Focussing on nationalist discourse before, during and after the revolution of 2011, Reem Bassiouney explores the two-way relationship between language in Egyptian public discourse and Egyptian identity. Her sources include newspaper articles, caricatures,

Focussing on nationalist discourse before, during and after the revolution of 2011, Reem Bassiouney explores the two-way relationship between language in Egyptian public discourse and Egyptian identity. Her sources include newspaper articles, caricatures, blogs, patriotic songs, films, school textbooks, TV talk-shows, poetry and novels.

Following a spectacular surge in interest for Egyptian masters, Modern Art in Egypt fills the void in Egyptian art history, chronicling the lives and legacies of six pioneering artists working under the British occupation. Using Western-style academic art as a starting point, these artists championed cultural progress, re-appropriating Egyptian visual culture from European orientalists to found a neo-Pharaonic School of Realism. Modern Art in Egypt charts the years from Muhammad Ali's educational reforms to the mass influx of foreigners during the nineteenth-century. With a focus on the al-Nahda thought movement, this book provides an overview of the key policy-makers, reformists and feminists who founded the first School of Fine Arts in Egypt, as well as cultural salons, museums and arts collectives. By combining political and aesthetic histories, Fatenn Mostafa breaks the prevailing understanding that has preferred to see non-Western art as derivatives of Western art movements. Modern Art in Egypt re-establishes Egypt's presence within the global Modernist canon.

Examines how popular media and culture provided ordinary Egyptians with a framework to construct and negotiate a modern national identity.

This book reassesses theoretical approaches to diglossia and code-switching in the light of empirical data from Egypt. The work is based on a corpus of monologues that includes political speeches, mosque sermons and university lectures. Part one is a detailed analysis of the systems of negation, deixis, and mood marking in Modern Standard Arabic and Egyptian Colloquial Arabic, with an emphasis on the occurrence and frequency of composite structures in empirical data. This analysis provides the basis for an extensive reassessment of theoretical approaches to code-switching in part two; this reappraisal in turn leads to a thorough analysis of the function of code switching in the Egyptian speech community, and of the factors which influence code choice, such as role of the speaker, audience, and subject matter.

In this second edition of Arabic Sociolinguistics, Reem Bassiouney expands the discussion of major theoretical approaches since the publication of the book’s first edition to account for new sociolinguistic theories in Arabic contexts with up-to-date examples, data, and approaches. The second edition features revised sections on diglossia, code-switching, gender discourse, language variation, and language policy in the region while adding a chapter on critical sociolinguistics—a new framework for critiquing the scholarly practices of sociolinguistics. Bassiouney also examines the impact of politics and new media on Arabic language. Arabic Sociolinguistics continues to be a uniquely valuable resource for understanding the theoretical framework of the language.

The cultures and politics of nations around the world may be understood (or misunderstood) in any number of ways. For the Arab world, language is the crucial link for a better understanding of both. Classical Arabic is the official language of all Arab states although it is not spoken as a mother tongue by any group of Arabs. As the language of the Qur'an, it is also considered to be sacred. For more than a century and a half, writers and institutions have been engaged in struggles to modernize Classical Arabic in order to render it into a language of contemporary life. What have been the achievements and failures of such attempts? Can Classical Arabic be sacred and contemporary at one and the same time? This book attempts to answer such questions through an interpretation of the role that language plays in shaping the relations between culture, politics, and religion in Egypt.