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Storytelling, Intellectual Histories and Political Geographies: Egyptians in Exile
Abstract
In this paper, I trace the lives of Egyptians in exile, particularly those who currently live the United States and Tunisia. Egypt has had three major waves of exile, all in response to different iterations of a military regime established in 1952. The last and largest wave started in 2013 as a response to a coup that brought General Abdel-Fatah el-Sisi to power. My paper has two aims: first, I look at connections between generations of exiles, both interpersonally and ideologically. Many of those who are in exile were ‘organic intellectuals’, who spent a long time talking about ideas, moved to action by those ideologies, without necessarily writing down their motivations, their activism and their political commitments. As such, storytelling becomes an important method to track both intellectual history and personal histories. By recounting their stories, their political commitments and their own personal trajectories, my paper seeks to uncover an “ethnography of concepts” (Stoler 2016) and a genealogy of “traveling theory” and ideologies (Bardawil 2020) tracing how political ideologies have morphed, developed and/or stayed the same across generations. Secondly, I trace how life and family history serve as important methodology in understanding political geography and changing shifts in power (Elyachar 2005). Through life history, we can see how Egyptians have navigated and produced different political geographies, how their political and affective subjectivities changed, and how those subjectivities shaped in turn the generations after. Resistance to militarism, I propose, particularly has history that is embodied through generations in exile. I build on Mannheim’s (1983 [1923]) formulation of generations as those who share not necessarily an age group, but rather a “common location in historical dimension of the social process (1983: 167). I look at how these generations continually produce “political geographies of exile”, drawing on the work of Antrim (2012). Antrim argued that trajectories of movement have produced specific geographic concepts. I take that as a starting point to thinking about how movement in space creates different conceptualizations and categories of what exile means for my interlocutors. Practices of movements engender distinct practices of knowledge making; this knowledge-making is spatial, temporal, gendered and generational.
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
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Sub Area
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