The Aswan High Dam, built between 1960 and 1971, caused considerable change to Egyptian politics and society (Waterbury 1979), although the specific ways that it created expectations for a new urban consumption regime have been understudied. The ubiquity with which the promise of “after the dam” circulated in Egyptian public culture to explain the timetable of postcolonial economic development reflected confidence that the Nasser regime and its monumental projects would guarantee a significant rise in the popular standard of living. The state used its newly nationalized commercial sector in the early 1960s to promote the building of the dam among its citizens. `Abd al-Halim Hafiz’s ode “The High Dam,” for example, played on television sets in the display windows of newly nationalized department stores in 1961 (Fernea and Fernea), stores that in the early 1960s increasingly catered to the families of the rapidly expanding sector of middle-class government employees. In less formal spaces, local consumption patterns reflected the optimism of the national development that the High Dam would produce. For example, local tailors crafted dresses from silver brocade on the theme of the High Dam (Abaza), and Nubian housewives embroidered skullcaps with the High Dam design for their relatives working in Cairo (Fernea and Fernea). By the time the dam was completed, however, the vast stores of electricity that had been promised by the dam’s expanded hydroelectric works had been largely channeled into industrial production such as artificial fertilizers and basic industry rather than rural electrification, and local industrial substitution industries had reached a structural crisis (Mabro; Waterbury 1983). Egyptian migration to the Gulf and Sadat’s open-door economic policies became the new drivers of popular consumption (and immiseration) in the1970s. This paper examines the postcolonial construction of citizenship through consumption in Nasser’s Egypt that Egyptians under Sadat used as a claim-making device against the state in the 1970s. Its primary sources are press advertisements and articles, memoirs, literature, and film. References Abaza, Mona. Changing Consumer Cultures of Modern Egypt. Boston: Brill, 2006. Fernea, Elizabeth Warnock and Robert A. Fernea with Aleya Rouchdy, Nubian Ethnographies. Prospect Heights: Waveland Press, 1991. Mabro, Robert. The Egyptian Economy, 1952-1972. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974. Waterbury, John. Hydropolitics of the Nile Valley. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1979. _____________. The Egypt of Nasser and Sadat. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983.