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As the twentieth century roared on, transformative technologies—from trains, trams, and automobiles to radios and loudspeakers—fundamentally changed the sounds of the Egyptian streets. The cacophony of everyday life grew louder, and the Egyptian press featured editorials calling for the regulation of not only mechanized and amplified sounds, but also the voices of street vendors, the music of wedding processions, and even the traditional funerary wails. Ziad Fahmy offers the first historical examination of the changing soundscapes of urban Egypt, highlighting the mundane sounds of street life, while "listening" to the voices of ordinary people as they struggle with state authorities for ...
Examines how popular media and culture provided ordinary Egyptians with a framework to construct and negotiate a modern national identity.
This fast-paced and timely book from Vijay Prashad is the best critical primer to the Middle East conflicts today, from Syria and Saudi Arabia to the chaos in Turkey. Mixing thrilling anecdotes from street-level reporting that give readers a sense of what is at stake with a bird's-eye view of the geopolitics of the region and the globe, Prashad guides us through the dramatic changes in players, politics, and economics in the Middle East over the last five years. “The Arab Spring was defeated neither in the byways of Tahrir Square nor in the souk of Aleppo,” he explains. “It was defeated roundly in the palaces of Riyadh and Ankara as well as in Washington, DC and Paris.” The heart of ...
Between the 1890s and 1920s, cities in the vast region stretching from the Mediterranean Sea to the Indian Ocean were experiencing political, social, economic, and cultural changes that had been set in motion at least since the early nineteenth century. As the age of pre-colonial empires gave way to colonial and national states, there was a sense that a particular liberalism of culture and economy had been irretrievably lost to a more intolerant age. Avoiding such dichotomies as East/West and modernity/tradition, this book provides a comparative analysis of contested versions of the concept of modernity. The book examines not only the "high" culture of scholars and the literati, but also popular music, the visual arts, and journalism. The contributors incorporate discussion of the way in which the business in both commodities and ideas was conducted in the increasingly cosmopolitan cities of the time.
For many Egyptians in the early twentieth century, the biggest national problem was not British domination or the Great Depression but a "marriage crisis" heralded in the press as a devastating rise in the number of middle-class men refraining from marriage. Voicing anxieties over a presumed increase in bachelorhood, Egyptians also used the failings of Egyptian marriage to criticize British rule, unemployment, the disintegration of female seclusion, the influx of women into schools, middle-class materialism, and Islamic laws they deemed incompatible with modernity. For Better, For Worse explores how marriage became the lens through which Egyptians critiqued larger socioeconomic and political concerns. Delving into the vastly different portrayals and practices of marriage in both the press and the Islamic court records, this innovative look at how Egyptians understood marital and civil rights and duties during the early twentieth century offers fresh insights into ongoing debates about nationalism, colonialism, gender, and the family.
As Algeria became connected to international news networks during French colonial rule in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this study examines how news spread through communities and across social divides, how new media changed the communication landscape, and how surveillance by the French government played a role.
While previous scholarship has viewed Mehmed Ali Pasha as the founder of modern Egypt, Khaled Fahmy offers a new interpretation of his role in the rise of Egyptian nationalism, locating him in the Ottoman context as an ambitious Ottoman reformer. Basing his work on previously neglected archival material, the author demonstrates how Mehmed Ali sought to develop the Egyptian economy and to build up the army, not as a means of gaining Egyptian independence from the Ottoman Empire, but to further his own ambitions for hereditary rule over the province. In its analysis of nation-building and the construction of state power, the book makes a significant contribution to the larger theoretical debates. It will therefore be essential reading for students in the field, as well as for Ottomanists, military historians and those interested in the development of the modern nation-state.
The story of Osiris is one of the central cultural myths of ancient Egypt, a story of dismemberment and religious passion that also exemplifies attitudes about personal identity, sexuality, and the transfer of royal power. It is, moreover, a story of death and the overcoming of death, and in this it lies at the center of our own means of engagement with ancient Egypt. ReMembering Osiris takes as its focus this tale as it is recorded in Egyptian texts and memorialized on the walls of temples and tombs. Since such a focus is attainable only through Egyptian representational systems, especially hieroglyphs, the book also engages broader questions of writing and visual representation: decipherment, controversies about the "ideograph," and the relation between visual images and writing.
In this innovative history of reading and writing, Hoda Yousef explores how the idea of literacy and its practices fundamentally altered the social fabric of Egypt at the turn of the twentieth century. She traces how nationalists, Islamic modernists, bureaucrats, journalists, and early feminists sought to reform reading habits, writing styles, and the Arabic language itself in their hopes that the right kind of literacy practices would create the right kind of Egyptians. The impact of new reading and writing practices went well beyond the elites and the newly literate of Egyptian society, and this book reveals the increasingly ubiquitous reading and writing practices of literate, illiterate,...
"An anthology of Arabic texts and English translations of works from the Arab Renaissance (Nahda) on modernity, language, gender, transnationalism, literary criticism, politics, travel, social justice, technology, history, and commerce. The edition is designed for the classroom, with an introduction, translator's note, and textual notes for students and teachers"--