Publics, Politics and Participation

(Wang) #1

24 Introduction


and directly through the audience they created, the imagined community
of print capitalism, but also through the social practices that clustered
around them. This included public readings and institutionalized “reading
nights” and the passing of papers from hand to hand, between friends and
neighbors. Despite the effectiveness of the press in creating its audience
and its public, the stories of communal strife and divided interests in the
press itself reveal the “limits of Ottomanism” and its ultimate failure in the
face of new nationalisms that eventually tore the Empire apart.
In contemporary times in the Middle East and North Africa region,
satellite television also operates, often in unexpected ways, to both consol-
idate and challenge collective identities. As Hadj-Moussa describes in her
chapter, on a practical level, obtaining satellite TV in Algeria necessitates
collective action, since satellite dishes are owned and managed by groups
of neighbors, which also implies agreement over which channels to view.
Collective action is also needed to defend the ownership, and viewing, of
satellite television, which “became the technological medium at the center
of the struggles between the state and the Islamists, with the viewers in
the middle.” Both the state and Islamists attempt to forbid or curtail the
watching of satellite television, the latter even resorting to armed threats
and forced dismantling of dishes. At the same time, satellite television has
also led to a heightened awareness of differences and divisions, by social
status and class, by gender and by identity politics. For these reasons,
Hadj-Moussa argues that “satellite television [has] permitted Algerians to
negotiate their modernity” and that watching television in Algeria is an
everyday act of resistance, vis-à-vis the state but also Islamists.
tellite TV also becomes a site of drama in the domestic sphere Sa
and a new connection of domestic space to public space, to the “outside.”
On the one hand, there is the retreat of men into the domestic, away
from coffeehouses and public squares, in order to watch television. On
the other hand, there are conflicts and contestations over which channels
to watch and with whom to watch, which reflect both gender and gen-
erational hierarchies. Thus Arabic channels are seen by men as appropri-
ate for women, and bind women to Arabness, Islam and Algerian values,
whereas the French stations are for males and, perhaps unintentionally,
a channel to democratic modernity. Interestingly, access to French tele-
vision and other satellite channels (including Arab news channels) are

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