A study of popular culture and the representation of modern life in Egypt.

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

The popular culture of pre-revolution Egypt did more than entertain—it created a nation. Songs, jokes, and satire, comedic sketches, plays, and poetry, all provided an opportunity for discussion and debate about national identity and an outlet for resistance to British and elite authority. This book examines how, from the 1870s until the eve of the 1919 revolution, popular media and culture provided ordinary Egyptians with a framework to construct and negotiate a modern national identity. Ordinary Egyptians shifts the typical focus of study away from the intellectual elite to understand the rapid politicization of the growing literate middle classes and brings the semi-literate and illiterate urban masses more fully into the historical narrative. It introduces the concept of "media-capitalism," which expands the analysis of nationalism beyond print alone to incorporate audiovisual and performance media. It was through these various media that a collective camaraderie crossing class lines was formed and, as this book uncovers, an Egyptian national identity emerged.

In The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, ten eminent scholars from Britain and the United States offer timely new appraisals of the revolutionary cultural transformations of the first decades of the twentieth century. Chapters on the major literary genres, intellectual, political and institutional contexts, film and the visual arts, provide both close analyses of individual works and a broader set of interpretive narratives. A chronology and guide to further reading supply valuable orientation for the study of Modernism. Readers will be able to use the book at once as a standard work of reference and as a stimulating source of compelling new readings of works by writers and artists from Joyce and Woolf to Stein, Picasso, Chaplin, H. D. and Freud, and many others. Students will find much-needed help with the difficulties of approaching Modernism, while the essays' original contributions will send scholars back to this volume for stimulating re-evaluation.

Ethnographic study of cultural politics in the contemporary Egyptian art world, examining how art-making is a crucial aspect of the transformation from socialism to neoliberalism in postcolonial countries.

This book takes a new approach to studying the contemporary Middle East, focusing on popular culture, including film, music, and television. Innovative essays by a group of smart young scholars in anthropology, history, and ethnomusicology.

This book examines a key question through the lens of popular culture: Why did the Egyptian people opt to elect in June 2014 a new president (Abdel Fattah al-Sisi), who hails from the military establishment, after toppling a previous military dictator (Hosni Mubarak) with the breakout of the 25 January 2011 Revolution? In order to dissect this question, the author considers the complexity of the relationship between the Egyptian people and their national army, and how popular cultural products play a pivotal role in reinforcing or subverting this relationship. The author takes the reader on a ‘journey’ through crucial historical and political events in Egypt whilst focusing on multi-layered representations of the ‘military figure’ (the military leader, the heroic soldier, the freedom fighter, the conscript, the martyred soldier, and the Intelligence officer) in a wide range of popular works in literature, film, song, TV drama series, and graffiti art. Mostafa argues that the realm of popular culture in Egypt serves as the ‘blood veins’ which feed the nation’s perception of its Armed Forces.