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Media of the Masses: Cassette Culture in Modern Egypt with Andrew Simon
Oriental Hall, AUC Tahrir Square
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Details
Media of the Masses investigates the social life of everyday technology—the cassette tape—to offer a multisensory history of modern Egypt. Over the 1970s and 1980s, cassettes became a ubiquitous presence in Egyptian homes and stores. Audiocassette technology gave an opening to ordinary individuals, from singers to smugglers, to challenge state-controlled Egyptian media. Enabling an unprecedented number of people to participate in creating a culture and circulating content, cassette players and tapes soon informed broader cultural, political, and economic developments and defined "modern" Egyptian households.
Drawing on a wide array of audio, visual, and textual sources that exist outside the Egyptian National Archives, Andrew Simon provides a new entry point into understanding everyday life and culture. Cassettes and cassette players, he demonstrates, did not simply join other twentieth-century mass media, like records and radio; they were the media of the masses. Comprised of little more than magnetic reels in plastic cases, cassettes empowered cultural consumers to become cultural producers long before the advent of the Internet. Positioned at the productive crossroads of social history, cultural anthropology, and media and sound studies, Media of the Masses ultimately shows how the most ordinary things may yield the most surprising insights.
Speakers
Andrew Simon
Lecturer and Research Associate in Middle Eastern Studies
Dartmouth College
Andrew Simon is a historian of media, popular culture, and the modern Middle East. He was a fellow at the Center for Arabic Study Abroad in downtown Cairo during the 2011 Egyptian Revolution and is currently serving as Senior Lecturer at Dartmouth College and the modern history book review editor for the International Journal of Middle East Studies. His first book, Media of the Masses: Cassette Culture in Modern Egypt, was published by Stanford University Press this past year. An Arabic translation of the book, which recently appeared on al-Daheeh and has generated widespread media coverage in the Middle East, is forthcoming with Dar El Shorouk later this year. Currently, Andrew is writing a biography of Shaykh Imam and will be making his private collection of cassettes public in a digital archive accessible to anyone who wishes to explore Egypt's acoustic culture.