This volume is an exciting and much-needed contribution to our understandings of the Middle East uprisings of 2011. It focuses on a critical yet under-theorized dimension of those uprisings: their political aesthetics. Crucially, the book also situates those uprisings in global perspective, connecting them to similar protests across the world, for example in the United States, India, the UK, Spain, Greece, and Botswana. It does so with an anthropological focus highly attuned to the historical roots of aesthetic practices, their social production, and the subtle ways they reshape social hierarchies, space, and temporality. Although many astute observers of the protests have written individual blog posts, media commentaries, and academic articles on the arts, performances, and spatial organization of the Middle East uprisings, this volume offers a comprehensive, globally connected, and socially grounded analysis of political aesthetics.

The book's central claim is that the power of these uprisings was in their challenges to, and often subversion of, the aesthetic regimes through which oppressive governments govern in this neoliberal age. The various chapters give more than convincing substance to this claim, richly analyzing a variety of aesthetic practices that proved central to the protests: song, graffiti, cartoon and caricature, poetry, dance, chants, and signs, as well as media and performance activism. They show the various ways that aesthetic play and performance were central to motivating, organizing, defining, and embodying political protest.

The introduction astutely lays out not only the central themes of the book, but also the core dimensions of the aesthetics of protest. It begins by highlighting one of the most notable aspects of the uprisings—the proliferation of humor, satire, parody, and caricature—and discusses their critical role in creating repertoires of protest that powerfully contest the aesthetics of authoritarian leadership, and do so particularly in their carnivalesque enactments. It also spotlights how poetry, song, and circulating images worked to constitute a notion of a collective that transcends social divisions often created or exacerbated by various governments. The editors present citationality—both discursive and visual—as a key analytic for understanding how aesthetic forms and practices link both historically and across national contexts. They urge us to consider as well how the practice of citation itself constitutes a heteroglossic creativity that reworks time, space, and embodied experience.

The chapters dealing with the Middle East uprisings include those by Simon Hawkins on various images “of and for” the revolution in Tunisia, Dalia Wahdan on song in Tahrir, Hanan Sabea on imaginings of “the people” in Egypt, Igor Cherstich on caricatures of Qaddafi in Libya, Steven Caton, Hazem Aryani and Rayman Aryani on protest poetry in Yemen, and Oren Livio and Tamar Katriel on signs, slogans, spatial organization, and performative play in Israel's 2011 protests.

Hawkins’ sharp analysis traces the powerful role of images, circulated in news and social media both to and through Tunisia, in shaping different phases of that country's uprising. He argues that European photojournalists' images of tear-gassed protestors, when transmitted back to Tunisia, motivated people to join the uprising in the early days in part because they resonated as part of a global imagery of protest (including the Palestinian struggle). Later circulation of images, particularly of the Tunisian flag, served to create a new mobilized notion of a Tunisian people, leading to a greater nationalization of the protests. But this coherence was to fracture with the introduction of circulating images of the ISIS flag and counter images of Tunisians doing the Harlem Shake in public space. Hawkins’ essay links thematically to Hanan Sabea's excellent piece on the ways that the spatial and temporal experience of occupying Tahrir opened new imaginaries for conceiving of “the people” (al-shaʿb) in a way radically different from that proposed by the regime. This essay takes seriously the aesthetic aspects of living, playing, and creating together in space but also, akin to Hawkins, critiques how the packaging of such events, often in spectacle, render “more complex processes. . .obscure” (70). Cherstich's unique and fascinating essay highlights how “the body of the colonel” was imagined in Libya's pre-uprising era and then became the object of quite specific caricatures in public space during and after the uprising (93). He argues that Qaddafi went from being a ghost/sorcerer/potential man to “just a man”—a tangible target of ridicule that could then be separated from the national body. This constituted a powerful reversal of Qaddafi's own self-presentation as a metonym of Libya. The Livio and Katriel essay on the Israeli protests is one of the more sophisticated analyses of how liminality and communitas are produced through particular spatial systems in the occupations of public space, as well as participation structures, thereby expanding the typical sense of what counts as “aesthetic” in political protest.

As with any edited volume, some chapters are weaker than others. Not all of the chapters connect the dots between the aesthetics of protest and their role in “subvert[ing] the aesthetically embodied, materially constructed edifices of tyrannical, authoritarian or neoliberal regimes” or even adequately examine the category of the aesthetic as promised in the introduction (1). Several of the chapters would have benefited from a more concentrated visual, textual, or aural analysis of the aesthetic forms that emerged from these protests, although this criticism does not detract from their smart interpretations of the social processes occurring around and through these forms.

The volume is gorgeously augmented with over 150 color illustrations of protests, graffiti, signs, and cartoons. It serves as one of the most comprehensive scholarly gatherings of visual documentation of the uprisings I have seen. It also includes a very helpful timeline of the protests in different locations from 2010 to 2013, allowing the reader to discover potential influences and transnational circulations between different movements.

The Political Aesthetics of Global Protest, especially the introduction and its strongest chapters, would be very useful to teach in both undergraduate and graduate courses on the Middle East uprisings, political protest, visual culture, and sound cultures. Overall, the volume should encourage more scholarship on the aesthetics of protest, because, as the authors say, these are not the “trivial ‘decoration’ of serious politics, the ‘icing on the cake’, so to speak.” As they rightfully argue, there is a “critical need. . .to recognize a radical shift in modes of mobilization and political activism that the uprisings and protests signaled, one not fully incorporated into the scholarly literature; a new embodied and aesthetic way of doing politics worldwide” (13). This is a potentially field-defining volume, pertinent to ongoing political protests everywhere.