Entangled Pasts

Focusing on the Arabic-speaking region, Entangled Pasts uncovers the place of an imagined history in everyday forms of political communications. Omar Al-Ghazzi examines how Arab media, public opinion, and imaginings of history intersect, asking how meta-histories are reproduced and adapted to shifting political circumstances and changing technological and media conventions. Meta-history is conceived as the imagination of the past, present, and future through abstracted binary frames: progress versus backwardness, honour vs humiliation, destruction vs reconstruction, liberation vs subjugation, and durable vs disposable.These meta-historical narratives are attached to discussions of an Arab past and how they circulate across media genres via a myriad of communicative practices including the phatic, the representational, the metaphorical, the performed, and the re-presenced. Arab states are the most powerful political actors invested in this politics of history through their influence over print, broadcast, and social media. Media workers and users simultaneously navigate, and at times resist, this top-down power.The book analyses numerous moving parts: everyday media, public contestation, and mnemonic imaginations of history. Yet, this movement and complexity unfold within stable cultural frames and historical references that become sites of political struggle. Drawing on mundane but ubiquitous media practices, from everyday social media activity and banal historical dramas to public symbols, journalistic metaphors, and promotional television content, Al-Ghazzi reveals how history remains a central terrain of meaning-making in contemporary Arab media and culture.