Sara Salem - Anticolonial Afterlives in Egypt (The Global Middle East)

Arshin Adib-Moghaddam, SOAS, University of London

Ali Mirsepassi, New York University

The Global Middle East series seeks to broaden and deconstruct the geographical boundaries of the Middle East as a concept to include North Africa, Central and South Asia, and diaspora communities in Western Europe and North America. The series features fresh scholarship that employs theoretically rigorous and innovative methodological frameworks resonating across relevant disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences. In particular, the general editors welcome approaches that focus on mobility, the erosion of nation-state structures, travelling ideas and theories, transcendental techno-politics, the decentralization of grand narratives, and the dislocation of ideologies inspired by popular movements. The series will also consider translations of works by authors in these regions whose ideas are salient to global scholarly trends but have yet to be introduced to the Anglophone academy.

Anticolonial Afterlives in Egypt

The Politics of Hegemony

Sara Salem

London School of Economics and Political Science

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Sara Salem 2020

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ISBN 978-1-108-49151-8 Hardback

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For my parents, Mamdouh and Marlie, and my sister Nancy

This was a difficult book to finish. It left me feeling as though some moments, some events, simply cant be captured in academic prose. At times, trying to understand, analyse, and make sense of revolutionary shifts felt like an injustice to emotive experiences, to the hopes, dreams, and setbacks millions of people went through and continue to go through. In some ways, the book remains unfinished precisely because of my doubts around making sense of or understanding monumental events. Because this book explores revolutionary loss, juxtaposing it alongside its twin, revolutionary hope, it is one that is always open to interpretation, and I hope that what is written within these pages is not the final story of revolution in Egypt.

In other ways, it was important to me to think through a story of revolution in Egypt that centred afterlives and how they reverberate into the present in the most unexpected ways. This is my humble contribution to the broader project of recovering the centrality and emotive significance of the anticolonial moment, made up of much more than state-led projects that came to dominate the postcolonial world. My sense is that the afterlives of anticolonialism have been powerful enough to seep into and structure the present. The futures that were imagined and the ones that were ultimately created can tell us a lot about where we are today, where we came from, and where we might go.

Despite the focus on Egyptian anticolonial afterlives, this story could not have been told without the events of 2011. Those momentous days illustrate just how entangled revolutionary hope and revolutionary loss always are and how long it can take to think through, feel, and write about what takes place during moments of revolutionary change. It was often eerie writing about anticolonial revolution at a time when Egypt was going through another revolution; I realize now that it was not a coincidence these two moments felt connected.