Performative Revolution in Egypt: An Essay in Cultural Power

Description

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Jeffrey C. Alexander examines what was new about Egypt's Spring revolution. Why was it so compelling to watch, and what made it so effective and does it have implications for democratic movements internationally. Using international news reports and translations of the social media pages that brought Egyptians flocking onto Tahrir Square, Alexander uncovers the narrative of a revolution that was scripted by its organizers, as both a moral statement and a media and digital statement. He sees it as a theatrical performance, designed to reveal to the key protagonists what a civil, egalitarian society might look like, by showing it in microcosm on the Square. Ultimately, he argues, it was the sight of the protestor's behaviour that swayed the army, and brought about regime change. From the author of the widely acclaimed 2010 book: The Performance of Politics: Obama's Victory and the Democratic Struggle for Power, this powerful intervention into the debate on the Arab Spring is a must-read for those curious about how social media are fundamentally changing global politics.

Jeffrey C. Alexander is the Lilian Chavenson Saden Professor of Sociology at Yale University, USA and Co-Director of the Center for Cultural Sociology. His most recent book was The Performance of Politics: Obama's Victory and the Democratic Struggle for Power (2010).

Jeffrey Alexander's book on the Egyptian revolution is a masterpiece of cultural sociology. He looks at the unfolding drama and examines how individual remarks and statments were shaped into a representation of collective expression in a wide variety of media. He makes us understand how revolutions unfold within societies that become 'subjectivized' through the invention of new represntations about themselves and the world, within the framework of an effervescent collective action. * Farhard Khosrokhavar, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France * Jeffrey C. Alexander's excellent Performative Revolution in Egypt: An Essay in Cultural Power brings the dissonance between this performance and its deliverables to the fore. * LSE Review of Books *