Performing Democracy in Iraq and South Africa: Gender, Media, and Resistance
​
​
How do individuals in the Middle East and Africa use blogs and performances to protest injustice? How do these alternative feminisms and innovative medias resist mass media's misconceptions?
​
Reflecting twenty years of research and experience--after working with guerrilla fighters in the Kurdish region of Iraq, refugees in Iran, interreligious groups in Morocco, and former political prisoners in South Africa--Segall offers a groundbreaking view of how groups use cultural forms to navigate memories of violation and to create new political identities. Unlike global media's shifting and often shallow spotlight on the protests of the Arab Spring, this book shows how communities are performing creative, economic, resistant, and even reconciliatory claims of rights amid contentious and gendered territories. By analyzing innovative sites of dissent-- ranging from Sunni feminists and LGBTQ urbanites who report on street protests through blogs to a South African group claiming racial reparations-- Performing Democracy attends to local venues and creative technology. With its impressive diversity of women's stories that are often forgotten by the press, this book suggests generational and hybrid protests-- voicing trauma, seeking change.
Solidarities: American Muslim Resistance Workshop & Public Presentations
Reviews
"Segall's book draws our attention to the use of media, art and popular culture by ordinary people living through extraordinary times. She highlights the role of affect and emotion in resisting, negotiating, understanding and coping with dramatic and sometimes violent political change." - Nicola Pratt, coauthor What Kind of Liberation? Women & the Occupation of Iraq
​
"A keen listener and observer, Kimberly Wedeven Segall brings together two decades of engagement with Middle Eastern and African communities that have sought to forge new political imaginaries. Drawing our attention to many forgotten springs beyond the newly named 'Arab Spring', Segall shows how popular and artistic expressions in this communities have resulted in 'hybrid blooms of democratic voices." - Gaurav Desai, coeditor of Postcolonialisms: An Anthology of Cultural Theory and Criticism
Previous Work
​
-
Performing Democracy in Iraq and South Africa: Gender, Media, and Resistance (Syracuse University Press, 2013).
-
“Media Sites: Political Revivals of American Muslim Women.” In Oxford Handbook of Performance and Politics, edited by Shirin Rai et al. Oxford University Press. Feb. 2021.
-
"De-imperializing Gender: Political Revivals, Shifting Beliefs, & Unexpected Trajectories in Lalami's Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits." Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies. 15:1 (March 2019). Duke University Press, 75-94.\
-
“Contestational Spaces and the Nervous Conditions of Postcolonial Theories,” Teaching the African Novel, edited by Gaurav Desai (MLA / Modern Language Association Series, 2009), 371-385.
-
“Melancholy Ties: Inter-generational Loss and Exile in Persepolis,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, 28.1 (2008), 38-49\
-
“Collective Mourning Practices in Iraq and South Africa," Lamentations in Ancient and Contemporary Contexts, edited by Nancy Lee and Carleen Mandolfo (Atlanta: SBL, 2008), 177-194.
-
“Postmodern Mourning in Durrant’s Postcolonial Narrative and the Work of Mourning,” Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Rhetoric, Writing, and Politics 26.3 (2006): 706-714.
-
“Story and Song in Iraq and South Africa: From Individual to Collective Mourning Performances,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, 25:1 (2005): 138-151.
-
“Pursuing Ghosts: The Traumatic Sublime in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace,” Research in African Literatures, 36:4 (2005): 40-52.
-
“Postcolonial Performatives of Victimization,” Public Culture 38 (2002): 617-619.
*from Faculty Profile at spu.edu
​
Interview
​