Ordinary Egyptians Creating the Modern Nation through Popular Culture [Hardcover]

The popular culture of pre-revolution Egypt did more than entertainit created a nation. Songs, jokes, and satire, comedic sketches, plays, and poetry, all provided an opportunity for discussion and debate about national identity and an outlet for resistance to British and elite authority. This book examines how, from the 1870s until the eve of the 1919 revolution, popular media and culture provided ordinary Egyptians with a framework to construct and negotiate a modern national identity.

Ordinary Egyptiansshifts the typical focus of study away from the intellectual elite to understand the rapid politicization of the growing literate middle classes and brings the semi-literate and illiterate urban masses more fully into the historical narrative. It introduces the concept of media-capitalism, which expands the analysis of nationalism beyond print alone to incorporate audiovisual and performance media. It was through these various media that a collective camaraderie crossing class lines was formed and, as this book uncovers, an Egyptian national identity emerged.

Examines how popular media and culture provided ordinary Egyptians with a framework to construct and negotiate a modern national identity. His book poses probing questions about the sources used to trace the emergence of Egyptian national identity, as well as the cultural and linguistic assumptions underlying the reading of these sources. . . [P]erhaps the signal contribution of this book is its emphasis on the oral/aural dimension of the nationalist movement, which has certainly not been given its due in historical treatments of Egypt's identity debates. . .Ordinary Egyptiansofferes a stimulating and valuable re-examination of the formative decades of Egyptian nationalism. This refreshing new work fills a significant gap and opens a path for further research on how class and literary taste functioned in the early stages of Egyptian national identity formation. Fahmy places the vel³=