Fedwa Malti-Douglas

Allen Douglas

The discipline of Middle Eastern studies in the West has often been resistant to incorporating new theoretical and conceptual paradigms. Arab Comic Strips provides at least one indicator that this trend has begun to change. The study reflects the influence of both political economy and post-modernism. The former's influence can be seen in the authors' focus on mass culture and "history from below," while the latter's manifests itself in the authors' use of semiotics and their eschewal of any linear model of social change or totalizing discourse. The strengths of Arab Comic Strips lie in its comprehensive treatment of the genre it scrutinizes. The authors present extensively detailed studies of comic strips that range from Iraq and the Gulf to North Africa and France. Further, the strips they select cover a wide thematic and ideological terrain. Pan-Arabist, Islamist, hybrid Western-Arab, and radical leftist strips all receive in-depth analysis. Through this analysis, the reader gains great insight into political and cultural debates specific to particular regions of the Arab world. The juxtaposition of strips representing different thematic, ideological, and geographical perspectives constitutes comparative analysis at its best. -- From http://www.jstor.org (Dec. 4, 2013).

Politics of an Emerging Mass Culture

Arab Comic Strips

A cultural history of Le Canard Enchaine, the famous French satirical newspaper from its founding during World War I through the 1920s.

The Canard Enchaîné and World War I

War, Memory, and the Politics of Humor

Georges Valois is the enigma who stands at the center of French fascism. Writer, publisher, economic and political organizer, Valois went from adolescent anarchism to fascism and finally to libertarian socialism. His career has mystified scholars, as it did his contemporaries. From Fascism to Libertarian Communism is the first study of Valois to take his entire life and work as its focus, explaining how certain basic assumptions and patterns of thought took form in strikingly different ideological options. Douglas's work, based on a thorough examination of sources from police archives to personal papers and interviews, provides a convincing explanation of this quixotic figure—a man who founded French fascism only to turn to the radical left and eventually die as a resister in Bergen-Belsen. At a time when radical socialism is in decline and neofascist movements are gaining renewed support—in France and elsewhere—this original interpretation of Georges Valois's life and thought could not be more timely.

George Valois Against the Third Republic

From Fascism to Libertarian Communism

War, Memory, and the Politics of Humor features carnage and cannibalism, gender and cross-dressing, drunks and heroes, militarism and memory, all set against the background of World War I France. Allen Douglas shows how a new satiric weekly, the Canard Enchaîné, exploited these topics and others to become one of France's most influential voices of reaction to the Great War. The Canard, still published today, is France's leading satiric newspaper and the most successful periodical of the twentieth century, and Douglas colorfully illuminates the mechanisms of its unique style. Following the Canard from its birth in 1915 to the eve of the Great Depression, the narrative reveals a heady mix of word play, word games, and cartoons. Over the years the journal--generally leftist, specifically antimilitarist and anti-imperialist--aimed its shots in all directions, using some stereotypes the twenty-first century might find unacceptable. But Douglas calls its humor an affirmation of life, and as such the most effective antidote to war.

Allen Douglas

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