In this talk, I will present my upcoming book project on the role of literary practices in recreating spaces of sociability and solidarity in post-revolutionary Cairo. Over the past two decades, Egypt’s literary worlds have been reconfigured by two major phenomena. First, the digital disruption of publishing since the mid-2000s has expanded access to literary authorship, allowing many new writers to enter the market.

My paper examines a moment of ideological crisis in modern Egyptian history, refracted through the film Ghuraba’(strangers, directed by Sa‘d ‘Arafa and written by ‘Arafa and Ra’fat al-Mihi). The film was screened in 1973, at a postcolonial inflection point in which Marxism, existentialism and an extreme formulation of Islamism were all depicted as exhausted and inadequate. Ghuraba’ gropes toward, but stops short of fully articulating, an Islamic moral engagement with secular society and ideology.

Book Overview: