<i>Téléphone arabe</i>: From child’s play to terrorism – the poetics and politics of postcolonial telecommunication

McCarren, Felicia

doi:10.1080/17449850802230616

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 6 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Writing on the politics and poetics of postcolonial telecommunications, Felicia McCarren explains that the game is known in France as téléphone arabe: 'one gives a message to another, who transmits it to the next; along the way, the message is inevitably transformed and the last player in the group delivers, out loud, its final, funny, version'. 27 She goes on to point out, however, that not only does the term 'téléphone arabe' signify the supposed 'technological naivety of the colonized', but that it also 'resonates now in western ears with the fear of communications technologies such as the cell phone being used not for nationalist, but for internationalist, terrorist ends, linked to Islamic if not "Arabic" extremism'. 28 For this reason, and for many others, the specific relationship between the Palestinian and the telephone, and the connection between the 'téléphone arabe' and suspected terrorist activities, demands an ever closer ear.…”

Section: Calling Here Calling Therementioning

confidence: 99%

Calling without calling: Barghouti, Derrida and ‘the international day of telephones’

Jackson

2021

Textual Practice

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Drawing on research into telecommunications in the region by Helga Tawil-Souri (2013, 2015, this essay focuses on the literary, cultural and political implications of telephony in Israel-Palestine. Analysing the telephone in Mourid Barghouti's I Saw Ramallah (2000) and I Was Born There, I Was Born Here (2011), I argue that Barghouti's memoirs of exile are structured by an impossible logic where picking up the phone means not getting through. Demonstrating the ways that the lines of communication within and between communities are crossed, complicated, and often cut entirely, I point to the ways that the oppressive religious, political and geographical boundaries are not only mirrored but also significantly extended through the telecommunications infrastructure in the occupied territories. The essay reads Barghouti alongside Jacques Derrida's account of telephoning in Israel in 'Avowing -The Impossible' (1998). Suggesting new connecting lines between the texts, I examine how Israeli control of airspace, infrastructure, and cellular networks contribute to Eyal Weizman's (2007) model of the vertical architecture of the statehow, in effect, using the telephone for both Barghouti and Derrida recalls the Blanchotian syntagma of 'X sans X': calling without calling.

show abstract

Section: Calling Here Calling Therementioning

confidence: 99%