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An Earwitness to History: Street Hawkers and Their Calls in Early 20th-Century Egypt

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 January 2016

Ziad Fahmy
Ziad Fahmy*
Affiliation:
Department of Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y.; e-mail: zaf3@cornell.edu
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Extract

Historians have recently started listening to the past, contributing to what David Howes has described as a “sensorial revolution in the humanities and social sciences.” In the same way that all five senses are relevant to our daily understanding of the world around us, they should be vital to our understanding of historical events. Interpreting how peoples of the past sensorially experienced their world makes possible a richer, more comprehensive grasp of historical events. A sensorially grounded historical narrative is an embodied history that is connected to everyday people and lives. Historians of the Middle East, however, with few exceptions, are still largely producing soundproof, devocalized narratives of the past.

Type
Roundtable
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 48 , Issue 1 , February 2016 , pp. 129 - 134
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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References

NOTES

1 Howes, David, The Sixth Sense Reader (London: Berg, 2009), 35Google Scholar; Bull, M.et al., “Introducing Sensory Studies,” Senses and Society 1 (2006): 5–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 For a more detailed argument about the need to incorporate sound in historical research on the Middle East, see Fahmy, Ziad, “Coming to Our Senses: Historicizing Sound and Noise in the Middle East,” History Compass 11 (2013): 305–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Ibid. See, for example: Abu-Lughod, Lila, Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Armbrust, Walter, Mass Culture and Modernism in Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Charles Hirschkind, The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006); Miller, Flagg, The Moral Resonance of Arab Media: Audiocassette Poetry and Culture in Yemen (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Kraidy, Marwan, Reality Television and Arab Politics: Contention in Public Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kapchan, Deborah, Traveling Spirit Masters: Moroccan Gnawa Trance and Music in the Global Marketplace (Middleton, Conn.:Wesleyan University Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Swedenburg, Ted, “Egypt's Music of Protest: From Sayyid Darwish to DJ Haha,” Middle East Report 42 (2012): 39–43Google Scholar; and Gordon, Joel, “Singing the Pulse of the Egyptian–Arab Street: Shaaban Abd Al-Rahim and the Geo-Pop-Politics of Fast Food,” Popular Music 22 (2003): 73–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Because it engages with some of the burgeoning literature in sound studies, Hirschkind's The Ethical Soundscape is a particularly good starting point for future studies on historical Middle Eastern soundscapes.

4 Schaffer, R. Murray, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Rochester, Vt.: Destiny Books, 1994Google Scholar [1977]), 8.

5 For one of the few articles on olfactory history by a historian of the Middle East, see Fahmy, Khaled, “An Olfactory Tale of Two Cities: Cairo in the Nineteenth Century,” in Historians in Cairo: Essays in Honor of George Scanlon, ed. Edwards, Jill (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2002), 155–87Google Scholar.

6 See Heyworth-Dunne, James, “A Selection of Cairo's Street Cries (Referring to Vegetables, Fruit, Flowers and Food),” Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies 9 (1938): 351–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Ibid., 352–53.

8 Ibid., 354.

9 Fahmy, Ziad, Ordinary Egyptians: Creating the Modern Nation through Popular Culture (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2011)Google Scholar.

10 Schaffer, The Soundscape, 180.

11 Sterne, Jonathan, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003), 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 See, for example, Fahmy, Ordinary Egyptians; Stanton, Andrea, “This Is Jerusalem Calling”: State Radio in Mandate Palestine (Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 2014)Google Scholar; Carole Woodall, “Sensing the City: Sound, Movement, and the Night in 1920s Istanbul” (PhD diss., New York University, 2008); Adam Mestyan, “Sound, Military Music, and Opera in Egypt during the Rule of Mehmet Ali Pasha (r. 1805–1848),” in Ottoman Empire and European Theatre, vol. 2, The Time of Joseph Haydn—From Sultan Mahmud I to Mahmud II (r. 1730–1839), ed. Michael Huttler and Hans Ernst Weidinger (Vienna: Hollitzer Wissenschaftsverlag, 2014), 631–56.

13 Ziad Fahmy, “Coming to Our Senses,” 305–15. For ethnomusicological works on the Middle East dealing with some of these issues, see Frédéric Lagrange, “Musiciens et poètes en Égypte au temps de la nahda” (PhD diss., Université de Paris à Saint-Denis, 1994); Danielson, Virginia, The Voice of Egypt: Umm Kalthum, Arabic Song, and Egyptian Society in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Racy, Ali Jihad, Making Music in the Arab World: the Culture and Artistry of Tarab (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)Google Scholar; Stokes, Martin, The Republic of Love: Cultural Intimacy in Turkish Popular Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jankowsky, Richard C., Stambeli: Music, Trance, and Alterity in Tunisia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Van Nieuwkerk, Karin, A Trade Like Any Other: Female Singers and Dancers in Egypt (Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 1995)Google Scholar.