Dalia Mostafa - Women, Culture, and the January 2011 Egyptian Revolution

This book comes at a time when the Egyptian nation is facing deep divisions about the notion and definition of revolution. The articles here aim to look at the 2011 Egyptian Revolution and the central role of women within it from a critical perspective. Our objective is not to glorify the revolution or inflate the role of Egyptian women within its parameters, but to analyse and critique both the achievements and setbacks of this revolution and the contributions of various strata of women to the revolutionary process, which is still unfolding. Womens participation is part of a broader picture and needs to be considered as an essential element of the ongoing struggle for freedom and social justice, not in isolation of it. The reader will soon realise that the authors in this book, perhaps, agree on one profound aspect of the 2011 revolution: the struggle is ongoing, and the revolutionary process is still being shaped and recreated. The story of the Egyptian Revolution still resists any kind of closure despite the ascendance of the military regime once again to power. The years to come will no doubt witness an expansion of the political and cultural archive of the Egyptian and Arab uprisings, accompanied by much academic work on their impact and significance. Womens roles and contributions need to occupy a central position in these academic analyses.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal for Cultural Research.

Dalia Said Mostafa is a Lecturer in Arabic and Comparative Literature at the University of Manchester, UK. Her forthcoming book is entitled The Egyptian Military in Popular Culture: Context and Critique. She has published studies in both Arabic and English on contemporary Arabic fiction, Arab cinema, and popular culture in Egypt.

Edited by

Dalia Said Mostafa

First published 2017

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 13: 978-1-138-66873-7

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Publishers Note

The publisher accepts responsibility for any inconsistencies that may have arisen during the conversion of this book from journal articles to book chapters, namely the possible inclusion of journal terminology.

Disclaimer

Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders for their permission to reprint material in this book. The publishers would be grateful to hear from any copyright holder who is not here acknowledged and will undertake to rectify any errors or omissions in future editions of this book.

The chapters in this book were originally published in the Journal for Cultural Research, volume 19, issue 2 (June 2015). When citing this material, please use the original page numbering for each article, as follows:

Introduction

Egyptian women, revolution, and protest culture

Dalia Said Mostafa

Journal for Cultural Research, volume 19, issue 2 (June 2015), pp. 118129

Chapter 1

Action, imagination, institution, natality, revolution

Ziad Elmarsafy

Journal for Cultural Research, volume 19, issue 2 (June 2015), pp. 130138

Chapter 2

Egypts revolution, our revolution: revolutionary women and the transnational avant-garde

Caroline Rooney

Journal for Cultural Research, volume 19, issue 2 (June 2015), pp. 139149

Chapter 3

Inserting womens rights in the Egyptian constitution: personal reflections

Hala Kamal

Journal for Cultural Research, volume 19, issue 2 (June 2015), pp. 150161

Chapter 4

Egyptian women, revolution and the making of a visual public sphere

Fakhri Haghani

Journal for Cultural Research, volume 19, issue 2 (June 2015), pp. 162175

Chapter 5

A multimodal analysis of selected Cairokee songs of the Egyptian revolution and their representation of women

Nadia A. Shalaby

Journal for Cultural Research, volume 19, issue 2 (June 2015), pp. 176198

Chapter 6

Gender and Tahrir Square: contesting the state and imagining a new nation

Ahmed Kadry

Journal for Cultural Research, volume 19, issue 2 (June 2015), pp. 199206

Chapter 7

To write/to revolt: Egyptian women novelists writing the revolution

Sherine Fouad Mazloum

Journal for Cultural Research, volume 19, issue 2 (June 2015), pp. 207220

Chapter 8

Giving memory a future: women, writing, revolution

Roger Bromley

Journal for Cultural Research, volume 19, issue 2 (June 2015), pp. 221232

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Roger Bromley is a visiting professor at Lancaster University, UK, Emeritus Professor in Cultural Studies and Honorary Professor of Sociology at the University of Nottingham, UK, and Associate Fellow at Rhodes University, South Africa. He worked for 44 years in a range of UK Higher Education institutions, as well as lecturing in more than 20 countries overseas. He is the author of Lost Narratives: Popular Fictions and Politics (1988); Narratives for a New Belonging: Diasporic Cultural Fictions (2000); From Alice to Buena Vista: The Cinema of Wim Wenders (2001); and four other books. As well as publishing articles on conflict, post-conflict, and reconciliation (Rwanda, Bosnia, South Africa, and Palestine), his research interests also include migration, diaspora, and cinematic representations of refugees and asylum seekers. His current project is Giving Memory a Future: Narratives of Conflict, Displacement and Reconciliation.

Ziad Elmarsafy is Professor and Head of the Department of Comparative Literature, Kings College London, UK. He is the author of Sufism in the Contemporary Arabic Novel (2012), and the co-editor, with Anna Bernard and Stuart Murray, of What Postcolonial Theory Doesnt Say (Routledge, 2015).

Fakhri Haghani teaches Comparative Studies of Culture and History in Iran and the Middle East at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Rutgers University, USA. She has numerous publications exploring the intersections of gender, sexuality and womens rights movements, politics of visual culture, popular culture, political arts, and social and intellectual history as multi-faceted manifestations of the contested identities in Iran and other societies of the Middle East. Her research interests combine interdisciplinary, transnational, and comparative theoretical approaches including, womens and gender studies, media and performance studies, and cultural studies. She has also served as a co-chair and a co-founding member of Human Rights Atlanta, an activist branch of the Centre for Human Rights Education in Atlanta.