Egyptian adaptations of Shakespeare's plays in the 1970s draw heavily on Soviet and Eastern European sources and models of the 1950s and 1960s. This complicates any binary notion of how postcolonial societies metabolize high-prestige western cultural products. It reminds us of a Cold War context largely forgotten in today's cultural studies. But it also raises a question: why the delay? Egyptian students had been returning from study abroad in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe since the late 1950s; Cairo and Alexandria had been saturated with exemplars of traveling Soviet-bloc culture (art exhibits, film screenings, and some literary translations) throughout Nasser's 1960s. Yet it was only after Nasser's death in 1970 that Egyptian theatre could appropriate the most overtly politically critical of its Soviet-bloc models. Jumping off from readings of a Soviet HAMLET film (1964) and an Egyptian HAMLET play (1971), this paper explores the place of Soviet models in the artistic (re)construction of Egyptian national identity after the 1967 defeat and after Nasser's death. More important than "committed" art and socialist realism, I argue, was the example of Soviet intellectuals coming to terms with the legacy of Stalinism.

My paper offers an ethnographic comparison of two theatre workshops for youth in Cairo—one held at a state-owned Cultural Palace, and the other at a private, internationally-connected cultural centre—in order to investigate the spatial and embodied imagination of citizens of the future at these institutions. Teaching theatre as a form of transnational cultural heritage, at the Giza Cultural Palace, and a means of practical knowledge, in the improvisation-based workshop at Studio Emadeddin, outlined contrasting versions of cosmopolitan citizenship. I argue that the Cultural Palace workshop put the place of culture at a distance, requiring the mediation of state intellectuals to form the cosmopolitan citizen. Meanwhile, the focus on cultivating communication and relational skills in the private studio workshop imagined global citizenship in the here and now. How is the idea of the cosmopolitan Egyptian citizen shaped within the competition for cultural authority between state and private institutions? How is the decline of a specific cosmopolitan aesthetic in the neoliberal era transforming the idea of cultural education?

This paper examines Egyptian state programs to bring “high culture” to the middle and lower classes in the context of state security crackdowns on Islamist political groups and secularist intellectual anxiety about the spread of the piety movement. Egyptian state officials in the Nasser period initiated “cultural cultivation” (tathqif) programs directed mainly at workers and peasants, arguing that a modern nation requires a well-educated and discriminating populace – a high culture in addition to a national culture. In the 1990s, these programs gained a higher profile and were invested with a certain urgency by state officials seeking to contain or counteract the piety movement’s increasing visible presence in public space and Islamist groups’ attacks on the government and tourists. Viewing these different developments under one umbrella of threat, the Ministries of Culture and of Youth built many museums, poured significant resources into youth cultural programs, and expanded the “culture palaces” program in lower income and rural areas. Intellectual writing has, especially since the early 1990s featured, discussions of a “need for more culture” and a culture “crisis” that must be addressed. Through examination of the General Organization of Culture Palaces, this paper explores shifts in how “culture” (thaqafa) has been conceived, operationalized, and directed at certain segments of the population in relationship to political and economic shifts. It argues that while earlier socialist/developmentalist notions of culture and its role in society persist, state actors and affiliated secularist intellectuals now construct a notion of national high culture that seeks to co-opt, control, and secularize Islam.

Adapting a model from cultural studies, the paper explores anew the interface between lived experience, texts and discourses, and the surrounding social context; it examines a 2005 Egyptian theatrical performance performed against the background of a watershed controversy that polarized the Egyptian nation's politico-cultural landscape. The centre of the controversy was none other than the idea of the Veil (hijab) as an essential cornerstone of the Muslim faith, but also as a badge of membership in an all-out Islamist oppositional movement seeking to challenge the hegemony of Egypt’s long-entrenched "Westernised" elite. This paper does not take a position for or against the veil, but rather explores how a number of performative cultural texts negotiate their surrounding realities by adding hitherto unforeseen dimensions to it. I will begin by a brief discussion of a number of cultural texts, including Hossam El-Haj’s 2007 video song Ethagepty, Bravo alaiki (“You’ve donned the Veil, Bravo for you!”) and Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni’s November 2006 statements criticizing the Veil along with their political and cultural fallout. Using these texts as performative background, I will focus in this paper on playwright Lenin El-Ramly’s Ekhlao El-Aqnea’a (Masks off!), directed by El-Ramly himself in a low-budget production that premiered in 2005. Far from limiting himself to a reductive discussion of the Veil as such, I argue, El-Ramly uses echoes from Ionesco’s Rhinoceros to expose the upsurge of Wahabist Islam within the contemporary Egyptian cultural landscape. Such influences, according to the secular Muslim playwright, have only resulted in a dangerous phantasmagorical appearance of a virtuous society but which masks a thinly-veiled reality of ongoing decline.