Egypt's Culture Wars Politics and Practice [Paperback]

This ground-breaking work presents original research on cultural politics and battles in Egypt at the turn of the twenty first century. It deconstructs the boundaries between high and low culture drawing on conceptual tools in cultural studies, translation studies and gender studies to analyze debates in the fields of literature, cinema, mass media and the plastic arts.

Anchored in the Egyptian historical and social contexts and inspired by the influential work of Pierre Bourdieu, it rigorously places these debates and battles within the larger framework of a set of questions about the relationship between the cultural and political fields in Egypt.

Introduction  Prologue: Take Them Out of the Ball Game: Egyptian Cultural Players in Crisis  Part 1: Inside the Literary Establishment: Power Struggles and Dreams of Autonomy  1. Dr. Ramzi and Mr. Sharaf: Sonallah Ibrahim and the Duplicity of the Literary Field  2. Children of Our Alley: The AUC Naguib Mahfouz Award and the Egyptian Cultural Field  3. The Big One: The Intellectual and the Political in Modern Egyptian Literature  4. The Value of Freedom: The Writer vs. the Literary Establishment  Part 2: Remaking Culture: Emerging Institutions, Discourses, Icons and Metaphors  5. Lost in Globalization: Education and the Stranded Egyptian Elite  6. Translating Gender between the Local and the Global  7. Where Have All the Families Gone: Egyptian Literary Texts of the Nineties  8. From the hara to the imara: Emerging Urban Metaphors in Contemporary Texts on Cairo  Part 3: The Bounds of Change: State, Street, and Self Censorship  9. Taking the Soap out of the Opera: The Case of Hagg Mitwallis Family  10. The New Kid on the Block: Bahibb issima (I love cinemal3¢