Egypt's Culture Wars: Politics and Practice

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.

Samia Mehrez is Professor at the Department of Arab and Islamic Civilizations, American University in Cairo, Egypt.

List of plates
Introduction	p. 1
Prologue: Take them out of the ball game - Egypt's cultural players in crisis	p. 14
Inside the literary establishment: power struggles and dreams of autonomy	p. 23
Dr. Ramzi and Mr. Sharaf: Sonallah Ibrahim and the duplicity of the literary field	p. 25
Children of our alley: the AUC Naguib Mahfouz Award and the Egyptian literary field	p. 41
The big one: the intellectual and the political in modern Egyptian literature	p. 58
The value of freedom: the writer against the establishment	p. 72
Remaking culture: emerging institutions, discourses, icons and metaphors	p. 89
Lost in globalization: education and the stranded Egyptian elite	p. 91
Translating gender between the local and the global	p. 107
Where have all the families gone? Egyptian literary texts of the 1990s	p. 123
From the hara to the imara: emerging urban metaphors in the literary production on contemporary Cairo	p. 144
The bounds of change: state, street and self-censorship	p. 169
Taking the soap out of the opera: the case of Hagg Mitwalli's Family	p. 171
The new kid on the block: Bahibb issima and the emergence of the Coptic community in the Egyptian public sphere	p. 188
Found in Cairo: the limits of representation in the visual field	p. 208
Literature and literalism: the Al-Khubz al-hafi crisis reconsidered	p. 229
Epilogue	p. 251
Appendices	p. 253
Notes	p. 276
Bibliography	p. 314
Index	p. 325
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Egypt's Culture Wars: Politics and Practice

Summary

Author Biography

Table of Contents

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