EBOOK
About
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 1870's 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.
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Reviews
"His book poses probing questions about the sources used to trace the emergence of Egyptian national identity, as well as the cultural and linguistic assumptions underlying the reading of these sources…Perhaps the signal contribution of this book is its emphasis on the oral/aural dimension of the nationalist movement, which has certainly not been given its due in historical treatments of Egypt's i
American Historical Review
"This refreshing new work fills a significant gap and opens a path for further research on how class and literary taste functioned in the early stages of Egyptian national identity formation. Fahmy places the verancular more squarely in the center of discussions of the history of Egyptian nationalism and marks out useful signposts in showing how expressive culture articulates with other developmen
University of Oxford
"This is truly an excellent and original book. Fahmy deconstructs commonly held assumptions regarding the formation of nationalism, particularly in its early stages, providing a thought-provoking contribution to our understanding of how agents propelled the formation of nationalism in Egypt in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Its contribution to the field is indispensable."
Tel Aviv University