¹ Among others, Ted Swedenburg, “Egypt's Music of Protest: From Sayyid Darwish to DJ Haha,” Middle East Report 265 (2012), http://www.merip.org/mer/mer265/egypts-music-protest; el-Hamamsy, Walid and Soliman, Mounira, “The Aesthetics of Revolution: Popular Creativity and the Egyptian Spring,” in Popular Culture in the Middle East and North Africa: A Postcolonial Outlook, ed. el-Hamamsy, Walid and Soliman, Mounira (London: Routledge, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Abaza, Mona, “Walls, Segregating Downtown Cairo and the Mohammed Mahmud Street Graffiti,” Theory, Culture & Society 30, no. 1 (2013): 122–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mona Abaza, “Mourning, Narratives and Interactions with the Martyrs through Cairo's Graffiti,” E-International Relations, 7 October 2013, http://www.e-ir.info/2013/10/07/mourning-narratives-and-interactions-with-the-martyrs-through-cairos-graffiti/; Valassopoulos, Anastasia and Mostafa, Dalia S., “Popular Protest Music and the 2011 Egyptian Revolution,” Popular Music and Society 37, no. 5 (2014): 638–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Kraidy, Marwan, The Naked Blogger of Cairo: Creative Insurgency in the Arab World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017)Google Scholar.

² On ‘Ukasha, see Armbrust, Walter, “The Trickster in Egypt's January 25th Revolution,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 55, no. 4 (2013): 834–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³ Among others, Bellin, Eva, “Reconsidering the Robustness of Authoritarianism: Lessons of the Arab Spring,” Comparative Politics 44, no. 2 (2012): 127–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brownlee, Jason, Masoud, Tarek, and Reynolds, Andrew, The Arab Spring: Pathways of Repression and Reform (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Ketchley, Neil, Egypt in a Time of Revolution: Contentious Politics and the Arab Spring (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴ Schwedler, Jillian, “Comparative Politics and the Arab Uprisings,” Middle East Law and Governance 7, no. 1 (2015): 141–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵ Wedeen, Lisa, “Conceptualizing Culture: Possibilities for Political Science,” American Political Science Review 96, no. 4 (2002): 713–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶ Ibid.

⁷ Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, trans. Quinton Hoare (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971), 161. I have previously studied the construction of regime hegemony through the reproduction of particular notions of Egyptian identity and nationalism. For example, see Nicola Pratt, “Identity, Culture, and Democratization: The Case of Egypt,” New Political Science 27, no. 1 (2005): 69–86.

⁸ This project, entitled “Politics and Popular Culture: Contested Narratives of the 25 January 2011 Revolution and its Aftermath,” was funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (no. AH/N004353/1) and was conducted by Nicola Pratt, Dalia Mostafa, Dina Rezk, and Sara Salem. The project website can be found at https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/research/researchcentres/cpd/popularcultureegypt/. An online archive based on the project called “Politics, Popular Culture and the 2011 Egyptian Revolution” can be found at https://egyptrevolution2011.ac.uk/.

⁹ For a useful discussion of different definitions of popular culture, see John Storey, Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2010), 5–11.

¹⁰ Walid el-Hamamsy and Mounira Soliman, “Introduction: Popular Culture—A Site of Resistance,” in Popular Culture in the Middle East and North Africa, 1–2.

¹¹ James R. Grippo, “The Fool Sings a Hero's Song: Shaaban Abdel Rahim, Egyptian Shaabi, and the Video Clip Phenomenon,” Transnational Broadcasting Studies 16 (2006), https://www.arabmediasociety.com/the-fool-sings-a-heros-song-shaaban-abdel-rahim-egyptian-shaabi-and-the-video-clip-phenomenon/.

¹² Farah Montasser, “A Year of El-Fan Midan in Egypt,” Ahram Online, 10 April 2012, http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/5/0/38785/Arts--Culture/0/A-year-of-ElFan-Midan-in-Egypt.aspx.

¹³ Stuart Hall, “Notes on Deconstructing the ‘Popular,’” in People's History and Socialist Theory, ed. Raphael Samuel (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 1981), 234.

¹⁴ El-Hamamsy and Soliman, “Introduction,” 1–2.

¹⁵ Such attitudes toward culture are elaborated in Winegar, Jessica, Creative Reckonings: The Politics of Art and Culture in Contemporary Egypt (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006)Google Scholar. For a discussion of the relationship between intellectuals and the people in the context of the 2011 Egyptian revolution, see el-Desouki, Ayman, The Intellectual and the People in Egyptian Literature and Culture (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a discussion of the politics motivating the organizers of El-Fann Midan, see Sprengel, Darci, “Loud and Quiet Politics: Questioning the Role of the Artist in Street Art Projects after the 2011 Revolution,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 23, no. 2 (2020): 208–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁶ Winegar, Jessica, “A Civilised Revolution: Aesthetics and Political Action in Egypt,” American Ethnologist 43, no. 4 (2016): 609–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁷ Marie-Jeanne Berger, “Cultural Enlightenment for Cairo's Downtown Futures,” Mada, 17 July 2014, https://madamasr.com/en/2014/07/17/feature/culture/cultural-enlightenment-for-cairos-downtown-futures/.

¹⁸ Swedenburg, “Egypt's Music.”

¹⁹ Tarek Adam Benchouia, “Festivals: The Culture and Politics of Mahraganat Music in Egypt” (MA thesis, University of Texas at Austin, 2015).

²⁰ See the 2013 feature documentary Ele Beheb Rabena Erfaa Edoh Lefook, dir. Salma el-Tarzi, which explores the mahraganat music scene in Cairo.

²¹ Elliott Colla, “The People Want,” Middle East Report, 263 (2012), http://www.merip.org/mer/mer263/people-want.

²² el-Falaky, Mai Samir, “The Representation of Women in Street Songs: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Egyptian Mahraganat,” Advances in Language and Literary Studies 6, no. 5 (2015)Google Scholar.

²³ Bennett, Tony, “Popular Culture and the Turn to Gramsci,” in Popular Culture and Social Relations, ed. Bennett, Tony, Mercer, Colin, and Woollacott, Janet (Milton Keynes, UK: Open University Press, 1986), xvGoogle Scholar.

²⁴ Benchouia, “Festivals.”

²⁵ Ismail, Salwa, Political Life in Cairo's New Quarters: Encountering the Everyday State (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006)Google Scholar.

²⁶ ‘Ali al-Haggar, “Ihna Sha‘b wa Intu Sha‘b,” July 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lE58cI5cAxA&feature=youtu.be.

²⁷ Pratt, Nicola and Rezk, Dina, “Securitizing the Muslim Brotherhood: State Violence and Authoritarianism in Egypt after the Arab Spring,” Security Dialogue 50, no. 3 (2019): 239–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁸ Mohamed Andeel, Souvenir Portrait of the Great Egyptian Family (in Arabic), al-Masry al-Youm Online, July 2013. Reprinted at https://africacartoons.com/mohamed-andeel-a-picture-of-egyptian-people/.