Téléphone arabe: From child’s play to terrorism – the poetics and politics of postcolonial telecommunication

Abstract

The French term téléphone arabe – the concept of an oral network or “bush telephone” that gives its name to a game of message‐passing – draws on the history of European fear and conquest of what Said called the “sheer, unadorned, and persistent fact of being an Arab” – the indecipherable, inaccessible and threatening otherness of the Arab “other”. A critical stereotype of the technological naivety of the colonized, it serves as a figure for pre‐technological social networks, the resourcefulness and reliability of humans over machines that, in colonial situations, resists and threatens colonial power, and that can even trump First World technologies. Recuperated by Arabic speakers, multilingual residents of former French colonies, immigrants or their transnational descendants in the metropole, the téléphone arabe becomes a joke, mocking the legacy of exploitation by, and resistance, to metropolitan technology as well as its postcolonial adoption and absorption, in a self‐critique that merges with the colonial critique. While the telephone creates transnational, global subjects, its local practices also circulate and nuance global practices.