Papers by Nathaniel Greenberg
The total word count of the introduction and translated text(s) should be between 8,000 and 10,000 words in English. One grant-in-aid of $1,000 will be paid to the translator(s) for copyright clearance and as honoraria. Proposals to translate one’s own work will not be considered.
The total word count of the introduction and translated text(s) should be between 8,000 and 10,000 words in English. One grant-in-aid of $1,000 will be paid to the translator(s) for copyright clearance and as honoraria. Proposals to translate one’s own work will not be considered.