[Commlist] New Book: The People Are Not an Image: Vernacular Video After the Arab Spring

The People Are Not an Image
Vernacular Video After the Arab Spring
byPeter Snowdon <https://www.versobooks.com/authors/506-peter-snowdon>

A major intervention in media studies theorises the politics and 
aesthetics of internet video


The wave of uprisings and revolutions that swept the Middle East and 
North Africa between 2010 and 2012 were most vividly transmitted 
throughout the world not by television or even social media, but in 
short videos produced by the participants themselves and circulated 
anonymously on the internet.

In/The People Are Not an Image/, Snowdon explores this radical shift in 
revolutionary self-representation, showing that the political 
consequences of these videos cannot be located without reference to 
their aesthetic form. Looking at videos from Tunisia, Bahrain, Syria, 
Libya, and Egypt, Snowdon attends closely to the circumstances of both 
their production and circulation, drawing on a wide range of historical 
and theoretical material, to discover what they can tell us about the 
potential for revolution in our time and the possibilities of video as a 
genuinely decentralised and vernacular medium.


    Reviews

“Journalist, scholar, filmmaker, and maverick thinker, Peter Snowdon has 
written a fascinating and penetrating analysis of the Arab Spring’s 
'vernacular videos' and their emancipatory function, offering 
illuminating insights that are likely to shake up cinema theory today 
much as these videos once cracked open the Arab world.”

– Deirdre Boyle, Associate Professor of Media Studies, The New School 
and author of Subject to Change: Guerrilla Television Revisited

“With The Uprising, a feature-length compilation of cell phone videos 
from the Arab revolutions, Peter Snowdon produced one of the great, if 
shamefully unknown, film works of the still young twenty-first Century. 
Revisiting his source material with admirable lucidity, the essays in 
The People Are Not an Image constitute a no less crucial and 
forward-looking work of cinematic exegesis. Together they represent a 
key development in the history of collective image-making.”

– J. Hoberman, author of Make My Day: Movie Culture in the Age of Reagan

“The anonymous videos of the 2010-2012 Arab uprisings, as reframed by 
this powerful and graceful book, are not documents of past events but 
performances that continue to live as they circulate online. Snowdon 
honors the videos as aesthetically complex works that, in the manner of 
a spiritual devotion, bring into being a collective body—one that just 
might burst the state’s cruel grip.”

– Laura U. Marks, author of Hanan al-Cinema: Affections for the Moving Image

“Peter Snowdon has mapped out the topography of a hidden treasure, 
drawing our attention to the videos of Arab revolutions as what he calls 
the ‘vernacular anarchive’ of a momentous historic event otherwise 
withering away in the speed of post-truth amnesia. This is a revelatory 
book, indispensable for our understanding of what happened in the course 
of the Arab Revolutions when we were not paying proper attention.”

– Hamid Dabashi author of The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism

“Snowdon combines narratives of personal encounters, without which no 
tale of a revolution can be complete, with a sophisticated analysis of 
the ways of seeing a complex, fast moving reality, and contemporary 
critical analysis. Combining the experience of filmmaking and the 
everyday dialectics of rebellion during the Arab uprisings of 2011, this 
book should appeal to anyone interested in the relation between image 
and protest, street and screen, ordinary life and extraordinary 
mobilization, feeling of personhood and sense historical relevance, and 
subjectivity in times of revolution.”

– Mohammed Bamyeh, author of Social Sciences in the Arab World and 
Anarchy as Order

https://www.versobooks.com/books/3680-the-people-are-not-an-image

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