In this paper, I explore the nuances of ‘modernity’, ‘national progress’ and ‘consciousness’ by focusing on theatre as envisioned by two Nahda intellectuals in fin de siècle Egypt – Ali Mubarak and Abdallah al-Nadim. I argue that they pursued their projects in an organic manner, a la Gramsci, but while Mubarak espoused a top down approach, Nadim’s was more variegated and unusually subaltern for the Nahda discourse of modernity. However, Mubarak and Nadim still shared mutual ground pertaining to the formation of a national project of modernization. Both sought total social transformation that went beyond small and secluded intellectual initiatives. They also attributed social change to an entity larger than individual self-motivation. For Mubarak, this entity was the central state, while for Nadim it was a collective national consciousness leading to national independence. In a way, the institution of theatre is emblematic of their intellectual divergence and anxiety over a perceived ‘public’ and its education. The paper’s analysis is hinged upon two sites of investigation apparent in Mubarak and Nadim’s writings: the discourses that gave theatre its shape and content; and the social agents allowed to partake in the theatrical modernity. Mubarak supported the state institutions’ intervention in educating the populace in order to achieve ‘national progress’ modelled on European/Colonial modernity. However, the modernity he envisioned was cloaked in an Islamic discourse that invoked linear history. As he put it, “modernity is a step towards historical progress that demystifies the true and rational elements of Islam”. According to this discourse, theatre is no more than a modern expression of Sharia law, that would propagate the Islamic legal formula of “promoting virtue and preventing vice” through art. Accordingly, the social agents involved in the theatrical project should come only from the state and its modern institutions, making them act as the modern Caliph. Nadim, on the other hand, regarded theatre as a site for cultivating ‘national consciousness’, through a dialectical process of unravelling social injustices via art. He built upon nostalgic discourses of ‘eastern glory’ that street performers typified. Accordingly, he wrote, the social agents that would best befit this unravelling are workers and students of eastern literature since their social context is ripe with resistance of colonial allure.

In this presentation, the Cairo mental asylum, ‘Abbāsiyya, is examined as a reconfigured colonial space. Since its inception in 1884, two years after the British occupation of Egypt, the ‘Abbāsiyya asylum received an unusual degree of official attention and financial investment, all the more striking in light of the budgetary cuts other government departments experienced. This could only happen because ‘Abbāsiyya, from its onset, was part of an important ideological function: justifying British control over Egypt’s internal affairs. On a symbolic level, the asylum exemplified the benefits British rule could bring to Egypt; a clear indication of such rule having brought order and light out of chaos and darkness. ‘Abbāsiyya further represented a formulation of a colonial policy that was intended to cut across the self-governing regime that had up to this point been allowed to evolve in Egypt. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault and Nikolas Rose, I argue that the policies and the practices associated with ‘Abbāsiyya contributed to an understanding of the emergence of the psy-sciences and mental asylums in a colonial setting. These policies illustrate the establishment of a panoptic gaze on previously neglected spaces of insanity. Systematic surveillance constituted government at a distance and made colonial lunacy administration a governable discursive space. The regulation of the medical officers, lunatic attendants, and hospital boards began the process of creating a professional psychiatric workforce. This research should be seen as an attempt to explain the mise en scène of the British establishment of the mental asylum as an institutionalized and centralized social control apparatus and argue that it was primarily the product of closely inter-related structural changes; the main driving force behind these changes being the advent of colonization and the obsession with creating “order” where there should exist an institution that not only combat but also remind of the consequences of non-conformity and deviance of the “insufficiently other” and serve to fend off the disruptive effect on an otherwise “docile” community.

My paper looks at the dialectical relationship between clothing reform and modernist architecture projects as they were imagined and embarked on in 20th century Pahlavi era Iran. Looking at the relationship between clothing and architecture allows to us identify several important dialectical movements that inform spatial and sartorial politics, at once bringing them together under a discourse that marks them as distinct. Broadly conceived, the first and most important relationship is between the ephemeral and superfluous as opposed to the timeless and universal. Modernist architectural discourse was one of universality. But how was such universality construed? What was overcome by the universal? How where modernist aesthetics translated into the Iranian context? One hesitates to ask this question because it requires trapping a nationalist discourse in a forward leaning ideology: an ideology that held the hope for the future as its inspiration. I will explore the reasons that lead reformers adopt modern dress – including unveiling. In this way I hope to read clothing as a social text that speaks to how Pahlavi-era reforms envisioned and conditioned the ideal citizen. This will bring us into a conversation about gender. Much has been said about how the veil/unveil has to do with the social status of women. Sartorial reforms, however, effected women and men. Clothing is often understood through the lens of material culture. I will use this general category to draw out the political significance of sartorial changes. I will draw parallels between architecture and clothing as they both reflect an aesthetics that can be read as speaking to the ideal man, and ideal women – and ideal nation. Furthermore, the language of architecture is of imagined masculinity while that of dress is of imagined femininity. This reading places gender within the dialectic of modernist aesthetics. Much of what inflected modernist theories of architecture was in direct contrast to what it saw as women’s fashion. This furthers my point that the discourse of modernist architecture cannot be read but with the accompanying discourse of clothing reform. To ignore this would to ignore the dichotomizing and indexing of modern gender norms.

As bombs and gunfire rocked Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990), domestic spaces were not impervious to the fighting on the streets. The space of the apartment in particular tends to take on multiple new meanings in novels written about the War. What was once a living space can become a refuge or a prison, a playing field or a battlefield, and even a monument to those that have departed. Inspired by the phenomenological approach of Gaston Bachelard in his The Poetics of Space, this paper will analyze and compare the shifting and overlapping spaces of the apartment as represented in novels such as Ghada Samman’s Kawabis Bayrut (Beirut Nightmares), Hoda Barakat’s Hajar al-Dahk (The Stone of Laughter), Rawi Hage’s De Niro’s Game, and Ghayas Hachem’s Play Boys. In such fictionalized accounts of the War, the confinement of women and children in particular leads to the multiplication of meanings and uses attributed to the apartment. While the occupied apartment becomes oversaturated in spatial significance, even the abandoned apartment remains haunted by the absence of its former occupants. The fragmented city outside is often reflected in this internal space, reproducing and commemorating the violence of war in the daily, lived realities of the apartment. In Deleuzian terms, by becoming-other the space of the apartment has been deterritorialized. In addition to Bachelard, Deleuze, and Guattari, this paper also draws from trauma and memory studies in order to highlight the devastating violence that has rendered the apartment an unsafe refuge, whose isolating confinement inspires the desire of escape. That being said, what sort of escape is possible or desirable in the context of civil war?