Saturday, October 31th 1:00 – 2:30

Session Room: Studio Theatre

1) Carmen Gitre, Virginia Tech
Producing Modern Egypt, Performing Morality: Cairo in the 1910s

On April 5, 1913, the Khedivial Opera House in Cairo opened a new season with a serious drama entitled Misr al-Jadida wa Misr al-Qadima (New Egypt and Old Egypt). Written by journalist and playwright Farah Antun and performed by the troupe of esteemed actor George Abyad, the play garnered positive reviews from the Arabic press that encouraged people to attend what they dubbed the first truly “Egyptian play.”

But neither Antun nor Abyad were originally Egyptian.  Both were Syrian Christian immigrants to Egypt, and both were heavily influenced by French culture.  Furthermore, public theater and performance were not new in Egypt. For centuries street theater had thrived in shadow plays, storytelling, and various other manifestations.  In coffeehouses and residential streets, entertainers invited spectators to play along as they performed fantastical stories that often delivered political messages and social criticism. So what was it that made the press consider the fruit of Antun’s and Abyad’s collaboration an unprecedented form of indigenous expression?

Misr al-Jadida’s perceived newness and authenticity, I argue, was intimately tied to the play’s content, context, and spaces in which it, and other plays like it, were performed. This paper suggests that while modern theaters of early twentieth-century Egypt entertained, they also served as cultural and ideological frontiers where sundry voices gathered, collaborated, and debated their prescriptions for building a modern Egyptian society. At the forefront of those who mediated and populated this frontier was a new social group, the effendiyya. Of diverse social and ethnic origins, effendis shared a faith in the promise of modernity and the conviction that they were to be its arbiters. In seemingly benign theatrical spaces, effendi playwrights, translators, and performers blended indigenous and foreign performative practices to reflect and critique society. In the process, they promulgated a self-reflective “modern” Egyptian identity.

2) Sarah Dwider, University of North Texas
The Redefined Fellahin: New Nationalist Imagery in the Work of Nasserist Era Egyptian Modernists

In 1919, spurred by developing nationalist fervor in Egypt, sculptor Mahmoud Moukhtar created Nahdet Misr. Depicting a fellaha woman gazing resolutely forward, arm embracing a phaoronic sphinx, this statue became celebrated as an image of Egyptian nationalism. Decades later, traces of Moukhtar’s first engagement with the fellahin – members of Egypt’s farming communities – as nationalist iconography found new emphasis in the work of Nasserist Era Egyptian artists. While contemporary scholarship has widely dismissed the use of the fellah in art created after the 1952 Revolution as tired repetition of imagery innovated by early modernists, this paper contends that the use of fellah imagery after 1952 was not repetition, but an active reengagement that allowed artists to trace the nation’s post-revolution transition through the collective body of the fellahin.

Under Egypt’s new socialist reforms, the development of industry and infrastructure became one of the government’s highest priorities, and the fellahin were sought out as a new source of industrial labor. The fellahin had long been regarded as the bearers of Egyptian authenticity and cultural heritage through their connection to the land, and their transition from village farmers to urban industrial laborers was of particular interest to artists in reevaluating the significance of the fellah as an iconographical marker. New depictions prominently featured fellahin engaged in industrial projects and occupying newly developed urban space. While early Egyptian modernists had employed the symbol of the fellah as a means of representing an essential Egyptian identity unaltered by time, by representing the fellahin as new revolutionary labor and documenting their transition away from traditional village life, artists sought to reactivate the fellah icon in response to their own revolutionary context.

3) Shana Minkin, University of the South
Dying to be French:  French consular death registries in late nineteenth-century Alexandria, Egypt

This paper asks questions of colonial governance, cosmopolitanism, and nationalism in Alexandria, Egypt, and the Nile Delta under British Empire in the late nineteenth century. Specifically, I look at the death registries of the French Consulate of Alexandria to illuminate the myriad definitions of the category of French. Although under British influence, Alexandria was a city populated by people from all over the globe.  Those documented as French dead  covered a plethora of nationalities, representing French citizens, Algerian and Tunisian Muslims and Jews, Swiss, German, Polish, and other European Catholics, and even Chinese nationals, Americans, and a British man. Why were these diverse bodies registered with the French consulate once dead? What can the multiplicity of names and nationalities, as well as the geographic diversity of the dead all over the Nile Delta, tell us about the living French community and the reach of the French consulate  - and therefore French political cache - in British Alexandria?

I argue here that by serving as the documenters, and hence the caretakers, of these dead bodies, the French demonstrated to the living population of the Nile Delta that they could serve as their guardians in this British-ruled, foreign land. The French announced themselves thusly as protectors not only of Catholics and French colonial subjects, but as governing powers in competition with the British in Egypt as a whole. Moreover, Alexandria as a city space proves to be much more than a mythical ‘cosmopolitan’ city oriented towards Europe. Instead, it is the epicenter of an internal Egyptian network, stretching the entirety of the Nile Delta and linking the colonial powers of the city to the countryside and beyond.