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music, comedy, soap operas, dance, cultural festivals—the contemporary popular culture of the Muslim world discussed in these pages— are sites of cosmopolitanism and public self-fashioning, neither fully under the control of the state or of religious authority. In tune with broader ideological currents, they wear their religiosity lightly, self-consciously, reflexively . “Post-ness” is at play in all of these chapters: “post-Islam,” Islam “airconditioned ” or “Lite.” Elsewhere, Bayat (2007) has discussed the politics of “fun” in the new Islamist movements, Boubekeur the Islamic “society of spectacle,” in which activist becomes “fan,” and imam “celebrity” (2007). Such categories are ideologically rich and complex. The popular cultural practices described in this book are not just “expressions ” of an underlying transformation. The contributions to this volume would, rather, seem to underline Hirschkind’s recent words about cassette sermonizing in Egypt. “The affects and sensibilities honed through popular media practice are as infrastructural to politics and public reason as are markets, associations, formal institutions and information networks,” he remarks (Hirschkind 2006, 9). The ease with which this volume’s authors move from popular culture to politics and back suggests we have traveled a long way from simplistic Marxian reflexes relegating “popular culture” to superstructure or false consciousness. They also suggest that we have traveled a long way from a time when reaction to such reflexes took the form of an equally problematic romance with “popular-culture-as-resistance.” The essays in this volume explore an emerging theoretical space, whose broad coordinates might be signaled, telegraphically, by the word “publics” (Fraser 1990; Warner 2002), on the one hand, and by “expediency” (Yúdice 2003), on the other. I will return to the interesting dynamics of this theoretical space, and some of its problems, shortly. The chapters in this volume also suggest the distance traveled from an earlier discussion of art and music in the Muslim world, which assumed a afterword martin stokes 276 martin stokes shared and highly normative core to aesthetic experience constituted by abstraction , arabesque, the primacy of the word and so forth. The complicity of such formulations with orientalism has been subject to much discussion (Stokes 2002). The contributors to this volume, most of them anthropologists and ethnomusicologists, share a commitment to ethnography, to local meanings and histories, to subjects in various senses “dialogued with” rather than “spoken for,” to a popular cultural politics that is emergent rather than known in advance. They also share a commitment to attempting to see social and cultural worlds from the bottom up rather than the top down. The challenges such commitments involve, particularly when they are located in the Middle East, or in Middle Eastern migrant culture, are increasingly well known (see Armbrust 2000). In a Middle Eastern context, the question of orientalism continues to raise its head. Along with all of the other things Muslims are deemed to lack, many in the West continue to believe they lack “popular culture.” Like Reading Lolita in Teheran, news of Afghan Star or of heavy metal bands in Iraq relies on patronizing assumptions by the press that such places have never before enjoyed “real” popular culture. Now that they do, thanks in part to the Western military interventions of recent years, freedom of the media, freedom of women, freedom to embrace globalization, freedom to love and desire will surely, at last, be theirs. This, at least, is the implication (Varzi 2008). It is important to remember that popular culture, defined in terms of mass-mediation technologies, has a long history in the Middle East. Film and recording technology took root quickly at the beginning of the twentieth century. The history of mass media in the Middle East is the history of women, of sexuality, of desire, of popular cultural cosmopolitanism, of cities, of migrancy, of political mobilizations and contestations, of publics. Such histories are at last beginning to make their presence felt in Middle East studies. Slowly, in academic circles at least, we are showing signs of moving away from the idea that the term “popular culture” in the Middle East is simply a way of registering—negatively or positively—the “impact of the West,” that it will always refer to something somehow extraneous . Pierre Hecker’s account of heavy metal fans and Islamists in Istanbul in this volume, for example, shows global cultural practices at play in distinctly local struggles. As I noted above, the broader theoretical space articulated by this volume is framed by the idea of “publics...

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