Felicia McCarren  (Tulane)
Téléphone Arabe

The French term "téléphone arabe" draws on the history of European fear and conquest of what Said called the "sheer, unadorned, and persistent fact of being an Arab"-the indecipherable, inaccessible and threatening otherness of the Arab "other." A critical stereotype of the technological naivete of the colonized, it serves as a figure for pre-technological social networks, the resourcefulness and reliability of humans over machines that, in colonial situations, resists and threatens colonial power, and that can even trump first-world technologies. Recuperated by Arabic speakers, multilingual residents of former French colonies, immigrants or their transnational descendants in the Metropol, the"téléphone arabe" becomes a joke, mocking the legacy of exploitation by andresistance to metropolitan technology as well as its post-colonial adoption and absorption. While the telephone creates transnational, global subjects, its local practices also circulate and nuance global practices: it reflects the fact that technology does not simply move in one direction: that, along with technology transfer, there is multidirectional transculturation--as, for example, so-called "third-world" phoning practices come to France, and French "nomade" cellular service is adapted to nomadic North African communities. Exploring what is encoded in the "téléphone arabe" introduces oral/aural and linguistic components into debates on the visualized and spatialized relations of colonial subjection in post-colonial theory (Bhabha on the fixity of the visual stereotype, reading Fanon and Jameson). But in what is now being called "Empire," the invisible threat of the "téléphone arabe" returns: dominating US representations of islamicist terrorist cells and driving the project to "bring to light" the networks hidden by the telephone, as well as the program of domestic surveillance that it is used to legitimate.