This paper explores the public art world in Egypt after the 2011 revolution. Through ethnographic research, I will suggest that new aesthetic imaginaries and art techniques have come into being in Egypt after the revolution, but were products of intricate historical contexts. The emergence of art networks and scenes in post-revolutionary Egypt follows years of fermentation and experimentation before the revolution, when artists started to adopt creative modes of living and art practices, and which employ the material of the neoliberal world and make use of its opportunities to conjure unexpected creative approaches in their art and lives. After the 2011 revolution, the use of public spaces shifted - opened for artistic expression and performance – unleashing the expressive thrust of underground artists whose approach appealed to ordinary people in public spaces and media networks. My paper suggests the various ways in which aesthetics and performances shape fields of power by cultivating new sensibilities and ways of seeing and listening to the world. Simultaneously, I want to explore how power comes to shape aesthetic mediations and artistic networks. By looking at how political groups, social movements, state institutions and media industries appropriate artistic production and artists’ skills and successes, this paper suggests that artists negotiate heterogeneous social backgrounds and imaginaries to conjure identities and worldviews within emerging publics shaped by both the neoliberal economy and state cultural policy. My paper is based on three ethnographic studies that I conducted in Egypt in 2011 and 2012. Through my analysis of the art-scene in Egypt and its revolutionary dimensions, I argue that the “real revolution” has been taking place in the forms of sociality simmering in Egypt long before 2011, emerging alongside neoliberal structural adjustment policies in Egypt. The Egyptian revolution, rather than a chronological rupture, is in fact a moment of intensity in which wider social and cultural changes came to reconfigure the political dimensions of publics, aesthetics, and identities.

When hundreds of thousands of Arabs began protesting against their governments, their mobilization did not only surprise their rulers, but even the protestors themselves - as an individual on Facebook put it: “How did this happen?” (al-Thaura al-Arabiyya li-Tahrir Falastin, April 7, 2011) Most analyses of the Arab Spring focus on environmental factors like authoritarianism or economic hardship, or on organizational factors like availability of new technologies or organizational experience of the people. However, these factors change too slowly to explain the unexpected outbreak of the protests. In response, this paper adopts Axelrod’s cognitive mapping approach, and models the Arab Spring as chains of interconnected beliefs. These chains represent the mechanisms by which social influence suddenly mobilized Arabs for revolt as shared beliefs about various factors, including 1. The actions of other people beginning to protest, 2. Present and past events like governmental repression, 3. Values like human dignity, 4. Social grievances like poverty, and 5. Emotions like moral outrage. Cognitive maps are constructed from Arabic Facebook groups, weblogs, and transcripts of Skype interviews. The analysis focuses on protestors from Egypt, where there was governmental change, in comparison with Morocco, where there was no change. It includes three time frames: 1. Beginning of protests, 2. Mass protests, 3. End of mass protests. It shows that protestors in Egypt mobilized around beliefs about 1. The actions of their families and friends in their immediate environment, 2. Governmental violence against the protestors, 3. The suicide of Mohammad Buazizi, and the departure of Ben Ali, 4. Moral outrage about the government, and 5. Values of governmental accountability. Protestors from Morocco shared beliefs about present events of governmental violence, and values of governmental accountability. However, they did not share beliefs about their families and friends protesting in their immediate environment.

In this paper I revisit several books that were published in Egypt soon after the ousting of Hosni Mubarak. The authors are Cairenes, mostly of a younger generation, who witnessed and participated in the uprising that started on January 25, 2011. Their accounts of their day-to-day involvement with, and experiences of what came to be labelled the Egyptian Revolution, can rightfully lay claim to authoritativeness and reliability as historiographical evidence. But, these texts not only record, describe and narrate the events, they envision circumstances that were yet to come. These acts of writing are thus more than ‘constatives’; in fact, they should be read as ‘performatives’ - articulations of visions, hopes and recommendations for the post-Mubarak Egypt. Written and published immediately after a symbolically important victory was achieved, yet at a time when Egyptian society was only entering what turned out to be a still lasting turbulent and uncertain period of transition, they intertwine the interpretations of what has happened with the ideas about what should happen. The future, however, has mostly let these writers down. What was supposed to have an illocutionary force did not bring about many perlocutionary effects. So, how is this disappointment negotiated? How is the writer-and-revolutionary coping with the on-going defragmentation of what in the early days of ‘our glorious revolution’ appeared to be much more compact – the imaginations of Egypt/ian/ness? Combining discourse analysis, New Literacy Studies, multimodal analysis and anthropology of writing, I approach these texts in search of tropes, sociolinguistic repertoires and discursive mechanisms through which the past, the present and the future were simultaneously written about. I then read them against another discursive backdrop, the one layered by the authors’ subsequent writings (those that have appeared after the initial ‘post-Mubarak’ texts were published) and the interviews I conducted with some of the writers two years after the uprising. I offer an interpretative commentary on how the acts of remembering and memorialising the past, experiencing the present and reflecting on the future form a nexus in which the meaning-making acts of writing engage with disenchantment.