Abstract
To explore the relationship between Wust al-Balad and contemporary Egyptian literature treating this district requires us to consider the way in which ideas of the modern impact urban space and the construction of modern Egyptian identity. By analyzing the interaction of these two narrative acts—the urban—architectural and the textual—I hope to reemphasize from a literary standpoint what Timothy Mitchell and Farha Ghannam have shown through their anthropological and theoretical studies—namely, that the battle for the modern subject was and continues to be waged in space.2 Evidence of the relationship between space and subjectivity is emergent in a number of contemporary novels. These works depict the struggle to negotiate a modern sense of Egyptian identity as the process of mapping local identity in space. In other words, situating the self within the changing urban geography of the city becomes a vehicle for coming into one’s selfhood. An understanding of the spatial logic internal to these new novels gives us, as Franco Moretti puts it, a “diagram of forces” from which we can deduce the way the social forces of the city have “produced” these novels.3 In a reciprocal turn, we can also get a sense of the way in which these novels continue to “produce the city for readers,” rendering the city as “legible” and providing a site in which space, specifically urban space, is made coherent through narration.4 Echoing this idea, Mary Pat Brady writes in the context of Chicana literary production, “Literature thrives on the intersections between the shaping powers of language and the productive powers of space … it uses space and spatial processes metaphorically to suggest emotions, insights, concepts, characters.
The modern occurs only by performing the distinction between the modern and the non-modern, the West and the non-West, each performance opening the possibility of what is figured as non-modern contaminating the modern, displacing it, or disrupting its authority.
—Timothy Mitchell, “The Stage of Modernity”1
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Notes
Timothy Mitchell, “The Stage of Modernity,” in Questions of Modernity, ed. Timothy Mitchell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 26.
Farha Ghannam, Remaking the Modern: Space, Relocation and the Politics of Identity in a Global Cairo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel: 1800–1900 (New York: Verso, 1998), 56–57.
See James Donald on how narratives produce cities. Donald, “This Here Now: Imagining the Modern City,” in Imagining Cities: Scripts, Signs, Memories, ed. Sallie Westwood and John Williams (New York: Routledge, 1997), 186–88.
Mary Pat Brady, Extinct lands, Temporal Geographies: Chicana literature and the Urgency of Space (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 8.
Nancy Reynolds, “Commodity Communities: Interweavings of Market Cultures, Consumption Practices, and Social Power in Egypt 1907–1961” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 2003), 151–73.
Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 11.
Jonathon Shannon, Under the Jasmine Trees: Music and Modernity in Contemporary Syria (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2006), 67.
Mike Crang and Nigel Thrift, eds., Thinking Space (New York: Routledge, 2000), 13.
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. D. Nicholson-Smith (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1991).
Susan Buck-Morss’s work on Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project is far more critical of Baron Haussmann’s “totalitarian” aesthetic of the imperial state than the work of David Harvey. See Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialects of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 89–90.
See also David Harvey (Paris, Capital of Modernity [New York: Routledge, 2006], 13, 107–16) on the scale of Haussmann’s projects and the role of the RER, which was designed to connect the outlying arrondissements where most of the workers and migrant laborers lived to the inner parts of the city,
See André Raymond, Cairo, trans. Willard Wood (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 291–97.
Max Rodenbeck, Cairo: The City Victorious (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1999), 162.
Lucie Ryzova, “Egyptianizing Modernity Through the ‘New Effendiya’: Social and Cultural Constructions of the Middle Class in Egypt under the Monarchy,” in Re-Envisioning Egypt: 1919–1952, ed. Arthur Goldschmidt, Amy J. Johnson, and Barak A. Salmoni (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2005), 125–26.
Ryzova, “Egyptianizing Modernity,” 130. See also Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski, “The Roots of Supra-Egyptian Nationalism,” in Redefining the Egyptian Nation, 1930–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 11, 16–22.
There seems to be a slight difference of opinion regarding the Azbakiyya gardens. Max Rodenbeck claims it was modeled after the Bois de Bologne garden in Paris, whereas André Raymond claims that it was an English-style garden modeled after the Parc Monceau in Paris. Jean-Luc Arnaud’s explanation seems to make the most sense: while the idea of a private park was definitely modeled after the English model, to avoid annual fees for the surrounding residents, the idea, modeled after the Bois de Bologne, of erecting commercial businesses surrounding the park and charging a small entrance fee seemed to be the most desirable solution. To compare, see Rodenbeck, Cairo: The City Victorious, 168; Raymond, Cairo, 315; and Jean-Luc Arnaud, Le Caire: Mise en Place d’une Ville Moderne 1867–1907 (Arles: Actes Sud, 1998), 108.
See Edward Said’s essay, “The Empire at Work: Verdi’s Aida,” on the way in which Verdi’s Aida (which was commissioned by Khedive Isma’il) represented back to the audience of foreigners an Egypt that reified their view of the Orient. In so doing, Said argues, the opera also participated in the creation of the city’s European facade. In Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1995), 111–32.
Janet Abu-Lughod, Cairo: 1001 Years of the City Victorious (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), 98.
Galila El Kadi and Dahlia ElKerdany, “Belle-Époque Cairo: The Politics of Refurbishing the Downtown Business District,” in Cairo Cosmopolitan: Politics, Culture, and Urban Space in the New Globalized Middle East, ed. Diane Singerman and Paul Amar (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2006), 353.
Laila Shukry El-Hamamsy, “The Assertion of Egyptian Identity,” in Ethnic Identity: Cultural Continuities and Change, ed. George De Vos and Lola Romanuccci-Ross (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 287.
Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 183–84.
Joseph R. Slaughter, “Master Plans: Designing (National) Allegories of Urban Space and Metropolitan Subjects for Postcolonial Kenya,” Research in African Literatures 35, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 37–38.
Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 9.
Graham Huggan, “Decolonizing the Map,” in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (New York: Rout-ledge, 2006), 356–57.
Franco Moretti, Graphs Maps and Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (New York: Verso, 2005), 64.
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© 2011 Mara Naaman
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Naaman, M. (2011). Specter of Paris. In: Urban Space in Contemporary Egyptian Literature. Literatures and Cultures of the Islamic World. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119710_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119710_2
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