...Asef Bayat Duke University Press 2007 CONSUMPTION, SOLEMNITY, HEGEMONY Islamism and the Politics of Fun Asef Bayat In December 2002, on a plane from Aleppo, Syria, I hap- pened to be sitting next...

... of the “as if.” Ambiguously positioned between fun and education, playful methods of preparedness command attention from children and adults—what I call “attentive play”—as they frame and reframe the games to figure out, “Is this play?” Ultimately, the article shows that attentive play buys time for the state to temporarily...

... in it are racked by the nagging guilt of the asymmetric distribution of the weight of the war. Asef Bayat’s discussion of Islamism and the politics of fun provides a provoca- tive supplement to this argument. Religious abhorrence of “fun” — a concept that includes forms of hedonism that indulge in fashion...

... rely on making fun of the feminine. Gay male drag takes femininity seriously (if not w~men and attempts to redeem it. Men in drag make themselves objects of desire and display on stage, dramatizing their sexual availability, taking on the sexual power and often the emotional power...

.... Now we have to peel 25 pounds of potatoes. It used to be fun; now it's work. It's like having 150 for dinner - every night. It is a pain in the behind." (Evening Bulletin, n.d.) By and large, the success of La Banane Noire was followed by the success of other restaurants and businesses...

... effervescence in which these spaces become sacred, or “comfy,” in 4chan vernacular. Yet since it is easier and more fun to be a “hater,” these spaces also tend to be deeply nihilistic. Although these qualities can have the effect of undermining the very foundation of any positive expressions of identity...

...? no train or bus can reach. You have to walk about an hour to reach my home. . . . For a couple of years, I helped my parents doing farmwork and house- work. Young people don’t like tilling the fields. I didn’t either. Everybody said working “on the outside” was fun and I could earn a lot...

... pUBLlc (yLluK€ on the other hand, the subject’s deployment of a talent for play and a sense of fun which makes him [sic] homo ludens par excellence” (5).This is apt but not singularly postcolonial, since the subject is always constituted at the inteqace between subjection and subjectivity...

..., I was having fun in school. Most of my fellow students worried and kvetched. And the truth is, I didn’t care. Because that was not where it was at for me. HM: By “in school,” do you mean graduate school by now...

.... And I want to have fun too—to go to the clubs and maybe wear some Adidas.… But today there’s nothing. Just terrible boredom [ plictiseală rău ].” He sat with his head in his hands. Boredom, more than sex, binds these two men together. They are, as this article argues, bored stiff. By this, I mean...

... construct, a hierarchical structure with a small number of fun- damental principles. The social mechanics that is being recorded in the bodies of humming server farms is not even a coherent, connected structure but a pluralistic entity...

... the desapareci- dos and their children in post-dictatura societies in Latin America, raising fun- damental questions about human rights violations, justice, and collective responsibility. The geographic spread of the culture...

... would get to teach basically books that were fun to read. CZ: So you decided you had to study anesthesiology? MP: Exactly, anesthesiology and government reform — sanitary science. CZ: There’s a masochism...

... come to his field in Iowa to indulge their nostalgia (see Brown, 68-69). The “American dream” of nation and baseball is rooted in gender. Knowledge produced about that dream ought to be accountable to the gen- der relations that constitute it. In closing, and only partially in fun, I note...

..., the construction of national and folk symbols and rituals, and the revitalization of various traditional identities. Once regarded as deviant, quaint or quirky features of certain societies (sometimes labelled moderniz- ing, new, or third world nations), such activities can now be seen as a fun- damental...

... story ending was that we ultimately arrive safely at the medical facility on the military base. This simulation was apparently a big hit with the visiting public, spun as fun for the whole family. But I did not find it especially enjoyable, even though I have found pleasure in playing video games...

... as a key text within the Indian national- ist discourse so as to preempt its colonization by the contemporary Hindu fun- damentalist Right. To do so, she has to free the text from glib characterization as anti-Muslim and fascist. The task...

... from a child about the first days of shut-down in the United States: GF: What do you wish the grown-ups in your life understood about what coronavirus is like for kids and what living through this is like for kids? Carter (age 6): I wish that they understanded that kids are not having any fun...

... a little bit. In a good way, like it was fun.” The karaoke standard thus requires something of a high-wire act, in which contestants must walk a fine line between derivation and originality, between respecting the original and “having fun” while emerging out from behind the voices that first...

...', by criticizing and making fun of his fellow immigrants, but doing so in the lilt of Bombay Indian- English. He thus maintains the slippage as well as his bourgeois distance. Mr. Rushdie's mimicry of the conservative perspective on Britain's im- migrants "emerges as the representation of a difference...