In the context of the dashed hopes of the Arab spring, the NWO VENI project Remembering Dissent and Disillusion in the Arab World critically analyses an emergent type of cultural memory. In documentary and fiction, young artists and activists open up a dialogue with the traces of revolutionary episodes of the 1970s in the Arab world. These videos and texts demonstrate that, although politically marginal, the legacies of student protests, labour strikes and communist dissidents are felt and negotiated in the cultural and intellectual field. Significantly, the works move beyond the documentation and narration of history to enter into an active dialogue with archival material and older militants and intellectuals. The project analyses this encounter and evaluates its potential as a site of political imagination in the counter-revolutionary aftermath of 2011.

Academically, the project makes two important innovations. First, in delineating a coherent transnational corpus it draws attention to the dialogical encounter between the generation of the recent uprisings and the generation of the 1970s. Because these debates are excluded from the field of party politics, which is stifled by state oppression, mutual sectarian distrust and corporate interests, a cultural approach is required. Second, with its focus on modes of listening and address, the project introduces the philosophical tradition of dialogism to the discipline of memory studies. It argues that both scholarly traditions could benefit from this encounter.

Finally, the dialogues under study should be understood as part of a global rearticulation of ideas on the left and new practices of political dissent that also has direct relevance to the Dutch context. How do new engagements with intellectual and militant pasts across the world speak to one another? A public program of screenings and events will open up these questions to a broader audience.

• Naeff, J.A. Revolutionary Reenactment: Militant futures past in Rania and Raed Rafei’s 74 (The Reconstitution of a Struggle) Regards, la revue des arts du spectacle 27: 19-36. https://journals.usj.edu.lb/regards/article/view/684

• arab spring
• cultural memory

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