BOOK EXCERPT | Creative Insurgency in The Naked Blogger of Cairo

Abstract

In the wake of the Arab uprisings, journalists, activists, and scholars coupled creative with revolution (or dissent, protest, resistance) to describe political graffiti, rap, art, and video. Distinguished institutions, from the Prince Claus Fund of the Netherlands to the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, lend the concept gravitas. The notion of “creative revolution” has a nice resonance. It is hard to think of a negative meaning to “creative,” and “revolution” acquires a positive sense when directed against loathed autocrats. “Creative revolution” appeals because it conjures up ordinary people standing up against oppression and doing so artfully. This language echoes rhetorical commonplaces about the uprisings being “nonviolent” and “nonideological.” But this nebulous notion is tricky. “Creative” seems to designate an artistic object, an item involving color, shape, melody, words, something that is supposed to stir feelings in us. Adding “creative” leaves a residual category of noncreative resistance. Can we really distinguish one from the other? Can we restrict creativity to aesthetics? Is using lemon juice to mitigate the pain of tear gas not creative? Are silent vigils not ingenious? Is using a cooking pot as a helmet to protect your head from police projectiles not imaginative? Are three persons riding a moped to a makeshift clinic, wedging the wounded and unconscious between the bodies of two unimpaired activists, not inventive? For the pairing of creativity and rebellion to convey anything beyond a vague notion of hip, nonviolent struggle, it requires a definition that reaches beyond aesthetic concerns to incorporate actions that are physical and symbolic, violent and peaceful.