Cairo Cosmopolitan Reviews

In the cities of the Arab world, while the media focus overwhelmingly on questions of religiosity and war, the future of urban modernity and political globalism is taking shape. As the Egyptian state reaches out to capture the apparent promises of neoliberalism, Cairenes struggle over and redefine their place, identity, and material welfare. 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. Luxury malls owned by the military or foreign investors compete with flourishing but criminalized open-air markets; Nubian, Upper Egyptian and labor-migrant identities confront a renaissance of Arab nationalism; and new chic coffee houses, crumbling movie palaces, and resurgent working-class cultures offer radically clashing versions of public and gender sociability. This volume launches 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. Cairo shows us that divergent cosmopolitanisms—both elite and working-class—are emerging across a broad spectrum of the polity, making new claims for political space, recognition, and representation. 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.

From the politics of food to images in the media, this double issue of Cairo Papers in Social Science focuses on a wide array of emerging cultural patterns in modern-day Egypt and their social, political, and economic ramifications. All the contributions are based on papers delivered at the Cairo Papers Thirteenth Annual Symposium in May 2004, and cover four broad areas: media and language, Islamic marketing, taste and public space, and food and markets. Contributors include Ray Bush (‘Staying Hungry: Food Politics in Egypt and the Near East’), Sami Zubaida (‘Food: Egypt and the Middle East’), Lilia Labidi (‘Truth Claims in the Cartoon World of Nagui Kamel’), Madiha Doss (‘Cultural Dynamics and Linguistic Practice in Contemporary Egypt’), Huda Lutfi (‘Mulid Culture in Cairo: The Case of al-Sayyida A’isha’), Maha Abdelrahman (‘Divine Consumption: Islamic Goods in Egypt’), Iman A. Hamdy (‘Watch for the Devil: Israel in Egyptian Movies and Soap Operas’), Malak S. Rouchdy (‘Food Recipes and the Kitchen Space: The Construction of Social Identities and New Frontiers’), and Reem Saad (‘Transforming the Meaning and Value of Traditional Crafts in Egypt’). Cairo Papers Vol. 27, nos. 1 & 2.