"The study of regulatory censorship is today seen as resounding dull and anachronistic. This is in part because of the way in which assumptions that censorship is the affliction of non-democratic and despotic political systems alone has been challenged by the attention given to new modes of regulation in Euro-American contexts.
Conceptually censorship has become polymorphic, it is now seen as constitutive and structural, an unavoidable entanglement of discursive and cultural practices that are in and of themselves the basis of social existence. Yet claims that we no longer know what ‘censorship’ means seem incredibly detached from the reality faced by the thousands of people languishing in detention in Egypt for a wide range of representational 'crimes'.
A concern with regulatory censorship is all the more necessary given the political moment in which we live where authoritarian neoliberalism entrenches itself across the globe and where a concern with 'freedom of speech' and expression are routinely dismissed as passé and ‘liberal’. In this talk I will explore the relationship between militarism, tutelary culture and censorship in Egypt.
In so doing I attempt to chart a history of preset arrangements, to expose the way in which censorship has been as much about promoting and privileging particular modes of representation rather than simply prohibition; how censors have been censored and how the constitutive and regulatory modalities of censorship have come together to sustain both Islamism and militarism in equal measure."
2019-11-29