This panel focuses on Egypt as a case study for exploring new methods with which historians can approach the interaction of peripheral locales and peoples with the larger, nationalizing forces of the long nineteenth century. By focusing on regions that have been all but ignored in the historiography of modern Egypt (the Delta; the Sudanese borderlands; the Western frontier), each of the panel's three papers complicates the narrative of Egypt's seamless construction as a national space. While the dominant, nationalist historiography of Egypt focuses on the "emergence" of Egypt as an integral and unified space, this panel demonstrates the historical limits of the state's authority outside of its urban seat of power, Cairo. In short, this panel attempts to remap, both literally and figuratively, modern Egypt by emphasizing the tensions that underlay the state's attempt to rationalize its peripheral spaces that did not quite "fit" into Egypt proper in this period.
These papers employ a variety of historical methods in order to speak to broader literatures on the limits of state authority and the fraught construction of the modern nation-state. One central concern of the panel is the nature and meaning of mapping as an historical practice; drawing on methodologies developed in the history of science as well as critical geography, these papers examine different attempts by the state to produce accurate depictions of Egyptian space (urban as well as desert), and the shortcomings of these cartographic enterprises. The papers also suggest new ways for historians to read maps as primary texts. In addition, the panel will examine the notion that historians can no longer treat the history of nation-state construction in geographical isolation, but rather must account for various global forces and competing claims to sovereignty that are typically shunted from view in many historical narratives.
With these themes in mind, all three papers employ methods from global and transnational historiography to resituate modern Egypt. One paper demonstrates how Egypt's southern borderlands (especially the regions of Darfur and Bahr Ghazal, both in modern-day Sudan) were brought into the national fold only at the expense of raising new questions about British and Ottoman sovereignty in the region. Two papers on Egypt's far-western provinces investigate the central role of the Ottomans, Italians, and British in attempting to claim and define this frontier area.
This paper examines the fraught process by which Egypt's far-western provinces - key parts of the Western (or Libyan) Desert as well as the far reaches of the Mediterranean coastline - eventually came under the firm sovereignty of the Egyptian state--a process that culminated in an official border treaty with Italian-occupied Libya in 1925. Bringing together a variety of different sources - official documents from the Ottoman, Italian, Egyptian, and British archives as well as travel narratives, maps, and memoirs - this paper suggests that the Egyptian West, previously ignored in the historiography of modern Egypt, is a crucial site for challenging a series of long-standing assumptions underlying conventional narratives of Egyptian nationalism and statecraft.
By taking a close look at the political, economic, and social history of the Egyptian west over a roughly thirty-year period, this paper seeks to address a series of issues of broader historical and theoretical interest. First, it investigates the meaning and impact of competing conceptions of space (local-Bedouin, European-colonial, Egyptian-nationalist) in a context of weak or limited state authority. Second, it seeks to understand alternate ways that spaces difficult to rationalize - the desert being a prime example - could be "mapped" spatially in the absence (until very late) of reliable cartographic representations. Finally, it questions the acceptance of a firmly national identity among Bedouin populations accustomed to local authority and frequent border crossings.
At the same time, this research seeks to tackle some longstanding assumptions in Egyptian historiography. Foremost among these is the notion that Egypt, unlike almost all other nations to emerge from colonial rule, boasted natural and well-known boundaries that could be seamlessly traced back to antiquity. This paper also seeks to question the common historiographical view that the Ottoman state ceased to play any meaningful political role in Egyptian affairs after the British occupation in 1882. The research presented here challenges both these assumptions by suggesting that the "Egyptian" West was a space that the Egyptians actively needed to win over from both Ottoman and (later) Italian influence and consequently rationalize and "tame," reaching out to the predominantly Bedouin population that inhabited this territory through a variety of administrative means.
Located in Egypt's extreme Western Desert, thirty miles from the Libyan border and some 350 miles from Cairo, Siwa is the most unique of all Egypt's oases. The 24,000 people of Siwa Oasis speak a Berber dialect, Siwi; take Arabic as their second language in state schools; and consider themselves separate from the Egyptian population. The unique modern history of Siwa has been shaped by relations with Berber tribes, the Libyan Senussi monarchy, the Ottoman Empire, the Egyptian khedivial government, the British colonial government, and the modern Egyptian state. Each of these succeeding governments attempted to incorporate the oasis, and gain the loyalty of its citizens, through a series of development projects. They also attempted to control the population, which often lived outside of the military or political reaches of the state, through the institutions of the modern state, such as police and prisons. The local history of Siwa Oasis, therefore, exemplifies the process of Egyptian modernization and the building of the modern Egyptian nation-state. This paper will examine not only the attempt of successive states to control the oasis, but also the meaning and effects of nationalism and modernization for the population of the oasis. This paper will also show the way in which Siwans experienced and also contributed to notions of modernity and nationalism, leaving a profound impact and experiencing unique modes of accommodation and resistance.
My research will take account of local, national, and imperial sources in order to situate the reaction of peasants to development projects within their historical relationship to both the state and to others in their community. By turning attention to this population, far from the centralizing forces of Cairo, my project argues for the ability of the case study to reveal a complementary and alternative national and regional history. It also questions the ability of the typical nation-state-based method of analysis to generate nuanced conclusions in studying the history of small places generally regarded as peripheral to the main currents of history.
Women's Autobiography in Contemporary Egypt:
Challenging the Constitution of Gender
"...who can doubt the memoir is here to stay -- if not forever, then for a good long while?" With these words James Atlas ended his article Confessing for Voyeurs:The Age of The Literary Memoir Is Now published in the New York Times in 1996. This was the case not only in American Literature but also to a great extent in Arabic and particularly Egyptian Literature. One of the interesting features of the nineties of the last century is the appearance of a powerful stream of autobiographical narratives by young Egyptian women novelists like Miral Altahawi's The Blue Eggplant, Mai Altemisani's Heliopolis and Sahar Almougi's Daria to name a few.
This paper explores the origin and the historical development of autobiography in the tradition of Arabic literature relating them to the contemporary scene. This paper also poses the question of why and how these young women writers write their autobiographies bearing in mind all the assumptions about gender, traditions and truth. These writings are the way for them to try to understand how their identities are formed, marginalized and oppressed. They realize how important memory and history can be for the understanding of the present and the future. They want not only to know but to remember who they are and what they want. What is more important about the act of writing an autobiography is that not only it defines identity but it creates and shapes identity and moves it from the margin to the center through enabling it writer to resist being voiceless.
In this case these autobiographical memories are not only part of their writers' personal individual narratives that gives value to their personal experiences but of the collective narrative of their societies. Thus, memories serve personal and social purposes as well since personal and social narratives are inevitably interconnected.
