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Abstract
The idea of prefiguration is widely assumed to derive from anarchist discourse; it involves experimenting with currently available means in such a way that they come to mirror or actualise the political ideals that inform a movement, thus collapsing the traditional distinction between means and ends. Practically all the literature on prefiguration has so far focused on structural, organisational and interactional issues – specifically, how activist communities attempt to create in their own interactions and in the way they organise their work the kind of society they envision: non-hierarchical, non-representational, inclusive, respectful of diversity. This article explores the extent to which volunteer subtitling undertaken by disparate individuals for collectives connected with the Egyptian Revolution supports or undermines the prefigurative agendas of these collectives. In doing so, it tentatively extends the current definition of prefiguration to encompass textual, visual and aesthetic practices that prefigure activist principles and actualise them in the present, focusing in particular on the level of experimentation involved in such practices.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. The only exception is Mehrez (Citation2012), which reports on a collective project undertaken in 2011 as part of a seminar on ‘Translating Revolution’ led by Samia Mehrez at the American University in Cairo.
2. The study was supported by an 18-month full-time fellowship, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the UK, grant number AH/K008242/1.
3. https://www.facebook.com/mosireen/info?tab=page_info (last accessed 2 February 2015).
4. See also http://mosireen.org/?p=737 (last accessed 18 February 2015).
5. https://www.youtube.com/user/Mosireen (last accessed 4 February 2015).
6. http://vimeo.com/mosireen (last accessed 23 January 2015).
7. http://mosireen.org (last accessed 1 February 2015).
8. http://www.leilzahra.com/?page_id=2 (last accessed 23 January 2015).
9. A slightly different list appears on the Amara subtitling platform that features the trailer for the project – see http://www.amara.org/en/videos/jM8VojIFupS5/info/words-of-women-from-the-egyptian-revolution-sanaa-seif-trailer/ (accessed 19 January 2016). This confusion, or lack of attention to crediting individuals with specific contributions to an activist project, is a by-product of a commitment to horizontality and resistance to patterns of representation that characterise the culture of contemporary activism, as discussed later in the article.
10. https://www.youtube.com/user/LeilZahra (last accessed 23 January 2015).
11. https://www.facebook.com/HerstoryEgypt (last accessed 23 January 2015).
12. Mortada also subtitled some Mosireen videos into English and, according to exchanges on the subtitling list dated July 2012, helped revise the subtitles into Arabic for Heart of the Factory (Corazón de Fábrica), a film about workers in a self-managed Zanon ceramics factory in Buenos Aires who ‘wanted to get in touch with the ceramica cleopatra workers’ in Egypt (Philip Rizk, Mosireen subtitling list, 15 July 2012). Katharine Halls, who coordinated the Mosireen subtitling list, also helped with subtitling for Words of Women (Mortada, interview with the author [46:45; 48:30]), including subtitling of the interview with the Bahraini activist Maryam Alkhawaja (exchange on Mosireen subtitling list, 21 July 2012). Words of Women is also fascinating in terms of other issues that cannot be discussed here, for lack of space. For example, it was conceived and largely managed by a Lebanese rather than Egyptian gay activist, demonstrating the centrality of the Egyptian Revolution and its powerful hold on activist imaginaries in the region and beyond. Mortada tries but fails to explain his investment in the Egyptian Revolution: ‘I don’t know because Egypt is Egypt. I don’t know. It’s really hard to explain to people about how important Egypt is emotionally for all of us’ (interview with the author [07.10]).
13. See, for example, ‘Crimes of Mohamed Ibrahim, Minister of Interior under Morsi and Sisi’, https://www.youtube.com/watch?x-yt-ts=1422579428&x-yt-cl=85114404&v=L72HdNNRF9Q, and ‘Sexual Torture under Mubarak, SCAF, MB’, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2kMzrFHt-Y (both accessed 1 February 2015).
14. ‘Massacre at Bayn al-Sarayat’, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxjCQbHbbjQ (last accessed 1 February 2015).
15. ‘The Revolutionaries’ Response to the Tahrir Monument’, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uFqqsKPQ6Y (last accessed 1 February 2015).
16. ‘The Right to Housing 1’, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCN_klpOxug (last accessed 1 February 2015).
17. ‘After Injury and Arrest, Bassem Mohsen Becomes a Martyr’, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bhod2FBeSrs (last accessed 1 February 2015).
18. ‘The Shura Council Detainees’, https://www.youtube.com/watch?x-yt-cl=85114404&x-yt-ts=1422579428&v=ALBiWyQD8tU (last accessed 1 February 2015).
19. Katharine Halls (personal correspondence, 17 September 2012) described Hawas as having ‘the biggest output of all the activist translators’ she has come across.
20. The attribution of these exact words to Ghandi is contested (Morton Citation2011).
21. Rizk, from Mosireen, expresses a similar attitude to representational practices in the context of the Revolution: ‘Youth activists were by no means representative of the protests, but they were the dominant voice presented. We were but a handful of individuals amongst a cacophony of shouts calling for change, each person with their own concerns, complaints, desires, cause for action, and reason for revenge. Throughout the upsurge in protests there was a strong horizontal inclination, a non-centralized decision-making process, a leaderless movement that could not be represented to a centralized, individual-focused media apparatus, through a penned article, given speech, authored art work, or character driven documentary film. Such a process of representation falsifies reality’ (Citation2014, 34.)
22. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for alerting me to the mix of formal and informal registers of Arabic in this instance, an aspect of the choice of Mosireen that Khalid Abdalla does not comment on in the interview. In line with Mosireen’s and other activist groups’ own informal spellings of Arabic words, I have chosen not to use the scholarly conventions of transcribing Arabic, here and elsewhere, in discussing the work of these groups (for further discussion, see Baker Citation2016, 13).
23. See, for instance, Mosireen’s documentaries on the Grifna movement in Sudan – ‘Sudan, the Resistance Continues’, http://mosireen.org/?p=1650, and Turkey – ‘Tahrir to Taksim We Demand the Fall of the System’, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20V2pv33F-w. See also Words of Women’s interview of the well-known Bahraini activist Maryam Alkhawaja, Episode 9, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxUD3TUC6zM. All accessed 4 February 2015.
24. Rizk’s recollection of paths of solidarity nurtured by Mosireen suggests that Mexico and Argentina were particularly receptive to the Egyptian experience: ‘Especially in times of ebb of protests in Egypt, I sought out connections with revolts around the world. …. On one occasion we were put in contact with members of the self-governed tile factory Zanon in Argentina, after they had watched a Mosireen video, with Spanish subtitles, on the strike of tile workers in the Ceramica Cleopatra company. On one occasion a series of Intifadat Intifadat videos was screened in a public square in Mexico City to passersby, and the artist who organized the screening handed out CDs of the films, encouraging people to organize home screenings’ (Citation2016, 229–230).
25. For further discussion of this issue, see the recording of Mortada’s keynote at the Globalizing Dissent conference, held in Cairo in March 2015, https://globalizingdissent.wordpress.com/translation-and-solidarity/ (last accessed 13 June 2015).
26. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_ywo_XZh1s (last accessed 6 February 2015).
27. Had the speaker chosen the media cliché عناصر مندسه, literally ‘infiltrators’, the choice of provocateurs could have been motivated, on the basis that even uneducated people sometimes recycle media phrases of a much higher register than their level of education gives them access to. This is probably what the viewer concludes here, from the choice of provocateur and use the constitution as a fig leaf.
28. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnLJ4zjpXCo (last accessed 18 February 2015).
29. During a workshop I organized for the collective in April 2014, with the help of Luis Pérez-González. A recording of this workshop is available at http://www.monabaker.org/?p=1891 (accessed 21 January 2016).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Mona Baker
Mona Baker is Professor Emeritus of Translation Studies at the University of Manchester, UK. She is author of In Other Words (1992/2011) and Translation and Conflict (2006), and Editor of Translating Dissent: Voices from and with the Egyptian Revolution (2016).