Discussions of canonization most typically hinge on literary texts; and yet canonization processes, in which certain cultural material, perspectives, narratives, and works are selectively included or excised, are at work in a much broader set of cultural contexts. This panel examines processes that aimed to define Egyptian national culture in the mid-twentieth century, from the 1930s through the 1960s. We look beyond the conventionally literary to consider cuisine, music, film, sport, and dance.
Common themes addressed by the papers include the use of modern forms of knowledge production to forge links to Egypt’s ancient heritage, the international politics of the Abdel Nasser regime, and the tension between text and embodied practice. Two papers address the way that practices were recorded and organized in new ways in textual form: cookbooks for middle-class housewives written by Abla Nazira and her contemporaries, and songbooks that presented Egypt’s musical heritage in new forms of notation. The next two papers consider sport and dance in the specific context of the post-1952 regime and its international politics, and the final contribution examines tensions between commercial and political interests with an exploration of Egyptian films that did not fit the mold of critically acclaimed canonization. As a whole these papers challenge dominant framings and periodizations of modern Egyptian cultural history.
From a range of disciplinary perspectives we ask a number of shared questions: which people and institutions were the gatekeepers of different “canons” in mid-century Egypt? How did their priorities reflect the interest of politics, morality, or order? How were they resisted or opposed by individuals or markets? How do gender, race, class, regional origin, and other forms of difference manifest in these processes? How do processes of canonization relate to narratives around “quality,” “frivolity,” and the classed constructions of taste? How have these processes contributed to contemporary understandings of what it means to be Egyptian –– and who has a role in shaping those understandings? By considering a range of cultural forms we shift scholarly conversations about nationalism, cultural politics, and difference into the realm of the embodied, the affective, and the spectacular, considering media through which elites and the masses alike engaged in remaking their understandings of Egyptian identity and belonging.
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In the mid-1950s, the Egyptian government launched a rigorous “recovery” operation aimed at collecting the nation’s musical heritage and publishing it in a series of songbooks. These books took what was, until then, a largely oral tradition of music and transformed it into neatly notated scores and poetic texts, testaments to Egypt’s venerable artistic heritage. Yet, the editors of these songbooks engaged in more than preservation: they created a musical canon based on their own particular visions of the nation, sanitizing a living repertoire and constructing new categories of “folk” and “classical” music. In this paper, I focus on songbook collections published by the Supreme Music Council and folklorist Bahija Rashid, examining how Egypt’s cultural elite attempted to curate a heritage that was pure and orderly, ancient as well as modern. I investigate the inclusion and exclusion of particular songs, lyrics, and historical narratives, and their relevance within the broader project of inventing Egyptian musical heritage. While the state’s publications were novel in their use of notated melodies, I also discuss how these books drew on an older tradition of Arabic song anthologies to authenticate the heritagization project.
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The 1930s, 40s, and 50s witnessed the flourishing of a new genre of Egyptian print cookbook––namely, print cookbooks written by and for women, aimed at a relatively new figure: the modern housewife. While some early print cookbooks elsewhere in the Arabophone world (Morocco, Lebanon) engaged directly and openly in projects of canonizing their national cuisines, Egyptian cookbooks present a slightly different case. In these cookbooks, it was in the careful assembly of a kaleidoscope of diverse recipes, rather than the framing of a national cuisine in those explicit terms, that authors performed the work of signaling what a proper Egyptian housewife ought to be feeding her children––the future of the nation. Overall this understudied subgenre of cookbooks promoted a vision of Egyptian cuisine that was middle-class, urban, and couched in terms of an Arab modernity oriented towards the Mashriq and the Eastern Mediterranean and away from the rest of the African continent. The paper argues that these texts projected a world where modern domestic ideology brought a specific flavor of economy to the kitchen –– a sense of order inseparable from particular aesthetic choices –– by introducing new taxonomies of acceptable food. These cookbooks emphasized European sauces like bechamel, the Circassian dish sharkasiyya, and eastward facing dishes like koshari. Meanwhile they excluded certain ingredients like shaṭṭa and ḥilba (hot pepper and fenugreek), and included with careful qualification foods perceived as “African,” like weka. Drawing on close readings of books by three major cookbook authors from this period as well as related archival material, this paper details the social and ethnic hierarchies embedded in the canonization of Egyptian cuisine. These readings form part of a broader argument that the domestic sphere, and the home kitchen in particular, was a key site where Egyptians began to identify as part of an Arab east or Mashriq, rather than North Africa, in a modern sense.
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The Revolution of 1952 has been presented as a turning point for Egypt not only politically, but also in the cultural realm. In the early years of the new Egyptian Republic, however, the government could neither carelessly nor completely discard the cultural channels of the British occupiers, as these were the very structures that had been coopted to support nationalist aims. In particular, sport and its concomitant discourse had played a critical role in allowing the ideas of intellectuals to be presented in an accessible manner and engage a broader selection of the population. The post-Revolutionary state, therefore, had to delineate a cohesive sport policy to maintain and build support for the regime.
I argue that, in the early years of the Revolution, the discourse engendered by this policy was supported by the traditional frameworks against which the movement rallied, underneath a façade of superficial transformations. There was, therefore, more continuity than discontinuity between British and post-revolutionary policy, as well as continued efforts to work with international sporting bodies. It was not until the 1956 Suez Crisis that a shift occurred in which the Egyptian government abandoned its attempts to become one among the club of Europeans, instead seeking a leadership role in the Arab World. During the British occupation, the key strength of sporting discourse was its multifarious nature, giving more people the ability to construct their own narratives and adapt what sport could accomplish to changing circumstances. The post-1956 direct use of sport as a government-sponsored tool for nation-building, however, not only restricted what these narratives could say, but also rejected the heritage of the pre-revolutionary era by devaluing it as a foreign imposition. With Egypt’s past sporting victories and heroes denied a prominent place, if any at all, in the nation’s collective consciousness, the idea of sport as an adaptable, transformative tool was forgotten. Instead, in the years following the Revolution, sport came to be seen as another government directive, one that could be engaged as a binary, by either accepting or rejecting its message.
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Dr. Ifdal Elsaket
Throughout the 1960s, film critics in Egypt called for the production of socially-aware cinema; films that would position Egypt on the global film-stage and engage in a wider battle against imperialism on international screens. They dismissed private-sector comedies and musicals as “whirlpools of frivolity” lambasting them as money-making enterprises that relied on sex, stars and violence to lure in “third-class” audiences. Much to their chagrin, however, private sector films that relied on salacious scenes, violence, and slapstick comedy actually drew in the majority of box-office receipts, as audiences ignored the jeremiads of film critics. By questioning the dominant frames around which the 1960s have been studied, and the disproportionate scholarship paid to a select number of canonised, and critically-acclaimed, films, my paper will spotlight a neglected story of Egyptian cinema audiences and the critics (and canonisation processes) they shunned. It will draw into sharp focus how class shaped understandings of what constituted “quality” cinema, and how it shaped broader attitudes towards audiences.
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Dr. Anthony Shay
Staging Egypt – Panel Canonizing Egypt
Beginning in the 1950s, Abdel Gamal Nasser and his regime undertook the project of valorizing the Egyptian peasant. This decision was made in the midst of the socialist bloc undertaking what I term the age of “Staging the Folk” in which, beginning with the Soviet Union with the establishment of the State Academic Ensemble of Dances of the Peoples of the USSR (known in the West as the Moiseyev Dance Company), all of the socialist states and prominent regions within them, as well as states under their influence like Egypt, established companies that produced mass spectacle through the presentation of folk dance and music, never before seen on such a scale.
In Egypt, Mahmoud Reda (1930-2020), founded his first dance company which grew from some 30 members, to reach nearly 150 dancers, musicians, and support staff a few years later. Due to his success, in 1961, the Ministry of Culture adopted the company as a state-supported dance company for purposes of representing Egypt both at home and abroad.
Reda faced several issues, not facing other artistic directors. 1. Belly dance was the primary form of both domestic and professional indigenous dance in Egypt, performed by men, women and children of all ages and all classes. Other than solo improvised dance and combat dances, little else existed in the relatively homogeneous folklore genres of dance from which Reda could create choreographies. In addition, professional belly dance was, and continues to be, linked to prostitution. 2. Because of this linkage, finding dancers was very difficult. 3. Prior to the adoption of the company, the financing of such an ensemble was very difficult.
This presentation looks at the work of Mahmoud Reda, in which that I will argue, as he stated several times, that, in spite of the claims of extensive research that he undertook, he created a new genre of dance, an invented tradition, in which he restricted the movements of belly dance for the female dancers to understated undulations, fully covered, especially in the beginning of the company, and did not permit the men to perform belly dance movements at all. For the men, he created an entirely new genre of dance and movement that never existed before, in order to distance his new genre of folk dance from belly dance (raqs baladi) as far as possible.
