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World Affairs

Book Review | Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography

In Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography, Ariella Azoulay interrogates issues of visual culture, in particular photography, the role of spectator-critics, body politics, and citizenship, through the lens of the Palestinian struggle. She argues that the boundaries of the aesthetic, the political, and the civil perpetuate power relations of nation-states and exclusions. Kiranjeet Kaur Dhillon reviews.

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Cloud Computing and the Monolithic Narrativer

Rami Khater discusses the implications of automated translation based on cloud computing and warns that the subaltern’s narrative and voice could be removed from the interpretation of all human history if our collective knowledge passes through the filters of these trained algorithms.

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Storm in a shisha

Some feared the 2008 novel The Jewel of Medina would create the fiercest backlash among Muslims since the Danish cartoon scandal. So why hasn’t it? Shereen El Feki looks at the politics surrounding the book’s publication.

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The Alhurra Project: Radio Marti of the Middle East

Larry Register’s forced departure from the US public diplomacy channel marks a low point for American efforts at broadcasting to the Middle East, an entirely predictable debacle which likely puts paid to even the slender hopes that the station might turn itself around argues Editorial Board Member Marc Lynch.

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Alhurra TV and Radio Sawa: Advancing freedom in the Arab World

That Arab viewers accept this U.S. government-funded station as credible is a great victory, especially after being on the air little more than three years. That some Arab viewers find the assertions of advocates for freedom jarring to their ears is a price we will gladly pay, argues outgoing Broadcasting Board of Governors Chairman Kenneth Y. Tomlinson.

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America’s Voice as it could have been

The inability of Sawa and Alhurra to speak with critical populations in the Middle East and their emphasis on the most trivial of American pop culture have marginalized the United States and prevented a reasoned and substantive conversation between the United States and the Arab world, says former VOA Director Myrna Whitworth.

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