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Paper short abstract:

The paper examines the satirical digital cultural production in the Egyptian blogosphere appearing since the 2011 uprising with the aim of assessing the role satire as an affective mode of writing plays in writing back to mainstream religious discourse, and its impact on creating new knowledge.

Paper long abstract:

The past few decades in Egypt witnessed a considerable expansion of internet use, which was initially accompanied with an expansion of the margins of freedom of expression in the digital realm. With the outbreak of the January 2011 revolution and the few years of political unrest that followed it, the fluidity of the situation contributed to the continuation of outpouring of cultural and intellectual production in the digital realm (Iskandar 2014) at the hands of (mostly youthful) people who found in the relative accessibility of the internet a viable space for presenting their alternative views. One aspect reflecting this trajectory of revision is the area of religious discourse where digital voices undertook a revision of mainstream discourse, through various forms of re-reading. These interventions came in the form of what Baker and Blaagaard (2016) designate as ‘citizen media’, where loosely affiliated citizens produce cultural practices and artefacts without reliance on institutional sponsorship.

My presentation examines examples of this digital production, with particular emphasis on satire as an effective mode of writing back. The use of satire exposes areas of incongruity inherent to this discourse and provides the satirist with a spectrum of subtlety on which to place their critique (Elliott 2004). Moreover, most of this digital production came in various shapes of multimodality- a quality that renders the digital content better capable of dissemination and continuity (Pappacharissi 2014). I will assess the popularity, influence, and reach of this kind of production, and its potential for revolutionizing religious discourse.