Mish mabsoota: on teaching with a camera in revolutionary Cairo†

Abstract

Made in the wake of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, Inti Mabsoota? is an experimental pedagogical video project that draws upon the emerging mobile esthetics of cell phone filmmaking and public encounters with revolutionary spontaneity. Inspired by the landmark cinéma-vérité film, Chronique d'un été (1960), in which participants ask people on the streets of Paris if they are happy, several of my students at the American University in Cairo became mobile film units, asking people the same innocuous question, “Inta mabsoot?/Inti mabsoota?”—Are you happy? Are you content? This seemingly benign exercise belies a variety of conceptual and methodological frictions, which offered productive pedagogical possibilities. Drawing upon the emergent revolutionary visual culture, this student project complicated both the reductive assessments of the “Arab Spring” as a manifestation of digital democracy and the heavy-handed way that western journalism has tended to address the “Arab Street” as a volatile mob. Using an embodied visual approach allowed students to apprehend modes of lived experience that might not register as political in more normative models, but which nonetheless form the basis of how people live and experience political life. Highlighting the non-representational aspects of the encounter also foregrounds the corporeal and visceral dimensions of the students’ experience. Accordingly, the critical video methods employed elucidate the kinds of affective knowledge produced for those on screen, behind the camera, and viewing from a distance.

Keywords

• Egypt
• enactment
• pedagogy
• visual culture
• political affect
• Arab Uprisings
• ethnographic encounter
• non-representational theory
• visual methodologies
• cinéma-vérité