This book explores the body and the production process of popular culture in, and on, the Middle East and North Africa, Turkey, and Iran in the first decade of the 21st century, and up to the current historical moment. Essays consider gender, racial, political, and cultural issues in film, cartoons, music, dance, photo-tattoos, graphic novels, fiction, and advertisements. Contributors to the volume span an array of specializations ranging across literary, postcolonial, gender, media, and Middle Eastern studies and contextualize their views within a larger historical and political moment, analyzing the emergence of a popular expression in the Middle East and North Africa region in recent years, and drawing conclusions pertaining to the direction of popular culture within a geopolitical context.

The book provides an innovative re-examination of the war on terror, arguing that since September 11th 2001, image warfare has replaced techno-war as the dominant warfighting model. Roger suggests that image warfare is a form of warfare in which Al Qaeda currently dominates while the West is still playing catch-up. By dealing with the deployment of disturbing images generated by the 9/11 attacks from bin Laden videos, suicide terrorism and hostage executions to prisoner abuses, Roger provides us with a new vocabulary through which these acts can be discussed and understood.

The Annual Brass Crescent Awards, a project started in 2004 with the purpose of promoting the best of the Muslim blogosphere, were awarded for year 2012. The best Muslim-authored blog is Sarah Farrukh's A Muslimah Writes. More than 1,000 people voted this year.

The author reveals the complex and at times contradictory cultural and political processes through which Arabness is forged in the contemporary United States, and explores the apparently intra-communal cultural concepts of religion, family, gender, and sexuality as the battleground on which Arab American young adults and the looming world of America all wrangle.

The authors of this report used an automated content analysis program called Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count 2007 (LIWC) to analyze more than 2.5 million tweets discussing the Iran election that were sent in the nine months following it. The authors (1) identify patterns in word usage over the nine-month period and (2) examine whether these patterns coincided with political events, to gain insight into how people may have felt before, during, and after those events.