The Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies has published Outcry: A Rhetorical Discourse Analysis of the Lebanese Uprising by Nader Sarraj (432 pp.). The book includes a bibliography and a general index. With its practical, systematic investigation of the concept of “margin discourse” and its mechanisms of action, Outcry unites the analysis of slogan discourse with the documentation of a new rhetoric. Its contents (e.g., chants, blogs, slogans, and wall writings) illustrate that, today, the margins have become a corpus as much as walls have become texts, documenting the perceptive and innovative rhetorical tide overtaking Arab streets that has characterised the best of popular rhetoric from the protests.
The book’s central problem, the point of departure from which it offers hypotheses and poses worthwhile questions, revolves mainly around the modes and mechanisms surrounding the presence of the linguistic component, with its pragmatic levels and persuasive and expository functions, amid the articulations of this massive popular uprising and its counterparts.
Have the levels of linguistic pragmatics enabled its users to employ its logic, stockpile of vocabulary, and rhetorical structures and forms to craft their demands, formulate their ideas, and deliver their message to those interested? Have the activists of the Lebanese “autumn of fury” internalised the lessons of previous popular movements (e.g., 2005 and 2015-2016) and thus, to realise their reformist ambitions, adjusted course, simplified their discourse, and clarified their destinations? Has feedback on their messaging shown that they have succeeded this time in addressing the revolting “street” in a language that befits it, respects its social intelligence, models its desires, channels its frustrations, and explains the causes and objectives of what is going on around it? The book restates these essential questions openly and brings readers along to envision sufficient, persuasive answers.
The novel contribution of Outcry is that the book seeks to substantiate a research hypothesis arguing that the transformations witnessed by revolting Arab societies have confirmed that language and street, which have frequently been forces for stability, have altered course due to transient “Arab Spring” movements and uprisings, augmented their functions, and, thus, stood by the powers and communities of the uprisings and come to speak for those taking refuge with them. The two have coordinated to transmit messages, raise demands, and condemn the corrupt. Today, rhetoric has come down from its lofty station and shaken off its traditionalism to engage with the suffering of the people and speak on their behalf, in their language.
Lebanon is one of these societies, or arenas, that warrant an analytical survey of the broad outcomes of protest language. Thus, the book’s hypothesis argues that the Arabic language has demonstrated its productive power on the ground, whether in oppositional phrasings, novel forms of protest, or the accompanying creative activities such as reworded songs, anthems, and chants.
Through a deconstructionist study of the slogan system, the language enabled its users to express their motivations transparently by adopting a multifunctional popular rhetoric with clear objectives. To communicate these goals to the general public, it maintained its essential principles, improved its styles, simplified its vocabulary, and employed forms of articulation and written and oral expression across various contexts of deliberation and engagement. It succeeded in consolidating the features of a forward-looking social consciousness among Arab youth, who were revolting against the authoritarianism of regimes, institutional corruption, and the looting of public funds.
Collectively, the language of protest slogans in Lebanon, the productive power of feedback thereon, and the study of its new roles in form, structure, meaning, and timing—to say nothing of elucidating the facets and courses of the new rhetoric that characterises the 17 October Revolution’s slogan discourse—constitute the book’s proposition. The author suggests that the coalescence of these elements should serve to reconsider the linguistic system of the new millennium: one which is better equipped to support its people’s demand for rights and their practise of politics as a democratic, reformist act and a true path forward.
One of the book’s additional propositions argues that the wide audience of this discourse may realise the importance of the linguistic component in protest culture and re-construct the priorities of its architecture and society. These two steps would strengthen its view of itself and the world and monitor points of strength and dynamism in its communication strategies. Another proposition considers the role of public spaces in the variance of the influence of protest discourses in the region’s cities that saw “Arab Spring” movements.
In Outcry, Sarraj studies the discourse of anger and innovative slogans across five chapters. In the first, devoted to posing the research question and the relationship between rhetoric, language, and society, especially in the fifth section titled “Oppositional Rhetoric Renews Itself, with the Furious Streets as its Inspiration”, the author seeks to clarify the concept of “oppositional rhetoric”. The second chapter discusses “The Slogan as Structure and Function in Linguistics and Rhetoric”, studying the case of social actors, their language, and the relationship between language and violence. The third chapter on “Metaphors and Codes as a Gateway to Understanding the World” takes up the semantic metaphors the popular movement has employed in service of various slogans and inspects each of these divergent semantic symbols. The author examines forms of youth discourse in shaping slogans and breaking taboos in the fourth chapter, titled “Using Rhetoric to Investigate Slogans of Lebanese Rage”, and addresses the notion of “counter-rhetoric”, as well as the rhythm and conditional forms of some slogans reflecting the present and socio-cultural heritage. In the fifth and final chapter, titled “Rhetorical Models Selected from the Protest Slogans Corpus”, the author presents the interaction of the press, the media, mass communication, and social media and draws general conclusions to model the course of chants and slogans that have been recreated and reverberated in the region’s arenas of revolution and opposition.
