In the early-twentieth century, comic actor, manager, and playwright Najib al-Rihani entertained Egyptians by bringing street performance and colloquial theater to the proscenium stage. His theater illuminated issues in contemporary Egyptian society through humor, and his recurring Everyman character, the ibn al-balad (authentic son of the town) Kish Kish Bey, always came out on top. Couched in his comedy, however, Rihani delivered potent messages about Egyptian society as it transitioned from being a British protectorate to an independent nation. As urbanization and migration from rural to urban areas accelerated, and as changing gender roles and questions of authenticity preoccupied Egyptians in the socio-political arena, Rihani’s entertainments delivered critique and a call for unity to a willing and eager audience. A cultural critic and immensely popular actor, I argue that Rihani’s use of comedy made him at once unifying and dangerous. On the one hand, Rihani’s stardom made his life experience exceptional. But his performance of colloquial street theater on the proscenium stage affirmed the value, vulnerabilities, and experiences of the urban Egyptian Everyman. Rihani’s stage was a place to challenge elite greed and hypocrisy, to play with modern ideals of strong women and sexuality with humor. He creatively promoted sectarian, class, and gender unity through laughter and song. Contemporary Egyptian nationalists and theater critics, however, were not so enthralled. For them, if theater was not didactic, aphoristic, or morally uplifting, it was suspect. Playwright and critic Muhammed Taymur wrote that vaudeville and similar entertainments were “full of obscene jokes and shameful attitudes…such shameless plays are the most dangerous types on the morals.” Worse was the insertion of seemingly trivial songs into those performances. If theater was a moral university (as many argued), one that connected a diverse population, just as mosques, churches, and schools did, then the stage was crucial to the moral and patriotic health of the newly independent nation. Whether or not Rihani subverted the status quo, the potential for doing so was ever present. In this paper, I use plays, advertisements, and contemporary journal articles to demonstrate how a microhistory of Rihani, a person both ordinary and extraordinary, both reflected and shaped post-independent, interwar Egypt. 1. Muhammad Taymur, Hayatuna al-tamthiliyya, (Cairo: Matba‘at al-i’timad: 1922), 94. 2. Amr Zakaria Abd Allah, “The Theory of Theatre for Egyptian Nationalists in the First Quarter of the Twentieth Century,” Quaderni di Studi Arabi, Nuova Serie, Vol. 4 (2009): 204.

This paper places Radwa Ashour's 2008 novel, "Farag," in dialogue with recent scholarship on "global" 1968. The paper argues that Ashour’s novel performs literary enactments of the very theoretical propositions undergirding the 2018 "Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties'" vision of the global—which itself builds upon and complicates previous formulations of the global in "Global South Studies" and Spivak’s "Death of a Discipline." Through the novel’s main character, Nada—the daughter of a French anarchist and Egyptian Nasirist—the text seamlessly integrates the Egyptian and French experiences of 1968 from a position of “decentered interlocality,” which denies area studies its categories through the evocation of a deterritorialized South. Playing off the metaphors we expect from accounts of 1968—coming of age tales of political awakening and teen-aged rebellion—Nada’s pivotal encounter with a French student demonstrator on a visit to post-uprising France alludes to Spivak’s literary search for collectivities “to come.” Yet, rather than fetishize the French example, "Farag" actively works to decenter France in the global narrative of 1968 and thwarts the uncritical mapping of the French model onto Nada’s experience. Through a close reading of her parents’ divorce, Nada’s subsequent travels to Paris, and her break with her father’s Nasirist example, I will examine the burgeoning collectivities Ashour places at the nexus of student struggles in 1968 Egypt and France. Moving into a reading of Nada’s reflections on Foucault following her imprisonment in Egypt, I will elaborate Ashour’s critique of facile, Eurocentric modes of comparison. Finally, turning to a letter written by Nada’s mother from the grave and the decline of Egypt’s 1970s student movement in the novel, I will unpack Ashour’s elaboration of a deterritorialized South spanning from the countryside of France to the streets of Cairo, Baghdad, and beyond.