Literary Neo-Orientalism and the Arab Uprisings Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Series Editor’s Foreword
- 1 From Tahrir to Terror: Neo-Orientalism and the ‘Arab Spring’
- 2 The Arab Uprisings and the Western Literary Market
- 3 Precarity Far and Near: The Arab Uprisings in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s Par le feu and Jonas Lüscher’s Frühling der Barbaren
- 4 Affective Masculinity and the Arab Uprisings: Adam Thirlwell’s Kapow! and Jochen Beyse’s Rebellion
- 5 Figurations of Terror: The Islamist Rage Boy in Karim Alrawi’s Book of Sands and Mathias Énard’s Rue des voleurs
- 6 The Arab Uprisings between Inequality, Insecurity and Identity
- References
- Index
2 - The Arab Uprisings and the Western Literary Market
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 August 2023
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Series Editor’s Foreword
- 1 From Tahrir to Terror: Neo-Orientalism and the ‘Arab Spring’
- 2 The Arab Uprisings and the Western Literary Market
- 3 Precarity Far and Near: The Arab Uprisings in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s Par le feu and Jonas Lüscher’s Frühling der Barbaren
- 4 Affective Masculinity and the Arab Uprisings: Adam Thirlwell’s Kapow! and Jochen Beyse’s Rebellion
- 5 Figurations of Terror: The Islamist Rage Boy in Karim Alrawi’s Book of Sands and Mathias Énard’s Rue des voleurs
- 6 The Arab Uprisings between Inequality, Insecurity and Identity
- References
- Index
Summary
The Midan has been our Holy Grail for forty years. Since 1972, when (then-president) Sadat’s forces dragged the student protestors at dawn from around the empty plinth at its center and into jail, demonstrations and marches have tried and failed to get into Tahrir. Two years ago we managed to hold a corner of a traffic island in front of the Mugammaȝ building for an hour. We were fewer than fifty people, and the government surrounded us with maybe two thousand Central Security soldiers, the chests and shoulders of their officers heavy with brass …
[A]s well as housing the symbols of military and political power, Tahrir is home to the civic spirit of Egypt. The Egyptian Antiquities Museum (1902) marks the northern end of the Midan, and when in 1908 the Egyptian national movement founded – through public donations – the first secular Egyptian University, they rented the palace of Khawaga Gianaclus – now the old campus of the American University in Cairo – at the other end … And early in the 1952 revolution, the small mosque near the Mugammaȝ was enlarged and dedicated to Sheikh Omar Makram, the popular leader against Napoleon’s French Expedition in 1798, against the British ‘Fraser’ Expedition of 1807, and later against Muhammed Ali himself when Sheikh Omar felt the ruler was taxing the people unfairly. Omar Makram died in exile, but his statue is part of our revolution; a meeting place, an inspiration, a bearer of flags and microphones and balloons.
In Cairo: Memoir of a City Transformed, Ahdaf Soueif – activist, commentator and one of Egypt’s internationally most well-known authors – takes the reader through the first year of the Egyptian revolution. Unlike most Western representations of the Arab uprisings, Soueif’s memoir does not portray the Egyptian uprisings as an unprecedented upsurge of a hitherto unknown revolutionary energy which was suddenly sparked by Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation in Tunisia. Instead, passages such as the one quoted above provide historical depth to the uprisings. Thereby, they do not only give the reader an idea of the long history of dissidence, but they also allow for the fact that ‘[f]or many Egyptians, 2011 was a continuation of the 1977 “Bread Riots” that were a continuation of the 1952 revolution that was a continuation of the 1919 revolution.’
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- Literary Neo-Orientalism and the Arab UprisingsTensions in English, French and German Language Fiction, pp. 33 - 52Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2022