This paper argues that ghumūd (obscurity) acquired a new significance in Egyptian literary aesthetics during the 1970s for three interrelated reasons. On an allegorical level, ghumūd gestured to a new disposition of forces in the postcolonial, Cold War era. Geopolitical power manifested variously in this period in hypervisible forms—authoritarian governance, Israeli belligerence and expansionism, anti-communist and anti-Islamist counterinsurgency—as well as recondite ways, as the classic imperial powers withdrew behind the veils of neocolonial exploitation and client regimes. The challenge of worldly art, then, was to produce a new cognitive mapping that could account not only for the shift in modes of governance but also for the redistribution of sensible forms of power on which that shift depended. Egyptian writers in turn thematized the invisible or absent powers that nevertheless determined their lives through a variety of literary, cultural, and religious topoi ranging from the rumor about an all-powerful master manipulator to the figure of the hidden imam in Shi‘a doctrine. On a conceptual level, ghumūd referenced the general climate of disappointment about the failed promise of the anticolonial moment and the uncertainty about the function of art after successive defeats. It described a loss of the systematic worldview that had underpinned the political and aesthetic movements of the anticolonial era. It also expressed dissatisfaction with the presumption of obviousness at stake in the anticolonial generation’s presentation of the urgency of the now. As a term of literary criticism and a principle of poetics, for example in the work of Shafiq Majali and Ghalib Halasa, ghumūd indexed a new privation of common sense and the disorientation of artists and activists. On a formal level, finally, ghumūd was the license for a new period of experimentation. But whereas in modernist literature of the West experimentation was underwritten by the principle of play with respect to a rule, in coeval literature of Egypt (and elsewhere) experimentation more often served an epistemological function. Its aim was rather to understand and represent a world subject to disavowed imperial and settler colonial logics. In the case of Gamal al-Ghitani, the layering of narrative levels reproduced the hierarchical arrangement of a world structured in dominance. But syntactical, narratological, and rhetorical deviations from the classical realist plot didn’t only register a critique. In Idwar al-Kharrat, for example, asyndeton brought into the reader’s field of vision the possibility of alternative solidarities unmediated by empire.