On naming Arab revolutions and oppositional media narratives

The unfinished Arab revolutions produced unsettling conditions, sectarian wars, counter-revolutionary wars, proxy wars and transitional democracies. US and Arab media responses could not find effective words to describe them and their underlying geopolitical implications. Whether to name them ‘protest’ or ‘unrest’, American mainstream media initially welcomed the events with a cautious curiosity while Arab media favoured a romanticized coverage. But as the protests spread fast and continued, a more dominant popular narrative in the US shaped by the ‘exceptionalist’ perspective about the Middle East emerged. This article explains how dominant discursive framings deployed a form of ‘nature talk’, specifically through names, phrases and locutions such as ‘Arab Spring’, ‘Jasmine revolution’, ‘Arab transition’, and horticultural words like ‘flower’, ‘rose’ and ‘blossom’ to describe the Arab uprisings. Because of an intellectually limiting media-produced racial vernacular during the period of mass protest, this dominant mainstream narrative spoke about the events either by using neo-imperial language that characterized the revolutions as an Islamist threat or by employing culturally reductionist vocabulary which infantilized protesters. The goal here is to place specific media frames and images that such linguistic constructions create and disseminate within the context of power relations, the politics of naming and knowledge production