With the advent of entertainment capitalism, global/globalized popular entertainment industries upswung in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, especially in Europe and the United States; existing popular entertainments like theatre, music, dance, reading, sports, etc. became substantially commercialized. Against the backdrop of this global entertainment scene, al-Nah?ah’s Egyptian/Levantine audiences and readerships had their own say vis-à-vis the global entertainment trends of the time. Reception of the multifarious globalized popular entertainments ranged from wholesale assimilation, (re-)appropriation and adaptation to utter disavowal and denunciation. Of special interest to the panel is Egyptomania as a peculiar case of an idea rooted in Europeans’ orientalist perceptions of ancient Egypt, and then found expression in a myriad of Euro-American popular entertainments, and owing to cultural globalization, an obsession with ancient Egypt proliferated elsewhere including modern Egypt. How modern Egyptian popular entertainment practitioners (e.g. public poets and lyricists, short and long fiction writers, and dramatists) re-appropriated ancient Egypt, be it across-the-board disavowal and disinterestedness or an obsession cast in an ideological/nationalistic agenda, is a focal point of interest to the panel. Another key point of interest for the panel is the emergence and growth of modern celebrity culture in Egypt by the mid-1920s. With Hollywood stars becoming popular among Egyptian artists and audiences, stars in Cairo were always keen to shape their image in response to the local culture. As the two celebrated divas in 1920s Cairo, Um Kulthum and Munira al-Mahdiyya used their own conceptions of Egyptian-ness to form their public personae. Besides, in the realm of Arabic publishing, of special interest are illustrated journals and books showcasing novel pictorial modes in the form of printed images that paralleled the rise of portraiture, landscapes, and cityscapes in oil painting and photography in European and the Ottoman contexts during the late 19th century. These engraved images served as popular forms of visual entertainment, coupled with the latest views on modernity, science, and culture that writers in these journals reported on to an Arab audience. Conversely, the panel will also examine the various endeavors of the early Egyptian film industry to introduce the cinema, as the new mass entertainment art of the day, to the avid Arab audiences. Along with the visual amusement and commerciality elements of those premier Egyptian films, precursors of early Egyptian cinema used the recurrent motifs of the desert, the bedouin, and the peasant for ideological and/or nationalist purposes which contributed to a growing sense of an embryonic Egyptian-ness.
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Dr. Alaaeldin Mahmoud
Egyptomania, as a western-turned-into-global cultural phenomenon, I argue, was restored with Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign (1798-1801). However, what evolved to be a European/western obsession with Egypt culminated in the aftermath of the discovery of King Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922. This “Egypt craze” appeared to have a profound touch on the broad array of western (popular) art forms like theatre, architecture, fashion, film, and fiction, to name a few. This paper investigates the perceived impact of the western/globalized Egyptomania on the Egyptian literary authors of the time. How the Egyptian litterateurs re-imagined ancient Egypt in their writings, what were their various responses to the palpable “commerciality” of the western/globalized version of Egyptomania, and how the Egyptian audiences/readerships of the time responded to the different, then newly produced Egypt-themed poems, plays, sketches, short stories, novels, songs, translations, etc. are some questions that are examined in the current paper.
Fashioned in anti-orientalist and/or de-colonializing manner, re-appropriating ancient Egypt in early twentieth-century in the Egyptian musical/poetic and prose theatre, fiction and lyrics was in quest of nationalist/local agenda and needs, evident (to name a few examples) in staging Cleopatra in a musical play titled "Mark Antonio and Cleopatra" in 1926, featuring the collaborative work of the “celebrities” of the day like Yunus al-Qadhi, Sayyid Darwish, Muhammad ‘Abd al-Wahhab, and Munirah al-Mahdiyyah. This success seemed to tempt Ahmad Shawqi to feature the “globalized” Cleopatra in his poetic play Ma?ra? Kiliy?p?tr? (“Death of Cleopatra”) in 1927, in an attempt that appeared like bringing (high) culture to popular entertainment. Similarly, responses to peculiar aspects of Egyptomania, like Tutmania and mummymania, are traced in works such as Shawqi’s poem T?t ?Ankh ?m?n wa h?ad??rat ?a?rih (“Tutankhamun and The Civilization of His Time”) (1926), Mahmud Taymur’s short story Fir?aun al-?agh?r (“Little Pharaoh”) (1939) and Najib Mahfuz’s short story Yaqa?at al-m?my?? (“The Awakening of the Mummy”) (1939).
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Mr. Raphael Cormack
In the late 1910s the entertainment press was rising fast in Cairo. First, newspapers started featuring reports about plays, actors and singers. Then, by the mid 1920s, a series of magazines exploded into life including gossip, photos and long interviews with the stars of the day. This was the beginning of modern celebrity culture in Egypt and a huge number of performers became national and international stars – Youssef Wahby, Fatima Rushdi, Badia Masabni, Naguib al-Rihani, and many more.
Many of the models for these new celebrities were Europeans or American. The figure of Sarah Bernhardt, probably the world’s first modern celebrity, loomed large over Egyptian actresses and many of them (including Fatima Rushdy and Rose al-Youssef) were called “The Sarah Bernhardt of the East”. The stars of Hollywood, such as Pearl White, Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks and others, also became pinups in Cairo.
There were many similarities between the celebrity cultures of Egypt, Europe and America. However, stars in Cairo were constantly shaping their image in response to the local culture. This paper focuses on two rivals and probably the most famous singers in the 1920s Cairo, Oum Kalthoum and Mounira al-Mahdiyya, who both used their own conceptions of Egyptian-ness to form their public personae. Oum Kalthoum, worked hard to paint herself as a conservative girl from the countryside, shocked by the excesses of Cairo’s nightlife scene. Mounira, on the other hand, reveled in her unconformity. Stories appeared about her late-night poker parties, her Zar ceremonies, superstitions, and the wild antics that happened on her Nile house-boat. They two women were polar opposites.
I argue that the clash between these two huge celebrities was, more than anything, a clash between different ways that women were constructing a female Egyptian national identity in the aftermath of the 1919 revolution. Mounira was urban, unabashed, and upfront; Oum Kalthoum was rural, modest, and reserved. The concept of a modern celebrity, that many want to trace back to the West, was being used to ask questions about a newly independent Egypt.
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Dr. Hala Auji
This paper examines the interplay between art, print culture, and entertainment by considering the important role that printed images—namely engraved portraits, landscapes, cityscapes, “exotic” imagery, and myriad other illustrations—as popular forms of visual amusement amongst Arabic-speaking residents of nineteenth-century eastern Mediterranean cities. New kinds of printed images, produced using a variety of technologies, began to increasingly appear in Arabic books and periodicals published at regional presses. Many of these engraved images appeared in literary-scientific journals that strove to popularize modern science and culture. These journals typified the regional nineteenth century conceptions of the arts and sciences as interconnected and universal fields of inquiry and exemplified what contemporary sources perceived of as the modern age. Through such journals, middle-class Arabic-speaking residents of Ottoman cities like Beirut and Cairo debated and promoted “modern” views on science, technology, art, history, and culture during the period of the Arab nahda. The earliest of these journals, printed in Beirut and Cairo from the 1870s onwards, included al-Jinan (The Gardens), al-Muqtataf (The Selections), and al-Hilal (The Crescent). While these journals focused on articles and reports, which were usually translated into Arabic from American, British, and French popular science and literary journals, these Arabic publications also featured engravings for popular consumption. The use of engraved blocks (from local and European sources) heralded new forms of visual literacy that altered customary views on pictorial representation. The printed images helped to turn Arabic periodicals into both visual compendiums of popularized encyclopedic knowledge and sites of pictorial entertainment for a general readership.
Scholars of Middle Eastern history locate these periodicals as important markers of regional perspectives on modernity, cultural progress, and social reform. However, while considerable attention is paid to these journals’ articles, their engravings remain largely unexplored. This paper will turn to a close analysis of these printed images as novel forms of visual entertainment and populist artistic expression at a time when other artistic practices, such as oil painting and photography, were gaining traction in the region. The study will also consider how such pictorial modes were being negotiated alongside the varied and shifting views on al-funun (the arts). These printed images thus allow for a consideration of how painting, photography, and printing were interconnected and what that meant for new perspectives on technology, popular entertainment, and visuality.
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Thana Al-Shakhs
Cinema is one of the most popular global entertainment tools that started in the nineteenth century. The increasing interest in the film industry found its way to the Middle Eastern through foreign, most often Western, filming companies. Egypt was one of the essential gates through which the Middle Eastern world is introduced to the global the film industry. This study will shed light on the attempts of localizing film industry in Egypt. The discussion will centralize the depiction of the national identity after independence, from 1923 to 1940. I will distinguish between two types of films: Egyptian films and Films about Egypt. The former represents the local identity and struggle while the second involves a colonial or a Western representation of Egypt. For example, the film In Tut Ankh Amon’s Country is shot in 1923 as a documentary film that reports the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb. Although Mahmoud Qasim considered this film as Egyptian in his Encyclopedia of the Arab Cinema, 1994 edition, and Twentieth Century Films' Guide of Egypt and the Arab World, 2002, he announced later in The History of Egyptian Cinema that the film offers a foreign perspective about Egypt. He updated his encyclopedia in 2004 to start the Egyptian cinema with 1927 films: Layla and kiss in the Desert. In both, the theme of desert appears as a local setting and culture. Additionally, I will discuss the image of peasants as appeared in early films such as Zainab 1930 and an Apples’ Seller (feminized) 1939. The plots of the selected films centralize the straggle of Bedouins and peasants as a subject of spectators’ sympathy. The desert and the farm represent a geographical image and involve a trend of localization among film producers. This local setting and values appear as a means of identity formation.
