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Acting Egyptian
Theater, Identity, and Political Culture in Cairo, 1869–1930
By Carmen M. K. Gitre
University of Texas Press, 2019

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, during the “protectorate” period of British occupation in Egypt—theaters and other performance sites were vital for imagining, mirroring, debating, and shaping competing conceptions of modern Egyptian identity. Central figures in this diverse spectrum were the effendis, an emerging class of urban, male, anticolonial professionals whose role would ultimately become dominant. Acting Egyptian argues that performance themes, spaces, actors, and audiences allowed pluralism to take center stage while simultaneously consolidating effendi voices.

From the world premiere of Verdi’s Aida at Cairo’s Khedivial Opera House in 1871 to the theatrical rhetoric surrounding the revolution of 1919, which gave women an opportunity to link their visibility to the well-being of the nation, Acting Egyptian examines the ways in which elites and effendis, men and women, used newly built performance spaces to debate morality, politics, and the implications of modernity. Drawing on scripts, playbills, ads, and numerous other sources, the book brings to life provocative debates that fostered a new image of national culture and performances that echoed the events of urban life in the struggle for independence.

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Afloat on the Ohio
An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo
Reuben Gold Thwaites
Southern Illinois University Press, 1999
Nineteenth-century American travel literature provides fascinating glimpses into the lives of ordinary people and into the history of the nation's settlement. Reuben Gold Thwaites's Afloat on the Ohio is a fine example of the genre, rich in Ohio River personalities, legends, and history as seen through Thwaites's eyes. His six-week journey by skiff covered a thousand miles from Redstone, Pennsylvania, to Cairo, Illinois, where the Ohio River meets the Mississippi. Thwaites's voyage echoes those taken by early explorers, pioneers, and settlers who opened up the West through river travel from the East.



This edition is a reprinting of the original 1897 edition.



 

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The Archive of Aurelius Isidorus
in the Egyptian Museum, Cairo, and the University of Michigan
Edited by Arthur E.R. Boak, Herbert Chayyim Youtie
University of Michigan Press, 1960
These papyri provide the first secure information, in concrete detail, on the purposes and the effects of the imperial tax reform under Diocletian at the end of the 3rd century and the beginning of the 4th. They also throw much new light on the 4th-century practice of "public liturgy"—the administrative device of making up the lack of money in the state treasury by compulsory labor service. An introduction, apparatus criticus, and translation accompany each text. A comprehensive index completes the volume.
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Cairo
André Raymond
Harvard University Press, 2000

Gaze toward the Nile from the desert hills of Mukattam, and the vast city of Cairo unfolds before you, with its monumental architecture, teeming populace, and thousands of years of rich history. The extraordinary tapestry of Cairo's past and present comes vividly to life in this magisterial study by André Raymond, arguably the premier social historian of the Arab world. The most deeply observed and historically nuanced account ever given of the greatest Arab city of northern Africa, this book shows us Cairo from the glimmer of its beginnings in the Arab conquest of Egypt in 640 through its transformation into the modern center of Middle Eastern life today.Here are the Fatimids, the Mamluks, and the Ottomans, the invasions, dynastic changes, and religious conflicts that one after another altered and shaped Cairo's destiny. And here, alongside rulers and religious leaders, are the merchants and artisans who have given Cairene life its distinctive character over time. Raymond depicts life in Cairo through the centuries, chronicling the coming of European influence, the vagaries of social evolution, and the development of economic structure and urban design. His work reflects all facets of Cairo's historical and social reality, weaving commerce, politics, religion, and culture into a finely worked portrait of the foremost Arab city on the continent of Africa.

With its splendid illustrations and maps and its meticulous attention to the topography and archaeology of the city, this book will prove as valuable to the serious traveler as to observers of Middle Eastern history and society. It stands as the definitive work on Cairo, unparalleled in scope, depth, and detail.

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Cairo
City of Sand
Maria Golia
Reaktion Books, 2004
Cairo is a 1,400-year-old metropolis whose streets are inscribed with sagas, a place where the pressures of life test people's equanimity to the very limit. Virtually surrounded by desert, sixteen million Cairenes cling to the Nile and each other, proximities that color and shape lives. Packed with incident and anecdote Cairo: City of Sand describes the city's given circumstances and people's attitudes of response. Apart from a brisk historical overview, this book focuses on the present moment of one of the world's most illustrious and irreducible cities.

Cairo steps inside the interactions between Cairenes, examining the roles of family, tradition and bureaucracy in everyday life. The book explores Cairo's relationship with its "others", from the French and British occupations to modern influences like tourism and consumerism. Cairo also discusses characteristic styles of communication, and linguistic mêmes, including slang, grandiloquence, curses and jokes.

Cairo exists by virtue of these interactions, synergies of necessity, creativity and the presence or absence of power. Cairo: City of Sand reveals a peerless balancing act, and transmits the city's overriding message: the breadth of the human capacity for loss, astonishment and delight.
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Cairo
Histories of a City
Nezar AlSayyad
Harvard University Press, 2013

From its earliest days as a royal settlement fronting the pyramids of Giza to its current manifestation as the largest metropolis in Africa, Cairo has forever captured the urban pulse of the Middle East. In Cairo: Histories of a City, Nezar AlSayyad narrates the many Cairos that have existed throughout time, offering a panoramic view of the city’s history unmatched in temporal and geographic scope, through an in-depth examination of its architecture and urban form.

In twelve vignettes, accompanied by drawings, photographs, and maps, AlSayyad details the shifts in Cairo’s built environment through stories of important figures who marked the cityscape with their personal ambitions and their political ideologies. The city is visually reconstructed and brought to life not only as a physical fabric but also as a social and political order—a city built within, upon, and over, resulting in a present-day richly layered urban environment. Each chapter attempts to capture a defining moment in the life trajectory of a city loved for all of its evocations and contradictions. Throughout, AlSayyad illuminates not only the spaces that make up Cairo but also the figures that shaped them, including its chroniclers, from Herodotus to Mahfouz, who recorded the deeds of great and ordinary Cairenes alike. He pays particular attention to how the imperatives of Egypt's various rulers and regimes—from the pharaohs to Sadat and beyond—have inscribed themselves in the city that residents navigate today.

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Cairo Pop
Youth Music in Contemporary Egypt
Daniel J. Gilman
University of Minnesota Press, 2014

Cairo Pop is the first book to examine the dominant popular music of Egypt, shababiyya. Scorned or ignored by scholars and older Egyptians alike, shababiyya plays incessantly in Cairo, even while Egyptian youth joined in mass protests against their government, which eventually helped oust longtime Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak in early 2011. Living in Cairo at the time of the revolution, Daniel Gilman saw, and more importantly heard, the impact that popular music can have on culture and politics. Here he contributes a richly ethnographic analysis of the relationship between mass-mediated popular music, modernity, and nationalism in the Arab world.

Before Cairo Pop, most scholarship on the popular music of Egypt focused on musiqa al-ṭarab. Immensely popular in the 1950s and ’60s and even into the ’70s, musiqa al-ṭarab adheres to Arabic musical theory, with non-Western scales based on tunings of the strings of the ‘ud—the lute that features prominently, nearly ubiquitously, in Arabic music. However, today one in five Egyptians is between the ages of 15 and 24; half the population is under the age of 25. And shababiyya is their music of choice. By speaking informally with dozens of everyday young people in Cairo, Gilman comes to understand shababiyya as more than just a musical genre: sometimes it is for dancing or seduction, other times it propels social activism, at others it is simply sonic junk food.

In addition to providing a clear Egyptian musical history as well as a succinct modern political history of the nation, Cairo Pop elevates the aural and visual aesthetic of shababiyya—and its role in the lives of a nation’s youth.

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Intimate Outsiders
The Harem in Ottoman and Orientalist Art and Travel Literature
Mary Roberts
Duke University Press, 2007
Until now, the notion of a cross-cultural dialogue has not figured in the analysis of harem paintings, largely because the Western fantasy of the harem has been seen as the archetype for Western appropriation of the Orient. In Intimate Outsiders, the art historian Mary Roberts brings to light a body of harem imagery that was created through a dynamic process of cultural exchange. Roberts focuses on images produced by nineteenth-century European artists and writers who were granted access to harems in the urban centers of Istanbul and Cairo. As invited guests, these Europeans were “intimate outsiders” within the women’s quarters of elite Ottoman households. At the same time, elite Ottoman women were offered intimate access to European culture through their contact with these foreign travelers.

Roberts draws on a range of sources, including paintings, photographs, and travelogues discovered in archives in Britain, Turkey, Egypt, and Denmark. She rethinks the influential harem works of the realist painter John Frederick Lewis, a British artist living in Cairo during the 1840s, whose works were granted an authoritative status by his British public despite the actual limits of his insider knowledge. Unlike Lewis, British women were able to visit Ottoman harems, and from the mid-nineteenth century on they did so in droves. Writing about their experiences in published travelogues, they undermined the idea that harems were the subject only of male fantasies. The elite Ottoman women who orchestrated these visits often challenged their guests’ misapprehensions about harem life, and a number of them exercised power as patrons, commissioning portraits from European artists. Their roles as art patrons defy the Western idea of the harem woman as passive odalisque.

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Key Command
Ulysses S. Grant's District of Cairo
T. K. Kionka
University of Missouri Press, 2006
During the Civil War, Cairo, Illinois, held a uniquely strategic position: it was not only the southernmost northern city, but it was also located at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers. Union strategists believed that the importance of securing it could not be overestimated, and Cairo was occupied by the first volunteer regiments organized in the western theater of the war. Arriving six months later, an underappreciated general named Ulysses S. Grant decided that the Union could do more with Cairo than simply guard it, and using the town as his headquarters, he set about reclaiming the Mississippi valley from Rebel forces. This book reveals the story of how Grant honed his strategic skills in those campaigns while also telling of the changes that came to Cairo.
Key Command examines Grant’s tenure at his first district command from both military and administrative perspectives. T. K. Kionka has written the first book-length study of the district, exploring the town’s Civil War legacy while shedding new light on Grant, the war in the West, and other important Union generals such as Logan and McClernand. From this command post, Grant led troops to the first great Union victories at Belmont, Fort Henry, and Fort Donelson, and Kionka explores their role in Grant’s military evolution while highlighting the contributions of civilian volunteers through first-person accounts.
Nineteenth-century Cairo was home to an unruly, ethnically diverse population, and Kionka interweaves the story of Grant’s military campaign with a social history of the town, describing the men and women associated with the Cairo camps who played significant roles in Grant’s command. Grant’s victories not only sealed his own reputation, but they also brought unprecedented wealth to a town that before the war had failed to develop under two different land companies. Kionka’s work tells how local entrepreneurs made money supplying Grant’s troops and how unscrupulous speculators poured into Cairo as Grant coped with dissension, supply shortages, and refugees. It also examines the prewar movement to create a new state out of southern Illinois and its implications both for Cairo and for Union strategy.
More than a military history, Key Command gives readers a glimpse of the social and cultural atmosphere of an important military base that proved to be the decisive training ground for the most successful general in the war. With its insight into a polarized society and wartime corruption, Kionka’s readable account sheds new light on our own times as it tells the story of a town struggling to survive and a man fighting to succeed.
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Markets of Dispossession
NGOs, Economic Development, and the State in Cairo
Julia Elyachar
Duke University Press, 2005
What happens when the market tries to help the poor? In many parts of the world today, neoliberal development programs are offering ordinary people the tools of free enterprise as the means to well-being and empowerment. Schemes to transform the poor into small-scale entrepreneurs promise them the benefits of the market and access to the rewards of globalization. Markets of Dispossession is a theoretically sophisticated and sobering account of the consequences of these initiatives.

Julia Elyachar studied the efforts of bankers, social scientists, ngo members, development workers, and state officials to turn the craftsmen and unemployed youth of Cairo into the vanguard of a new market society based on microenterprise. She considers these efforts in relation to the alternative notions of economic success held by craftsmen in Cairo, in which short-term financial profit is not always highly valued. Through her careful ethnography of workshop life, Elyachar explains how the traditional market practices of craftsmen are among the most vibrant modes of market life in Egypt. Long condemned as backward, these existing market practices have been seized on by social scientists and development institutions as the raw materials for experiments in “free market” expansion. Elyachar argues that the new economic value accorded to the cultural resources and social networks of the poor has fueled a broader process leading to their economic, social, and cultural dispossession.

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The Naked Blogger of Cairo
Creative Insurgency in the Arab World
Marwan M. Kraidy
Harvard University Press, 2016

A Times Higher Education Book of the Year

Uprisings spread like wildfire across the Arab world from 2010 to 2012, fueled by a desire for popular sovereignty. In Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, and elsewhere, protesters flooded the streets and the media, voicing dissent through slogans, graffiti, puppetry, videos, and satire that called for the overthrow of dictators and the regimes that sustained them. Investigating what drives people to risk everything to express themselves in rebellious art, The Naked Blogger of Cairo uncovers the creative insurgency at the heart of the Arab uprisings.

“A deep dive into the cultural politics of the Arab uprisings…Kraidy’s sharp insights and rich descriptions of a new Arab generation’s irrepressible creative urges will amply reward the effort. Reading Kraidy’s accounts of the politically charted cultural gambits of wired Arab youth rekindles some of the seemingly lost spirit of the early days of the Arab uprisings and offers hope for the future.”
—Marc Lynch, Washington Post

The Naked Blogger of Cairo is a superb and important work not just for scholars but for anyone who cares about the relationships between art, the body, and revolution.”
—Hans Rollman, PopMatters

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Picturing Illinois
Twentieth-Century Postcard Art from Chicago to Cairo
John A. Jakle and Keith A. Sculle
University of Illinois Press, 2012

At the outset of the twentieth century the debut of the American picture postcard incited widespread enthusiasm for collecting and sending postcard art that lasted decades. In Picturing Illinois, John A. Jakle and Keith A. Sculle examine a diverse set of 200 vintage Illinois picture postcards revealing what locals considered captivating, compelling, and commemorable. They also interpret how individual messages impart the sender's personal perception of local geography and scenery. Jakle and Sculle follow the dialogue between urban Chicago and rural downstate, elucidating the postcard's significance in popular culture and the unique ways in which Illinoisans pictured their world.


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Politics in the Crevices
Urban Design and the Making of Property Markets in Cairo and Istanbul
Sarah El-Kazaz
Duke University Press, 2023
In Politics in the Crevices, Sarah El-Kazaz takes readers into the world of urban planning and design practices in Istanbul and Cairo. In this transnational ethnography of neighborhoods undergoing contested rapid transformations, she reveals how the battle for housing has shifted away from traditional political arenas onto private crevices of the city. She outlines how multiple actors—from highly capitalized international NGOs and corporations to city dwellers, bureaucrats, and planning experts—use careful urban design to empower conflicting agendas, whether manipulating property markets to protect affordable housing or corner luxury real estate. El-Kazaz shows that such contemporary politicizations of urban design stem from unresolved struggles at the heart of messy transitions from the welfare state to neoliberalism, which have shifted the politics of redistribution from contested political arenas to design practices operating within market logics, ultimately relocating political struggles onto the city’s most intimate crevices. In so doing, she raises critical questions about the role of market reforms in redistributing resources and challenges readers to rethink neoliberalism and the fundamental ways it shapes cities and polities.
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Pyramids and Nightclubs
A Travel Ethnography of Arab and Western Imaginations of Egypt, from King Tut and a Colony of Atlantis to Rumors of Sex Orgies, Urban Legends about a Marauding Prince, and Blonde Belly Dancers
By L. L. Wynn
University of Texas Press, 2007

2008 — Leeds Honor Book in Urban Anthropology – Society for Urban, National, and Transnational/Global Anthropology

Living in Egypt at the turn of the millennium, cultural anthropologist L. L. Wynn was struck by the juxtapositions of Western, Gulf Arab, and Egyptian viewpoints she encountered. For some, Egypt is the land of mummies and pharaohs. For others, it is a vortex of decadence, where nightlife promises a chance to salivate over belly dancers and maybe even glimpse a movie star. Offering a new approach to ethnography, Pyramids and Nightclubs examines cross-cultural encounters to bring to light the counterintuitive ways in which Egypt is defined.

Guiding readers on an armchair journey that introduces us to Russian and Australian belly dancers on Nile cruise ships, Egyptian rumors about an Arab prince and his royal entourage, Saudi girls looking for a less restrictive dating scene, and other visitors to this "antique" land, Wynn uses the lens of travel and tourism to depict a fascinating and often surprising version of Egypt, while exploring the concept of stereotype itself. Tracing the history of Western and Arab fascination with Egypt through spurious hunts for lost civilizations and the new economic disparities brought about by the oil industry, Pyramids and Nightclubs ultimately describes the ways in which moments of cultural contact, driven by tourism and labor migration, become eye-opening opportunities for defining self and other.

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Revolution Squared
Tahrir, Political Possibilities, and Counterrevolution in Egypt
Atef Shahat Said
Duke University Press, 2024
In Revolution Squared Atef Shahat Said examines the 2011 Egyptian Revolution to trace the expansive range of liberatory possibilities and containment at the heart of every revolution. Drawing on historical analysis and his own participation in the revolution, Said outlines the importance of Tahrir Square and other physical spaces as well as the role of social media and digital spaces. He develops the notion of lived contingency—the ways revolutionary actors practice and experience the revolution in terms of the actions they do or do not take—to show how Egyptians made sense of what was possible during the revolution. Said charts the lived contingencies of Egyptian revolutionaries from the decade prior to the revolution’s outbreak to its peak and the so-called transition to democracy to the 2013 military coup into the present. Contrary to retrospective accounts and counterrevolutionary thought, Said argues that the Egyptian Revolution was not doomed to defeat. Rather, he demonstrates that Egyptians did not fully grasp their immense clout and that limited reformist demands reduced the revolution’s potential for transformation.
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The Security Archipelago
Human-Security States, Sexuality Politics, and the End of Neoliberalism
Paul Amar
Duke University Press, 2013
In The Security Archipelago, Paul Amar provides an alternative historical and theoretical framing of the refashioning of free-market states and the rise of humanitarian security regimes in the Global South by examining the pivotal, trendsetting cases of Brazil and Egypt. Addressing gaps in the study of neoliberalism and biopolitics, Amar describes how coercive security operations and cultural rescue campaigns confronting waves of resistance have appropriated progressive, antimarket discourses around morality, sexuality, and labor. The products of these struggles—including powerful new police practices, religious politics, sexuality identifications, and gender normativities—have traveled across an archipelago, a metaphorical island chain of what the global security industry calls "hot spots." Homing in on Cairo and Rio de Janeiro, Amar reveals the innovative resistances and unexpected alliances that have coalesced in new polities emerging from the Arab Spring and South America's Pink Tide. These have generated a shared modern governance model that he terms the "human-security state."
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Tomorrow, God Willing
Self-made Destinies in Cairo
Unni Wikan
University of Chicago Press, 1996
"I, without earning a penny, have to be the provider!" Thus Umm Ali sums up the nearly impossible challenge of her daily existence. Living in a poor neighborhood of Cairo, she has raised eight children with almost no help from her husband or the Egyptian government and through hardships from domestic violence to constant quarrels over material possessions.

Umm Ali's story is amazing not only for what it reveals about her resourcefulness but for the light it sheds on the resilience of Cairo's poor in the face of disastrous poverty. Like countless other poor people in Cairo, she has developed a personal buoyancy to cope with relentless economic need. It stems from a belief in the ability of people to shape their own destiny and helps explain why Cairo remains virtually free of the social ills—violent street crime and homelessness—that have eroded the lives of poor people in other major cities.

Unni Wikan first met Umm Ali and her family twenty-five years ago and has returned almost every year. She draws on her firsthand experience of their lives to create an intimate portrait of Cairo's back streets and the people who live there. Wikan's innovative approach to ethnographic writing reads like a novel that presents the experiences of Umm Ali's family and neighbors in their own words.

As Umm Ali recounts triumphs and defeats—from forming a savings club with neighbors to the gradual drifting away and eventual return of her husband—she unveils a deeply reflective attitude and her unwavering belief that she can improve her situation. Showing how Egyptian culture interprets poverty and family, this book attests to the capacity of an individual's self-worth to withstand incredible adversity.
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You Can Crush the Flowers
A Visual Memoir of the Egyptian Revolution
Bahia Shehab
Gingko, 2021
Part visual history, part memoir, You Can Crush the Flowers is a chronicle of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution and its aftermath, as it manifested itself not only in the art on the streets of Cairo but also through the wider visual culture that emerged during the revolution. Marking the ten-year anniversary of the revolution, celebrated Egyptian-Lebanese artist Bahia Shehab tells the stories that inspired both her own artwork and the work of her fellow revolutionaries. Shehab narrates the events of the revolution as they unfolded, describing on one hand the tactics deployed by the regime to drive protesters from the street—from the use of tear gas and snipers to brute force, intimidation techniques, and virginity tests—and on the other hand the retaliation by the protesters online and on the street in marches, chants, street art, and memes. Throughout this powerful and moving account, which includes over one hundred images, Shehab responds to all these aspects of the revolution as both artist and activist. The result bears witness to the brutality of the regime and pays tribute to the protestors who bravely defied it.

 
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