Power, Public Feelings, and Popular Culture

Is Marwan Pablo’s Denamet a treatise on alienation? Can we read Mohamad Samy’s notorious Ramadan series Nasl il Aghrab as a critical commentary on the befuddled nature of contemporary power?

This course is an invitation to engage with the social worlds we inhabit through the lens of popular culture. By looking at everything from Egyptian rap songs to television series and online vlogs, we will attempt to take popular culture seriously, both as a site where power is negotiated and deployed, and where feelings are publicly constituted, fostered, or condemned. Throughout the course, we will combine our experiences as viewers/ consumers of the various artefacts with works of anthropological and philosophical theory in an effort to understand the complex fields of power, and the convoluted emotional webs that make up our present.