Diary of an Imaginary Egyptian

The ongoing protest movements spanning the globe seek to challenge, revitalize and rethink political processes as well as demand economic justice. Forming into a dispersed and poignant network of struggles, the current situation reveals a global culture of hope, angst and imagination. Author and artist Brandon LaBelle has sought to engage these events by way of a diary of affiliation and reciprocation in which personal memories and cultural reflections search for remote connection, in particular, with the Arab Spring. His Diary of an Imaginary Egyptian is marked by an urgency to unsettle divides, both imaginary and physical, between west and east, Anglo and Arab, and to put into question narratives of the political. Written between February and June of 2011, the Diary functioned as a daily consideration of the intensity of events erupting around the world structurally linked to personal thoughts and memories. This five-month period acts as a platform from which questions around US imperialism, art and revolution, the task of writing, and the possibility of new political subjectivity are raised. LaBelle asks for an "agency of the intimate", outlining a tender map of the transnational.