The Moral Resonance of Arab Media

“This brilliant interdisciplinary work on media and tribal poetry in Yemen by a superb Arabist is at once a significant contribution to media studies, linguistic pragmatics, poetics, and the anthropology of the Middle East. The scholarship is thorough, carefully building on previous research, but also departing from it in original and imaginative ways… While acknowledging that the two aesthetics of circulation and resonance are integral to each other, Miller argues that it is particularly the aesthetics of ‘resonance’ that is important to understanding how moral authority, political order (or disorder), and artistic success are debated by Yemenis. This idea, and the claims the author makes for it, will surely occasion lively discussion and debate.”—Steven C. Caton, Middle East Journal