Sensing the City: Representations of Cairo's Harat al-Yahud
Deborah Starr2006, Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History
Sign up for access to the world's latest research
checkGet notified about relevant papers
checkSave papers to use in your research
checkJoin the discussion with peers
checkTrack your impact
Abstract
Maurice Shammas (Abu Farid) stands out among writers whose literary works represent Jewish life in modern Egypt. His collection of short stories Al-shaykh shabtay wa-hikayat min harat al-yahud [Sheik Shabbtai and Stories from Harat al-Yahud (1979)] and his memoir ‘Azza, hafidat nifirtiti [‘Azza, Nefertiti’s Granddaughter (2003)], written in Arabic, represent not the wealthy cosmopolitans, but rather the poor residents of Cairo’s harat al-yahud. This article explores Shammas’s representations of the city, arguing that for Shammas the city’s textuality is not primarily visual or material, but aural. The spaces of the city are defined by the sounds that fill them: Arabic music and the musicality of Arabic, verbal and non-verbal human expression, and the noise of the structures of the city themselves. This article also traces and unpacks the intertwined tropes of nationalism and urban localism, cosmopolitanism and parochialism, language and identity in Shammas’s writings.
Related papers
The Image of Cairo in Hejazi's A City Without Heart
This article critically investigates the poetry of Ahmed Abdul-Muti Hejazi's controversial anthology A City Without Heart in order to explore the image of Cairo in contemporary Egyptian poetry. The paper argues that in spite of the existence of some similarities between western and Arabic city poetry, which primarily results from the impact of major western poets on their counterparts in the Arab world, there are still wide cultural and ideological differences between these two poetic traditions. While the hostile attitude of the western poet toward the city is formulated through an existential crisis resulting from the loss of faith in the values of a mechanized and commercialized culture, the negative image of the city in Arabic poetry is attributed to the Romantic trend integrated into the Arabic poetic canon distinguishing between city and country life and having its roots in pre-Islamic poetic traditions. In this context, the paper points out that due to the impact of the Romantic attitude in Arabic literature toward the city, the famous Egyptian poet, Hejazi, fails to integrate or appropriate modern western city images, inspired by poets like Baudelaire and Eliot, to fit indigenous purposes. Attempting to imitate his masters, the modernist Euro-American models, while being influenced by the local Romantic trend, Hejazi exaggerates the urbanization motif particularly the negative consequences of the industrial process on the Arab city. Ignoring the wide technological gap between the Arab city and its western counterpart and constructing an image of Cairo emulating western models, the poet creates a distorted literary city that does not exist either in the East or the West.
Colonial Modernity and Urban Space: Naguib Mahfouz's Cairo
Journal of Urban Cultural Studies, 2014
This article explores the spatial dimension of colonial modernity in Naguib Mahfouz's 1947 novel Midaq Alley. I begin by discussing the way in which modernity reconfigures urban space in Cairo so that the radical disjunctures and discontinuities it initiates become encoded within the topography of the city itself. I then address the impact this reconfiguration of space has on the inhabitants of Midaq Alley, forcing them to engage with modernity as a concrete presence in their daily lives. In other words, to use Mikhail Bakhtin's terminology, modernity in the novel takes on a chronotopic quality - fusing time and space, history and geography - and as a consequence, those characters who aspire to move from one temporality to another are required to do so by following a particular spatial trajectory. They must traverse a number of significant boundaries and interstitial zones, before entering those chronotopic sites whose function it is both to signify and shape colonial modernity: in this case, specifically, the brothel and the bar.
The Image of Cairo in Hejazi's A City Without a Heart
From a comparative perspective , this article critically investigates A City Without Heart by Ahmed Abdul-Muti Hejazi, in order to explore the image of Cairo in contemporary Egyptian poetry. The paper argues that in spite of the existence of some similarities between western and Arabic city poetry, which primarily results from the impact of major western poets on their counterparts in the Arab world, there are still wide cultural and ideological differences between these two poetic traditions. While the hostile attitude of the western poet toward the city is formulated through an existential crisis resulting from the loss of faith in the values of a mechanized / commercialized culture , the negative image of the city in Arabic poetry is attributed to the Romantic trend integrated into the Arabic poetic canon, distinguishing between city and country life and having its roots in pre-Islamic poetic traditions. In this context, the paper argues that due to the impact of the Romantic attitude toward the city, Hejazi fails to integrate / appropriate modern western city images, inspired by poets like Baudelaire and Eliot, to fit indigenous purposes. Attempting to imitate modernist Euro-American models while being influenced by the Romantic trend, Hejazi exaggerates the urbanization motif, particularly the negative consequences of the industrial process on the Arab city. Ignoring the wide technological gap between the Arab city and its western counterparts and constructing an image of Cairo that emulates western models, the poet creates a distorted literary city that does not exist either in the East or the West.
Representing Contemporary Urban Space: Cairo Malls in two Egyptian novels
Arabica, 2011
Taking into account the expansion of malls as a constitutive element of Egyptian urbanism at the beginning of the twenty-first century, this article analyzes the representation of the mall in two contemporary Egyptian novels. A close reading of Mūsīqā l-mūl by Maḥ mūd al-Wardānī and An takūna ʿAbbās al-ʿAbd, by Aḥ mad al-ʿĀydī shows that the function of intertextuality in those narratives is central to understand this representation, as well as the sense of alienation or belonging to the contemporary urban space it conveys. Al-Wardānī constructs his novel through intertextuality with classical Arabic culture, contrasting the contemporary space of the mall with the ideal bazaar of a One Thousand and One Nights tale (al-ḥ ammāl maʿa l-banāt), mapping the latter out as an utopian space versus the hostile, anti-erotic and despotic atmosphere of the mall. Al-ʿĀydī's approach places the mall at the center of global consumer culture, a space of encounter and refuge, away from the aggressive street environment.
Street Sounds: Listening to Everyday Life in Modern Egypt (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020)
Street Sounds: Listening to Everyday Life in Modern Egypt (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020), 2020
Book Description: As the twentieth century roared on, transformative technologies—from trains, trams, and automobiles to radios and loudspeakers—fundamentally changed the sounds of the Egyptian streets. The cacophony of everyday life grew louder, and the Egyptian press featured editorials calling for the regulation of not only mechanized and amplified sounds, but also the voices of street venders, the music of wedding processions, and even traditional funerary wails. Ziad Fahmy offers the first historical examination of the changing soundscapes of urban Egypt, highlighting the mundane sounds of street-life, while “listening” to the voices of ordinary people as they struggle with state authorities for ownership of the streets. Interweaving infrastructural, cultural, and social history, Fahmy analyzes the sounds of modernity, using sounded sources as an analytical tool for examining the past. Street Sounds also addresses the sensory class-politics of noise by demonstrating how the growing middle classes sensorially distinguished themselves from the Egyptian masses. This book contextualizes sound and layers historical analysis with a sensory dimension, bringing us closer to the Egyptian streets as lived and embodied by everyday people. REVIEWS: "With considerable skill, Ziad Fahmy listens to listeners in a place and time wholly underexplored by historians of the senses. In the process, he offers us an important and trenchant interpretation of the sensory definition of modernity." —Mark Smith, University of South Carolina "Street Sounds brings the boisterous soundscape of modernizing Egypt to life. Ziad Fahmy has an ear for the noise of history in motion—street hawkers, calls to prayer, braying donkeys, wagon wheels, claxons and screeching tires, recorded song, and the ever-present buzz of electricity. He allows us to hear an Egypt we might otherwise discount." —Joel Gordon, University of Arkansas "In this fascinating and highly original study, Ziad Fahmy takes sound seriously as both a primary source and a qualitatively distinct phenomenon of modernity. Street Sounds apprehends sonic and scopic regimes as interrelated aspects of a larger sensorium, thereby pioneering a new and extraordinarily rich form of Middle Eastern cultural history." —Walter Armbrust, University of Oxford
‘Cairo Ring Road’: Anthony Hamboussi’s Poetic Survey of an Urban Topography
Cairo's landscape has morphed over the past century due to uncontrolled urban growth. This transformation has overturned the city's iconic status as a city of great monuments of Islamic art, the 'City Victorious'. While Cairo has occupied a central position in the study of historic art and architecture from the Middle East, poor planning and mismanagement of heritage sites have put the city's historic significance into a state of crisis. While historians turn away from Cairo's contemporary urbanity, by contrast, photographers such as Anthony Hamboussi have refocused their lenses on the city's current realities. The city's historic monuments are drowning in an urban topography that resulted from impoverished governance and improvised urban expansion. What can we learn from photographs of Cairo's ongoing urban informality, uneven development and spatial inequality? This article critically examines one photographer's project to make visible the undesirable majority of contemporary Cairo. The author argues that engaging with the city's contemporary reality, in this case through photography, is key to understanding its declining heritage status and the poor condition of many of its monuments of Islamic architecture.
"Music and Power in Cairo: Azbakiyya," Urban History 40, 4 (2013): 681-704.
Urban History, 2013
In this article the origins of the modern metropolis are reconsidered, using the example of Cairo within its Ottoman and global context. I argue that Cairo's Azbakiyya Garden served as a central ground for fashioning a dynastic capital throughout the nineteenth century. This argument sheds new light on the politics of Khedive Ismail, who introduced a new state representation through urban planning and music theatre. The social history of music in Azbakiyya proves that, instead of functioning as an example of colonial division, Cairo encompassed competing conceptions of class, taste and power.
Traversing the urban as a woman in Cairo and Aswan
2015
Traversing the Urban as a Woman in Cairo and Aswan Mennat-Allah Mourad The American University in Cairo under the supervision of Dr Martina Rieker This thesis explores the hierarchical dynamics that govern the everydayness of women's relationship to spaces. I argue that our conceptual understanding of space, especially through terms such as modern, cosmopolitan, tribal, village...etc, are all part of a lexicon that makes our everyday, but that also how we traverse the city, and the choices that we make of where to go and how to get there is an integral contributor of how a city is not only imagined but lived, and thus how the social imaginations that we believe govern our everyday is actually reiterated. I argue that our choices as influenced by neoliberal capital has been influencing in turn our everyday and how it is not separate from the overarching events of rupture that occurred in 2011 through to 2013, and how these ruptures helped make the invisible of the hierarchical dimensions of the city visible.
“Even if the Sons of Rum are not like Him” the Spatial and Temporal Journey of a Late 19th Century Egyptian Song
Middle East - Topics and Arguments, 2018
This paper follows the material and discursive circulation of the Egyptian popular song “Fī-l-Jihādiyya” as it traveled from the urban context to Upper Egypt throughout the 19th century. The song narrates the farewell of a mother to her son recruited to war, and her helpless attempt to save him. I explore how centuries-old local forms of mobility enacted by authors and performers intersected with the infra- structural changes in transportation under British colonization increasingly since the third quarter of the 19th century. Additionally, by reflecting on the long durée of the song’s circulation and performative replication, I investigate the continuities within the military social infrastructure throughout the century, and argue that the ongoing exploitation of Upper Egyptian soldiers helps explain the endurance of “Fī-l-Jihādiyya’s” social relevance. I thus provide a case for the study of material and social infrastructures as interrelated realms of analysis, specifically with respect to the different implications of the material and social mobilities that my analysis uncovers.
" 'I Am in an English Autumn': Constructions of Egypt as Postcolonial Space in Ahdaf Soueif's The Map of Love and Alaa Al Aswany's The Yacoubian Building"
" 'I Am in an English Autumn': Constructions of Egypt as Postcolonial Space in Ahdaf Soueif's The Map of Love and Alaa Al Aswany's The Yacoubian Building"
'Strolling in Enemy Territory: Downtown Cairo, its Publics, and Urban Heterotopias'
Orient-Institute Studies 3 (2015) Open Access publication at: http://www.perspectivia.net/publikationen/orient-institut-studies/3-2015/ryzova_strolling
The Violence of Memory and Movement: Reading Cairo from its Ring Road
Égypte/Monde arabe
Dans Égypte/Monde arabe Égypte/Monde arabe 2021/1 (n° 23) 2021/1 (n° 23), pages 105 à 120 Éditions Centre d'études et de documentation économiques, juridiques et Centre d'études et de documentation économiques, juridiques et sociales sociales
The modern ordinary: changing culture of urban living in Egypt's traditional quarters at the turn of the twentieth century
Middle Eastern Studies, 2016
Having experienced social and political structures of the 19 th century Europe, Western-educated Egyptian elite used public institutions to force legislative structures and procedures that ruled out traditional housing forms and spatial systems. This essay detects direct and indirect impact of these changes that informed the spatial change of modern living in Egypt in the first quarter of the twentieth century. It offers analysis of socio-spatial practices and change in ordinary Cairenes' modes of everyday living, using social routine and interaction to explain spatial systems and changing house forms during the first quarter of the 20 th century. In doing so, the essay utilized archival documents, accounts, formal decrees, and novels of the time as well as conducting survey of house forms and spatial organizations in Old Cairo.
Central cairo: Street naming and the struggle over historical representation
The article endeavours to historicize the Egyptian capital’s functional and symbolic centre. The underlying premise of this entire study is that street and square names are not merel y tools for getting around, but should be viewed as complex texts with meanings and tropes that must be examined in the context of time and place. Street and square names encapsulate the tension between the regime, which determines the names, and the use and interpretations that individuals and groups attribute to these same names and images.
Living in Historic Cairo: Past and Present in an Islamic City edited by F. Daftary et al (book review)
International Journal of Islamic Architecture, 2012
IJIA publishes reviews of books that treat or are relevant to Islamic architecture, design, planning, and urbanism. We seek to provide focus on contemporary production and issues, while also locating these areas of study in communication with other academic disciplines and the contemporary practice of architecture.
Related topics
Loading Preview
Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.