Five years after the Arab revolutions, the inheritance of the post-colonial state has come into question, specifically in regards to the possible unfolding or stalling of the emancipatory project of decolonization and independence.
This panel problematizes the way the present is haunted, refracted or shadowed by the afterlives of the past. In Omens of Adversity David Scott argues that we need to pay particular attention to the dynamics of aftermaths and ruins of the postcolonial past. The collapse of postcolonial self-determination has undermined the way people believe in transformative political futures and changed their understandings of the past as a time that can be overcome.
Such problematic relationship will be addressed through the vantage point of ruins and remembrance. It builds on a growing literature and increasing interest in the prism of ruination as a landscape of politics and memory, and its deployment in understanding the postcolony (Gordillo 2014, Stoler 2013, Benjamin 1968). It seeks to do so by raising questions in regards to the theoretical resources it provides for understandings of the Middle East.
The panel, therefore, questions the space and time of emancipation, and the claims of sovereignty of the post-independence state. By building on several case studies from different disciplinary backgrounds, the panel will seek to bridge questions of generations and intergenerational memory, remembrance and forgetfulness as well as questions of the materiality of building and ruination. Drawing from anthropology, history, political science, and urban studies, the panelists address rural and urban spaces, intergenerational memoirs and narratives. They therefore experiment with different forms of archives of the post-independence state. The panel investigates traces of incompleteness, vulnerable acts of government as well the resources of political agency in enacting and contesting the space-time of the state and its deployment on everyday time, historicity and infrastructure.
Bibliography:
Benjamin, Walter. 1968 [1955]. Theses on the Philosophy of History. In Illuminations, pp. 253-264. NY: Schocken Books.
El Shakry, Omnia S. 2007. The Great Social Laboratory: Subjects of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Egypt. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press.
Gordillo, Gastón. 2014. Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction. Durham: Duke University Press.
Koselleck, Reinhart. 2004. Futures past on the semantics of historical time. New York: Columbia University Press.
Scott, David. 2013. Omens of Adversity: Tragedy, Time, Memory, Justice. Duke University Press.
Stoler, Ann Laura. 2013. Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination. Durham: Duke University Press.
Anthropology
Architecture & Urban Planning
History
Literature
Political Science
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Mr. Mohammed Ezzeldin
The questions of failed uprisings and unfulfilled revolutions have been key analytical optics in the modern historiography of Egypt. Whether in the anticolonial struggle, postcolonial emancipation, 1970s uprisings or in 2011 revolution, major historical narratives were marked by the schemas of lack, incompleteness and premature foreclosures. Yet, one still need to inquire about the lingering questions, revolutionary residues of these experiences, and ask: how can we orient ourselves historically and temporally to amputated openings and suppressed emancipatory potentials?
In order to engage these questions, I will revisit the biography and personal accounts of Arwa Salih, one of the militant leaders of Egyptian student movement in 1970s. She belonged to a remarkable generation whose political activism began at the heels of the devastating military defeat of the Arab armies in the Six Day War in 1967 and was cut short with the implementation of draconian neoliberal policies following the crackdown on the popular uprising known as the bread riots in 1977-an event considered by some historians as a precursor to the 2011 revolutionary scenes.
Between 1967 and 1977, Egypt witnessed a series of popular upheavals and riots spearheaded by various student movements that tried to bring an end to dictatorship, authoritarianism and patriarchy. While their struggles reached a peak, the country moved away from the nationalist-socialist anti-colonial framework towards a laissez faire neoliberal position, peace treaty with Israel and solid alliances with the United States.
Due to those radical sociopolitical and economic fluctuations, Salih and her comrades found themselves suddenly in a disorienting world moving in a different direction not in sync with the struggles and sacrifices of their youth. She described her generation as the premature (al-mubtasarun) in her seminal book of the same title. The premature designates the unrealized potentials, incomplete projects and unfulfilled promises of a failed emancipatory project that her generation embodied.
Stuck between an older order that was crumbling and a new order that was still in the making, Salih’s generation found itself in a stalled situation where the future is no longer linked to the past.
Building on contemporary debates on revolutionary afterlives (Ross 2002, Wilder 2015, Comay 2011) and futures past (Koselleck 2004, Scott 2013), my paper will engage the life and legacies of Salih and her comrades, not as a conventional social history but to configure a new temporal modality and historical sensibility depart from the schemas of failure, loss and lack.
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Dr. Nada El-Kouny
In the wake of the Arab Spring, the hamlet of Tahsin in the Nile Delta Governorate of Egypt claimed “Administrative Independence” from the state in 2012. Tahsin’s movement, which commenced approximately a decade prior to this wider upsurge, was a unique experience of a rural community’s attempts at sovereignty making. The claim to “independence” was in response to the violence experienced through state neglect: the lack of basic services, the decay and ruination of existing structures, and the resultant everyday repercussions of direct violence. The village youth materialized their movement into building the absent infrastructural services, in the absence of the state's provision of them. I investigate how memory (Nora 1996[1992]; Halbwachs 1980[1950]), generations (Mannheim 1982[1928]; Scott 2013) and ruins (Stoler 2013; Gordillo 2014) coalesce in producing incentives for political action and sovereignty making. I build on recent scholarship on ruins and ruination to understand how violence is manifested through infrastructural failures. Marginalized rural communities—outside of the urban centers of control in pushing for state accountability and recognition—magnify material-affective relations as infrastructure becomes their chosen channel to claim rights and implicate state institutions and officials in their sovereignty demands. My paper will therefore reveal the ways in which violence can be generative, becoming the bases on which new structures can be built and used for sovereignty making and recognition.
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Dr. Aya Nassar
This paper focuses on the material construction and afterlife of post-colonial ambition, and it looks into the ways the state of post-independence sought to deploy its political order through urban space. Building on literatures of colonial and postcolonial urban forms, memory, ruins and debris (Çelik, 1997; Edensor, 2007; Jacobs, 1996; Stoler, 2013) my presentation uses city topographies, architectures and mundane relics as monuments and texts allowing for some sort of readability of materialized memory (Weigel, 1996, p. 37,112). Thus, with reference to Cairo, my presentation approaches city space as one of the monuments of the state (Stoler, 2000). It focuses on one monument in the city of Cairo to interrogate the ambitious -yet vulnerable- attempts of staging and controlling the urban spatial-symbolic order in the postcolonial state. The monument of the Unknown Soldier in Nasr City conceived and constructed in the mid 1970s sheds light on the post-colonial state’s capacity and control in shaping the urban spectacle of the capital city, as well as the fragility and chance that subscripts this appearance of control. I draw on archival material gathered through fieldwork; specifically the personal collection of the urban planner of the neighbourhood where the monument eventually came to be, as well as interviews with the designer of the monument, and his personal collection of photographs. I analyze this material to show how the monument and its landscape performed as a spectacle, an event, materiality and discourse of post-independence nationalism, and state commemoration (Wedeen, 1999, Anderson, 1991). The present trace of this monument opens up an investigation of the urban politics of space production in 1970s Egypt, its actors and its imaginaries. Cairo of the 1970s remains under-studied, but -it is argued- is central in critically engaging with contemporary Cairo as a metaphor of disillusionment with the expired emancipatory futures of post-independence.
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Momen El-Husseiny
In June 2015, Sissi’s authorities demolished the burnt headquarter of the National Democratic Party (NDP) that belonged to Mubarak’s regime. The building was located on the Nile with an intricate history of power and architectural modernism, since 1959. Media and authorities reported the event with multiple messages that played along the notions of the end of Mubarak’s era. But also in an astounding manner, the destruction aimed to remove the material evidence that symbolically referred to people’s resistance to dictatorship on January 28th, 2011. The memory and physical ruins of people setting fire onto the building’s facade was demolished; this moment of revolutionaries’ collective action of anger was erased.
The demolition of ruins asserts the rise of Sissi’s power with the promise of a booming economy and prosperity. A year before, the regime destroyed the ruins and burnt architecture of Rab’aa Mosque that stood as a Memorial for the August 14th massacre of 2013. Military engineers quickly destroyed the ruins and restored the Mosque to its previous aesthetics. This paper argues that what we are witnessing today is a model of nation-state building through the destruction of monuments and memory, the adverse classic of nation-state building through the construction of memorials.
The paper analyzes the logic of nation-state building in Egypt using the history of Cairo Municipality building project, the NDP. Using archives, architectural drawings, and narratives of the architect Mahmoud Riad, the paper delves into how the different regimes claimed the building in the process of rising powers from Gamal Abdel Nasser who occupied it, hijacked its function and turned it into the headquarter of the Socialist Union, the only political party of its time, to Sadat and Hosni Mubarak who turned it into the NDP, the horrific symbol of hard-fisted politics, then Sissi, who demolished it entirely with its paradoxical history. With every regime since the 1950s, there was a process of submergence and emergence of a new political party for the ruler. Today, there is a process of demolition without a replacement of any party or a physical structure that represents the ruler.
The material absence of the ruler’s symbol of Sissi is paralleled with the demolition of ruins that signified people’s moments of collective action is what I argue as characterizing today’s New Egypt and logic of nation-state building.
