Beeshu’s Laugh

Abstract

Abstract Although the Syrian uprising initially seemed poised to proceed along a path similar to that of revolutions in other parts of the Arab world, the situation quickly devolved into one of the bloodiest and most destructive conflicts since World War II. Against the backdrop of nearly unprecedented devastation and harsh repression, a popular ‘arts of self-satire’ has flourished, creating a form of visual critique directed simultaneously at the regime and the self. On the surface, such works appear to be deeply cynical but in fact serve as a means of visual and social empowerment. In this article I argue that self-satire—and the ‘involvement’ it reveals, exposes and displays—creates a distinctly Syrian form of popular artistic production whose goal is to create a sense of agency and provoke intra-communal and public empathy with the suffering of the Syrian people. Thus, in Syria, the arts of the uprising are often darkly cynical and self-mocking, but that very self-satire becomes the means by which Syrians insist to themselves, and the world, that their circumstances must be revealed, witnessed and radically identified with.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 5 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.