Jonathan Guyer: Art, Mass Media, and Satire

Jonathan Guyer: Art, Mass Media, and Satire

From Cairo, Jonathan will focus on examining connections between cultural currents and political change across the region. He has been living and working in Egypt since 2012, where he is a contributing editor of the Cairo Review of Global Affairs, a policy journal published by the American University in Cairo. From 2012 to 2013, he was a Fulbright fellow researching political cartoons in Egypt. He previously served as a program associate for the New America Foundation’s Middle East Task Force in Washington, DC, and as assistant editor of Foreign Policy’s Middle East Channel. A frequent analyst on Public Radio International, he has contributed to Guernica, Harper’s, Modern Painters, The New York Review Daily, The New Yorker, The Paris Review Daily, New York Magazine, Nieman Reports, and others. His research on Egyptian satire has been cited by the Associated Press, CNN, The Economist, The Nation, New Statesman, Reuters, and TIME, as well a variety of international news outlets. A cartoonist himself, he blogs about Arabic comics and caricature at oumcartoon.tumblr.com.

  • Not another Western intervention

    Not another Western intervention

    • Jonathan Guyer
    • September 1, 2017
    Can writers transcend archetypes, stereotypes and other misguided expectations? When I met an editor from an American newspaper five years ago, I sought guidance for crafting the perfect pitch. Having just begun working as a journalist in Cairo, I was developing an expertise in Arab political comics. The editor’s response was blunt: The rag was likely ...
  • Report from Egypt past, present and future

    Report from Egypt past, present and future

    • Jonathan Guyer
    • July 18, 2017
    The following is an adaptation of remarks I delivered at ICWA’s semi-annual gala on June 2 at the Cosmos Club, Washington, DC. On March 6, a colossal head of an ancient pharaoh was uncovered in a 10-meter deep pit in the city of Matariya, an hour north of Cairo. The excavators wrapped it for protection overnight ...
  • Speech Bubbles: Comics and Political Cartoons in Sisi’s Egypt

    Speech Bubbles: Comics and Political Cartoons in Sisi’s Egypt

    • Jonathan Guyer
    • May 10, 2017
      The Century Foundation invited me to contribute a chapter on Egyptian cartoons and comics for Arab Politics beyond the Uprisings: Experiments in an Era of Resurgent Authoritarianism. This chapter builds on extensive fieldwork conducted during my two-year ICWA fellowship, offering the most comprehensive study to date of the challenges facing cartoonists in Egypt. I am ...
  • Nationalism for Kids: How Egyptian Comics Teach Conflict

    Nationalism for Kids: How Egyptian Comics Teach Conflict

    • Jonathan Guyer
    • May 3, 2017
    I presented a version of this paper in February at “Framing War and Conflict in Comics,” the second annual Symposium on Arab Comics at the American University of Beirut.   When General Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi ran for the Egyptian presidency in the spring of 2014, the children’s magazine Samir published a stoic caricature of him its cover. This ...
  • Remembering Alexandria’s Visionary

    Remembering Alexandria’s Visionary

    • Jonathan Guyer
    • April 15, 2017
    In my first piece for the New York Times, I write an homage to the great Alexandrian scholar Mostafa el-Abbadi, who passed away in February. Several obituaries of el-Abbadi appeared in Egyptian newspapers, but most merely consisted of his curriculum vitae. No remembrance captured his colorful disposition and feisty erudition, let alone his ambivalent relationship ...