Cairo is a city of collective exhaustion. From the 2011 revolution to Sisi's seizure of power in 2013, like millions of others, Mona Abaza was swallowed by a draining and exhausting daily life of a ...city caught up in the aftermath of revolt - a daily life that transformed countless people into all-embracing apolitical subjects.Cairo collages narrates four parallel tales about Cairo's urban transformations in the twenty-first century, examining everyday life and resilience after 2013. Weaving personal narrative with incisive theoretical discussions of the quotidian and the everyday, Abaza raises essential sociological questions regarding global orientations pertaining to emerging military urbanism. With reflections on the long hours of commuting to the gated communities in the desert east of Cairo and the daily material lives and social interactions of residents in decaying middle-class buildings, Abaza's collage of landscapes weaves together the transmutations underway in the various Cairene geographies.With the military seizing overt power in Egypt, Cairo's grand and dramatic urban reshaping during and after 2011 is reflected upon under the lens of a smaller story narrating everyday interactions of a middle-class building in the neighbourhood of Doqi.
The legendary overland silk road was not the only way to reach Asia for ancient travelers from the Mediterranean. During the Roman Empire’s heyday, equally important maritime routes reached from the ...Egyptian Red Sea across the Indian Ocean. The ancient city of Berenike, located approximately 500 miles south of today’s Suez Canal, was a significant port among these conduits. In this book, Steven E. Sidebotham, the archaeologist who excavated Berenike, uncovers the role the city played in the regional, local, and “global” economies during the eight centuries of its existence. Sidebotham analyzes many of the artifacts, botanical and faunal remains, and hundreds of the texts he and his team found in excavations, providing a profoundly intimate glimpse of the people who lived, worked, and died in this emporium between the classical Mediterranean world and Asia.
A history of urban modernity in Cairo through cinema
which"makes us see makes us see the movies in a whole new way"
(Chris Berry, King's College London) The relationship
between the city and cinema ...is formidable. The images and sounds of
the city found in movies are perhaps the only experience that many
people will have of cities they may never visit. Films influence
the way we construct images of the world, and accordingly, in many
instances, how we operate within it. Cinematic Cairo: Egyptian
Urban Modernity from Reel to Real offers a history of Cairo's
urban modernity using film as the primary source of exploration,
and cinematic space as both an analytical tool and a medium of
critique. Cairo has provided rich subject material for Egypt's film
industry since the inception of the art form at the end of the
nineteenth century. The "reel" city-imagined, perceived, and
experienced-provides the spatial domain that mirrors change and
allows for an interrogation of the "real" city as it encountered
modernity over the course of a century. Bringing together chapters
by architects and art and literary historians, this volume explores
this parallel and convergent relationship through two sections. The
first uses films from the 1930s to the end of the twentieth century
to illustrate the development of a modern Cairo and its modern
subjects. The second section is focused on tracing the
transformation of the cinematic city under conditions of
neoliberalism, religious fundamentalism, and gender tensions. The
result is a comprehensive narrative of the urban modernity of one
of the most important cities in the Arab world and Global South.
Contributors Ahmed H. AbdelAzim , University of
Wisconsin-Madison, USA Khaled Adham ,
Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin, Germany Kinda
AlSamara , Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia
Nezar AlSayyad , University of California,
Berkeley, USA Doaa Al Amir , October 6th
University, Cairo, Egypt Mirette Aziz , Misr
International University, Egypt Muhammad Emad
Feteha, The American University in Cairo, Cairo, Egypt
Farah Gendy , Raef Fahmi Architects, Cairo, Egypt
Hala A. Hassanien , Architect, Wasl, Cairo, Egypt
Tayseer Khairy , Arab Academy for Science
Technology & Maritime Transport, Cairo, Egypt Mariam
Marei, The American University in Cairo, Cairo, Egypt
Ameer Saad , Architect, Dar Al-Handasa, Cairo,
Egypt Heba Safey Eldeen , Misr International
University, Cairo, Egypt Mohammad Salama , San
Francisco State University, San Francisco, USA Nour
Sobhi , Misr International University, Cairo, Egypt
Sherin Soliman , Misr International University,
Cairo, Egypt
This book gives a structured account of Egypt's transition from Ptolemaic to Roman rule by identifying key relationships between ecology, land tenure, taxation, administration and politics. It ...introduces theoretical perspectives from the social sciences and subjects them to empirical scrutiny using data from Greek and Demotic papyri as well as comparative evidence. Although building on recent scholarship, it offers some provocative arguments that challenge prevailing views. For example, patterns of land ownership are linked to population density and are seen as one aspect of continuity between the Ptolemaic and Roman period. Fiscal reform, by contrast, emerges as a significant mechanism of change not only in the agrarian economy but also in the administrative system and the whole social structure. Anyone seeking to understand the impact of Roman rule in the Hellenistic east must consider the well-attested processes in Egypt that this book seeks to explain.
This is the only volume to present significant results of research into the Pleistocene of the Western Desert of Egypt. Research on Pleistocene prehistoric remains in Dakhleh Oasis began during ...survey in the 1978 Dakhleh Oasis Project (DOP) season, with discovery of the ubiquity of stone artefacts. Dedicated work by both prehistorians and environmentalists continued until 2011. Comparative DOP reconnaissance and geological work in Kharga Oasis began in 1987, which morphed into the Kharga Oasis Prehistory Project (KOPP) in 2001. Papers on the Pleistocene research are focused on geoarchaeological and palaeo-environmental data, reporting on different aspects of the off-site fieldwork conducted in the oases. Pleistocene finds and sequence are included. Detailed analyses of palaeolakes, the meteoritic Dakhleh Event, chronometric dating, and the 'empty desert hypothesis' employ state of the art research strategies and techniques to provide important information on Pleistocene human uses and habitability in the Western Desert. A summary paper and a Catalogue of Pleistocene localities recorded in the Dakhleh Oasis survey are provided. The volume will be a major contribution to the publication of the results of several decades of work in a region where fieldwork is now increasingly difficult. This will be the only volume in which the significant results of the research into the Pleistocene of the Western Desert of Egypt appear. This has been undertaken under the auspices of the Dakhleh Oasis Project and its off-shoot The Kharga Oasis Prehistory Project. The preliminary results have been presented at various conferences and in articles that have all been well received. They incorporate state of the art research strategies and dating techniques. The volume will be a major contribution to the publication of the results of several decades of work in a region where fieldwork is now increasingly difficult.
Remembering Cosmopolitan Egypt examines the link between cosmopolitanism in Egypt, from the nineteenth century through to the mid-twentieth century, and colonialism. While it has been widely noted ...that such a relationship exists, the nature and impact of this dynamic is often overlooked. Taking a theoretical, literary and historical approach, the author argues that the notion of the cosmopolitan is inseparable from, and indebted to, its foundation in empire.
Since the late 1970s a number of artistic works have appeared that represent the diversity of ethnic, national, and religious communities present in Egypt in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During this period of direct and indirect European domination, the cosmopolitan society evident in these texts thrived. Through detailed analysis of these texts, which include contemporary novels written in Arabic and Hebrew as well as Egyptian films, the implications of the close relationship between colonialism and cosmopolitanism are explored.
This comparative study of the contemporary literary and cultural revival of interest in Egypt’s cosmopolitan past will be of interest to students of Middle Eastern Studies, Literary and Cultural Studies and Jewish Studies.
Introduction Part 1: Colonial Anxieties and Cosmopolitan Desires 1. Literary Alexandria 2. Poetics of Memory: Edwar al-Kharrat 3. Polis and Cosmos: Ibrahim Abdel Meguid Part 2: Counterpoint New York 4. Why New York?: Youssef Chahine Part 3: A Mobile Levant 5. Gazing Across Sinai 6. A Mediterranean Vigor that Never Wanes: Yitzhaq Gormezano Goren 7. Unmasking Levantine Blindness: Ronit Matalon. Conclusion
Deborah A. Starr is Associate Professor of Modern Arabic and Hebrew Literature at Cornell University. Her research and teaching interests include contemporary literature and film, minorities of the Middle East, cosmopolitanism, postcolonial studies, and urban studies.
"An incisive study, which clearly establishes the fact that the phenomenon of cosmopolitanism could be both historical and ahistorical—a binary that is by no means contradictory, and can in fact be deployed to foster harmony in contemporary diversities in which ‘adversarial discourse’ (p. 149) dominates. All students of history and theorists on political ideas will forever be beholden to this remarkable effort by Starr." - Amidu Olalekan Sanni, Lagos State University, Nigeria; British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 39:1
On time Barak, On
2013., 20130725, 2013, 2013-07-19
eBook
In this pioneering history of transportation and communication in the modern Middle East, On Barak argues that contrary to accepted wisdom technological modernity in Egypt did not drive a sense of ...time focused on standardization only. Surprisingly, the introduction of the steamer, railway, telegraph, tramway, and telephone in colonial Egypt actually triggered the development of unique timekeeping practices that resignified and subverted the typical modernist infatuation with expediency and promptness. These countertempos, predicated on uneasiness over “dehumanizing” European standards of efficiency, sprang from and contributed to non-linear modes of arranging time. Barak shows how these countertempos formed and developed with each new technological innovation during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, contributing to a particularly Egyptian sense of time that extends into the present day, exerting influence over contemporary political language in the Arab world. The universal notion of a modern mechanical standard time and the deviations supposedly characterizing non-Western settings “from time immemorial,” On Time provocatively argues, were in fact mutually constitutive and mutually reinforcing.
Nationality is the most important legal mechanism sorting and classifying the world's population today. An individual's place of birth or naturalization determines where he or she can and cannot be ...and what he or she can and cannot do. Although this system may appear universal, even natural, Will Hanley shows that it arose just a century ago. In Identifying with Nationality, he uses the Mediterranean city of Alexandria to develop a genealogy of the nation and the formation of the modern national subject.Alexandria in 1880 was an immigrant boomtown ruled by dozens of overlapping regimes. On its streets and in its police stations and courtrooms, people were identified by name, occupation, place of origin, sect, physical description, and other attributes. Yet by 1914, before nationalist calls for independence and decolonization had become widespread, nationality had become the defining category of identification, and nationality laws came to govern Alexandria's population.Identifying with Nationalitytraces the advent of modern citizenship to multinational, transimperial settings such as turn-of-the-century colonial Alexandria, where ordinary people abandoned old identifiers and grasped nationality as the best means to access the protections promised by expanding states. The result was a system that continues to define and divide people through status, mobility, and residency.
A history of elite women who were concubines and wives of powerful slave-soldiers, known as Mamluks, who dominated Egypt both politically and militarily in the eighteenth century.
In a series of studies, Ian Moyer explores the ancient history and modern historiography of relations between Egypt and Greece from the fifth century BCE to the early Roman empire. Beginning with ...Herodotus, he analyzes key encounters between Greeks and Egyptian priests, the bearers of Egypt's ancient traditions. Four moments unfold as rich micro-histories of cross-cultural interaction: Herodotus' interviews with priests at Thebes; Manetho's composition of an Egyptian history in Greek; the struggles of Egyptian priests on Delos; and a Greek physician's quest for magic in Egypt. In writing these histories, the author moves beyond Orientalizing representations of the Other and colonial metanarratives of the civilizing process to reveal interactions between Greeks and Egyptians as transactional processes in which the traditions, discourses and pragmatic interests of both sides shaped the outcome. The result is a dialogical history of cultural and intellectual exchanges between the great civilizations of Greece and Egypt.
