The Academy Encounters Popular Culture

 

Edited by Walter Armbrust

University of California Press, Berkeley, 2000 

 

This collection of academic essays intends to fill a gap in the literature on Middle Eastern culture. Scholars from the fields of anthropology, history, and ethnomusicology, among others, analyze various aspects of popular culture (defined as "art and 'entertainment' . . . in their mass mediated forms") in the Middle East, Pakistan, Morocco, and two diasporic Middle Eastern communities in the U.S. Editor Walter Armbrust, in his introduction and in his selection of articles, hopes to challenge the prevailing academic paradigm of globalization with other critical perspectives, such as transnationalism and modified forms of modernism, postmodernism, and nationalism. The articles examine texts and performances with a nuanced explication of the social conditions surrounding their production and consumption."

 

Several of the articles are successful in this enterprise, and Armbrust's article on Egyptian cinema before the 1960s is one of them. A few of the ideas reinforced throughout the volume include the importance of nostalgia in creating notions of an "authentic" and identifiable national culture; the influence of global marketing on representing non-Western cultures to the metropolitan West; and the difficulty of applying Western standards of "classical" and "folk" to many Middle Eastern art forms. Roberta L. Dougherty's chapter on Badi'a Masabni, an Egyptian cabaret performer in the 1930s and '40s, and the carnival court in the satirical magazine al'Ithnayn is particularly excellent. 

Other chapters fare less well: a writer may give personal anecdote too much weight in making his argument; or mistakenly interpret a select upper-class phenomenon as popular in appeal. How does one determine which art or entertainment form is popular? This is a dilemma addressed by Armbrust, but not sufficiently addressed in some of the articles.

 

Though "Mass Mediations" no doubt presents new approaches to its subject matter, it is definitely a book aimed at an academic audience. It is unfortunate that several of the writers were not able to present their ideas in more readable prose, communicating their new perspectives to an audience beyond their own academic enclave.