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The first part of the chapter presents the members of the sixties generation, telling the story of their emergence onto the cultural scene in Egypt. It outlines the socio-economic and political context of which they were both a part and an expression. Who are these writers? When and how did they emerge? What is significant about their work? Why did they appear at such a critical moment in Egyptian history? What are the sources of literary and aesthetic inspiration? This chapter draws on an array of primary material from the journals of the time whose pages were filled with discussions about this emerging generation. This presentation of the sixties generation is undertaken with an attention to the broader context of the literary sphere in Egypt, what Bourdieu calls “the field of cultural production.” The second part of the chapter focuses on the theoretical arguments for the examination of space in literature, examining the broader “spatial turn” in the humanities and social sciences, engaging this approach within the context of modern and contemporary Egyptian literature. A focus upon spatial representations expands our analysis of the work of the sixties writers, bringing together the thematic, the aesthetic, and the political.

While the general public engages in varying levels of it, the models and modeling professionals I spoke to for this study claimed they felt as though they were never off duty and were always at work to produce the right “look” in person, in photographs, and online. Model agents made it clear that it matters where models live, where they eat and shop, and on which airline they travel. As this chapter explores, some respondents reported being told explicitly by their agents they had to put on the show all the time, even if they were just running around the corner to do an errand, mindful of the impression they might make as they are out and about, conscious of their online image created by the photos snapped of them in fashionable neighborhoods or at social events and posted to blogs or websites dedicated to documenting the modeling world. It seems like a lot of work, but models who really want to “make it” report trying to make it look fun to be exposed in this way, to be “on” all the time, to be out there in the spotlight, as often as humanly possible.

In India, ‘independent documentary film’ is a term that signifies a body of films that first appeared in 1975 during the Constitutional Emergency, a period when the repressive exercise of state authority threatened the democratic political foundations of the nation. The initial usage of the term ‘independent’ to denote a production category located outside of state structures is now a misnomer. In the post-economic reform landscape, independent filmmakers operate with greater flexibility and various interdependent and mutually cooperative forms of organisation between filmmakers, the state, international and domestic NGOs, private institutions and individuals are commonplace. My attempt here is to construct an ongoing critical dialogue between broader concepts of documentary studies and the situated perspectives that emerge from individual accounts and the analysis of films produced and circulated using diverse modes and architectures. Emphasising the historical significance of documentary as a space of oppositional representation, the accounts produce a grounded theory of independence structured in relation to institutions, industry practices, individual subjectivities and technology in post-reform India. Combining the study of independent film practice and textual analysis, the mixed methods study investigates how independent Indian documentary is a practice that not only produces political representation but opens up new material relations between culture, society and the individual.

This chapter presents an overview of recent work on cultural intermediaries and the ‘creative class’ in relation to social inequality. The chapter looks at Britain’s ‘creative class’ in relation to workforce patterns, tastes, social attitudes, and their faith in the transformative power of culture. Ultimately the chapter suggests we need caution when thinking about the impact of cultural intermediaries on social inequality.

Enthusiasm in Western media and the academe about the paradigm-shifting events of the Arab uprisings of 2010-2013 has been marked by notable attention to creative cultural production by Arab youth. Perhaps no single genre has received more of this attention than Arabic rap and hip hop. However, despite the political attentiveness this recent enthusiasm has displayed, most of this literature has not yet addressed how the particularities of the processes of cultural production create experiences that help define specific political bearing. I want to further this conversation by asking: how can some rap and hip hop in Arabic be understood as specific political practice? What can analyzing this cultural production reveal about the emergent forms of political belonging enacted and developed in these practices? Focusing on performatic strategies in rap concerts, I explore different uses of call and response, costuming, “warm up” and “cool down” techniques to theorize how rap performances might work to build political community, what I call here “radical belonging.”

This epilogue pulls all of the chapters together by reaffirming Pressley-Sanon’s advocacy for a reading of Haiti’s history, memory, and cultural production through the lens of the ocean’s waves as well as its spiritual tradition in general and the Marasa specifically.

Distinguishing between the physical phenomena of modernization and the rhetorical conditions of modernity, this chapter argues that during the nineteenth century in Spanish America, men and women took advantage of the rhetoric of modernity in order to attach their own, sometimes very different, agendas to discourses about modernity and that they responded to modernity based on their attitudes about gender. Using Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of the field of cultural production, the chapter explains the book’s inclusion of multiple texts. It argues that the malleability of the discourses of modernity enables writers to use gender as a staging-ground for ideas about national progress and also to advance arguments about the importance of women in the nation.

This chapter specifies how theoretical conceptualizations of learning have become integrated into a student's thinking and representation. It provides a review of ideas and concepts associated with influential music learning theories. It analyzes four influential perspectives of learning, and considers how the learner is shaped by them: (1) the music learner as a skilled performer, (2) the music learner as a collaborator, (3) the music learner as an explorer, and (4) the music learner as an authentic musical being. It also explores Pierre Bourdieu's theory of the field of cultural production in his The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, and looks into the view that the music learner is a part of an intricate sociocultural web involving particular structures and practices that empower some and prevent others from taking a deliberate role in the field of cultural production that constitutes music.

The book is divided into three sections. The chapters in part one, ‘Arab Media in Transition’ explore the broad changes that have occurred in the relationship between the growing Arab mediascape and the turbulent political environment of the Middle East and North Africa region. Part two, ‘Space and the Cultural Production of Arab Media’, provides an analysis of the relationship between space—both physical and virtual—and the public’s growing involvement in cultural creation. The chapters in this section focus on everyday practices, narratives, and identity formations that are negotiated in the informal public sphere of the street and cyberspace, as well as how these issues play out in formally organized media cities. The final part of this book, ‘Media, State Interests, and Non-State Actors’, explores the radical shift in state-society power relations in a number of Arab countries. The chapters in this concluding section elaborate on how Arab publics have taken media tools into their own hands, ensuring that the future of information is no longer the sole monopoly of the state.