Bringing together a distinguished interdisciplinary group of scholars, this volume explores what happens when new forms of privatization meet collectivist pasts, public space is sold off to satisfy investor needs and tourist gazes, and the state plans for Egypt’s future in desert cities while stigmatizing and neglecting Cairo’s popular neighborhoods. These dynamics produce surprising contradictions and juxtapositions that are coming to define today’s Middle East. The original publication of this volume launched the Cairo School of Urban Studies, committed to fusing political-economy and ethnographic methods and sensitive to ambivalence and contingency, to reveal the new contours and patterns of modern power emerging in the urban frame. Contributors: Mona Abaza, Nezar AlSayyad, Paul Amar, Walter Armbrust, Vincent Battesti, Fanny Colonna, Eric Denis, Dalila ElKerdany, Yasser Elsheshtawy, Farha Ghannam, Galila El Kadi, Anouk de Koning, Petra Kuppinger, Anna Madoeuf, Catherine Miller, Nicolas Puig, Said Sadek, Omnia El Shakry, Diane Singerman, Elizabeth A. Smith, Leïla Vignal, Caroline Williams.
Cairo Cosmopolitan
Politics, Culture, and Urban Space in the New Globalized Middle East
Edited by
Diane Singerman
Paul Amar
15 October 2009
564 pp.
80 b/w illus., 21 tables, 2 maps
15X23cm
ISBN 9789774162893
For sale worldwide
$29.95
Also available by this author
Cairo Contested
Governance, Urban Space, and Global Modernity
Edited by Diane SingermanThis cross-disciplinary, ethnographic, contextualized, and empirical volume—with an updated introduction to take account of the dramatic events of early 2011—explores the meaning and significance of urban space, and maps the spatial inscription of power on the mega-city of Cairo. Suspicious of collective life and averse to power-sharing, Egyptian governance structures weaken but do not stop the public’s role in the remaking of their city. What happens to a city where neo-liberalism has scaled back public services and encouraged the privatization of public goods, while the vast majority cannot afford the effects of such policies? Who wins and loses in the “march to the modern and the global” as the government transforms urban spaces and markets in the name of growth, security, tourism, and modernity? How do Cairenes struggle with an ambiguous and vulnerable legal and bureaucratic environment when legality is a privilege affordable only to the few or the connected? This companion volume to Cairo Cosmopolitan further develops the central insights of the Cairo School of Urban Studies.
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15 November 2011
Paperback
536 pp.15X23cm
$29.95
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Cairo Contested
Governance, Urban Space, and Global Modernity
Edited by Diane SingermanThis cross-disciplinary, ethnographic, contextualized, and empirical volume—with an updated introduction to take account of the dramatic events of early 2011—explores the meaning and significance of urban space, and maps the spatial inscription of power on the mega-city of Cairo. Suspicious of collective life and averse to power-sharing, Egyptian governance structures weaken but do not stop the public’s role in the remaking of their city. What happens to a city where neo-liberalism has scaled back public services and encouraged the privatization of public goods, while the vast majority cannot afford the effects of such policies? Who wins and loses in the “march to the modern and the global” as the government transforms urban spaces and markets in the name of growth, security, tourism, and modernity? How do Cairenes struggle with an ambiguous and vulnerable legal and bureaucratic environment when legality is a privilege affordable only to the few or the connected? This companion volume to Cairo Cosmopolitan further develops the central insights of the Cairo School of Urban Studies.
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Connected in Cairo
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Mark Allen PetersonFor members of Cairo’s upper classes, cosmopolitanism is a form of social capital, deployed whenever they acquire or consume transnational commodities, or goods that are linked in the popular imagination to other, more ‘modern’ places. In a series of carefully contextualized case studies—of Arabic children’s magazines, Pokémon, private schools and popular films, coffee shops and fast-food restaurants—Mark Allen Peterson describes the social practices that create class identities. He traces these processes from childhood into adulthood, examining how taste and style intersect with a changing educational system and economic liberalization. Peterson reveals how uneasy many cosmopolitan Cairenes are with their new global identities, and describes their efforts to root themselves in the local through religious, nationalist, or linguistic practices.
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Bedouin, Settlers, and Holiday-Makers
Egypt’s Changing Northwest Coast
Donald P. ColeSoraya Altorki
The arid regions impose strict limits upon human existence and activity. And yet by respecting those limits, the flourishing and stable culture of these regions has for centuries been sustained. In the late twentieth century, however, forces such as modernization, globalization, and the politics and economics of nations became so great that major changes in the old ways had to take place for the sake of survival. Egypt’s northwest coast, where meager coastal rains have supported a sparse but thriving population of Bedouin, saw the arrival of settlers from the Nile Valley, accustomed to a very different way of life and production, and hordes of tourists whose “empty, silent structures” effectively turned the most productive strip of the coastal range into an artificial desert. This study documents the great accommodations that took place to ensure the arid rangelands of the northwest coast continue to be viable for the demands of human existence imposed on them. “A main thesis of this study,” the authors write, “is that change in the northwest coast of Egypt has strong parallels in other arid regions of the wider Arab world; and specific comparisons are made to change underway elsewhere—especially regarding the transformation of Arab nomadic pastoralist production to a new form of ranching, and the related changes of sedentarization and the monetization of most aspects of livelihood.”
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1 September 1998
e-book
266 pp.2 maps
14.5X23cm
$15.99
This book is only available for purchase from Egypt