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Imaginaries of Eastern Civilization: The Boxer Rebellion in the Egyptian Periodical Press
Abstract
This project uses sources drawn from various factions of the Egyptian periodical press to understand how depictions of the Chinese Boxer Rebellion reflected broader questions of transnational solidarities in the face of imperialism. Periodicals I look at include Al-Ahrām, Al-Muqtaṭaf, Al-Manār, Al-Muʾayyad, Al-Hilāl, which all featured coverage and editorials about the Boxer Rebellion. These print forums used the Boxer Rebellion as a foil for pointing out contradictions and contesting meanings of the colonial situation in Egypt. This paper is concerned with what representations of the Boxer Rebellion can tell us about how the ideologies these authors expressed reflected visions of Egypt’s future. My work asks how discourses surrounding the issue of the Eastern Question fueled debate among Egyptian writers, and how they fashioned their defenses against decline narratives in an east facing manner. Most works that take up the Eastern Question offer indigenous responses to it as defensively facing West, whether that be through projecting internal cultural strengthening or through projecting strength outwardly toward the West. I intend to argue that discourses surrounding the Eastern Question were also used to strengthen conceptions of “Eastern” identities internally. This project looks not at how the West characterized the East, but rather it looks at how a self-conscious Egypt fashioned itself in an East facing direction against Western narratives of their own supposed demise and need for tutelage, thus bolstering Eastern solidarities transnationally. This was further a matter of the “civilized world” versus “barbarity”. Many Egyptian writers thought, as reflected in their coverage of these events, that the brutality and violence of Western incursion into China contradicted the narratives of civilizational progress that Western empires used to justify their colonial and imperial projects. Further, the idea that Eastern states, including Egypt and China, possessed a deeper intrinsic civilizational heritage began at least as early as the turn of the twentieth century. This inherent heritage, reformers thought, could be used to make the technological strides necessary to prove their superiority over the West. However, the editors’ and authors’ proposed solutions forward from this point differed markedly. These differences of opinion about the situation in China ultimately reflected the authors’ own struggles in defining what it meant to be Egyptian under colonial rule.
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
Egypt
Sub Area
None