Hearing Voices: Aural History and Egyptian Nationalism (1805-1920s)
Panel 180, 2010 Annual Meeting
On Sunday, November 21 at 08:30 am
Panel Description
This panel is comprised of four presentations about voice, hearing, presence, and nationalism in Egypt (1805-1920s). Together, we seek repressed traces of human agency, striving to ever-expand the numbers and categories of those who are permitted to speak. But as subaltern and even non-human actors are given voice, as speech acts are proliferating and diversifying, we seem to have also become slightly tone-deaf. What are we losing with a very expansive notion of "voice"? Are we overlooking the myriad ways in which actual sounds are deployed in the service of various political, cultural, and social projects? This panel suggests that the first step in taking historical voices seriously is taking them literally.
Important work in the history and theory of visuality reveals the fruitfulness of politicizing other senses too. Taking the nation state, for example, scholars like James Scott have examined what "seeing like a state" entails; after Foucault, we all take seriously the Panopticon; after Timothy Mitchell, the exhibition; and the shift from the gaze of the flaneur to a bird's-eye-view of the modern map strikes us as clearly political too. Can these insights be translated into the audiblee? Anthropologists such as Charles Hirschkind, exploring different "soundscapes" in contemporary Egypt, are answering this question with a resounding "yes," and this panel seeks to generate a similar attentiveness among historians of the country.
Our object of analysis is the emergence of Egyptian nationalism and the nation state during the long nineteenth century. Each of the papers examines different vocal registers of the nation, exploring its multiple renditions into (or away from) the aural. Is there a particular sensuriom attached to the idea of nationalism? Is it similar across space, time, and culture? What is the position of the aural in hierarchical configurations of the senses? What are the new media, venues, pitches, genders, rhythms, performative strategies, and legal and cultural arrangements with which voices become national? Is the later nation state sustained by new audiences? New vocabularies and understandings of the voice? Are there new ways of listening or ignoring it? Addressing such questions, this panel uses the voice for thinking about the relations between the body and the body politic in nineteenth- and early-twentieth century Egypt.
Benedict Anderson famously suggested that the emergence of nationalism should be anchored in the context of new timekeeping protocols that make possible new forms of conviviality, holding together previously dispersed collectives. Yet Anderson's focus on simultaneity and horizontal synchronicity fails to account for the emotional intensity of nationalism. It does not probe its erotic dimensions, or the instances in which love for the nation is more akin to attraction to a sexual partner than to affinity with strangers moving together through empty and homogeneous time.
This paper explores how titillating delays and instances of failed synchronicity structured Egyptian nationalism. It examines newly introduced media such as the radio and telephone which reconfigured, in the first three decades of the twentieth century, the meanings and emotions attached to the feminine voice and its transmission. It suggests that recording and broadcasting technologies like radios and gramophones forced voices into fixed temporal frames which prevented improvisation and the coaxing expansion or repetition of a musical theme as a means of delaying (and thus amplifying) its climax. At the same time, other technologies, such as the manually operated telephone switchboard, allowed women (as wives and unmarried switchboard operators) to put man on hold in various new ways. Thus orchestrating the public sphere of men, these disembodied female voices played an important, yet invisible role in the history of nationalism. Indeed, invisibility has been enabling in a setting where feminine visibility and respectability were hardly commensurable. In contrast to recent historiographical trends for which metaphorical "voices" are indexical to agency, this paper seeks to retrieve these voices, also in the literal sense of the word.
This paper will focus on a particular type of comedic performer in early-twentieth-century Cairo: the muqallid, or mimic. Muqallidin, like the locally renowned Ahmad al-Far, performed in streets on religious holidays, in private homes for traditional celebrations, and in the intervals between acts of more serious Arabic plays in the modern theaters of 'Imad al-Din Street and the sha'bi district, Rawd al-Farag. Performances ranged from mimicry of street vendors and famous singers, to the staging of original, colloquial plays. Their bawdy, clever lines were intended to shock bourgeois sensibilities and provoke laughter from audiences that ranged from wealthy patrons to the urban sha'b. Thus, their loose scripts were merely frameworks for improvisations that adapted to the contexts of their performances and the mood of the audience.
Muqallidin drew their techniques from older traditions of Aragoz and shadow plays, but they blended with newer conventions of theatrical performance. Drawing on elements such as collective history, humor, and mythology--in addition to contemporary social and political situations--sha'bi performances offered release from the frustrations of lived realities and provoked audience imagination as to what might be. By focusing on Ahmad al-Far, I will argue that muqallidin, by virtue of their imaginative, colloquial humor and sometimes fantastical scenarios, embodied and gave voice to what it meant for the often overlooked sha'b, or the urban, working-class, to be "modern" and "Egyptian."
The Nightingale of the Nation: the entanglements of 'Abduh al-Hamuli
This paper aims to reconstruct the histoire crois?e of Cairo and Istanbul via art: voice and hearing, with the example of an Egyptian singer who became a proto-national icon of Egyptianness. Paradoxically, Abduh al-Hamuli (1836-1901) from the caff-chantants arrives to the Cairo Opera House with significant support from the Ottoman-Egyptian elite including a tour in Istanbul and most importantly, translating Turkish songs into Arabic.
His voice however is praised by the Egyptian-Syrian press as it comprises authenticity, originality, and such sweetness that deserves the epithet bulbul - nightingale. Al-Hamuli held single performances and performed also with the theater group of al-Qabbani thus contributing to the history of Arab music theatre too. Especially from the 1880s his presence automatically evoked an Egyptian essence vis-a-vis the French, Italian, Ottoman Armenian visiting troupes and the British colonizer. His singing became a political "voice" due to its sweetness itself. Thus my paper will explore the double interplay of a body and a voice between Istanbul and Cairo, between cafas and the Opera House, between international fame and national iconology.
The process of legal reform in 19th-century Egypt is usually described as one of Westernization and secularization. This paper challenges that narrative and argues, instead, that a better understanding of this process can be achieved by listening to how litigants in police stations and law courts enunciated their presence, how they established their identity, how they verbalized their grievances and how they argued their cases. By relying on evidence drawn from the Egyptian National Archives, the paper argues that the new notions of law, personhood and justice that ushered in legal reform hinge on the new role played by the human voice in courtroom dramas.
