Review

Reviewed Work(s): URBAN SPACE IN CONTEMPORARY EGYPTIAN LITERATURE:

PORTRAITS OF CAIRO by Mara Naaman
Review by: Samah Selim
Source: The Arab Studies Journal, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Spring 2012), pp. 142-146
Published by: Arab Studies Institute
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23265837
Accessed: 15-03-2018 08:19 UTC

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms

Arab Studies Institute is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
The Arab Studies Journal

This content downloaded from 213.212.249.200 on Thu, 15 Mar 2018 08:19:50 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 URBAN SPACE IN CONTEMPORARY EGYPTIAN
LITERATURE: PORTRAITS OF CAIRO

Mara Naaman

New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011

(xxv + 227 pages, bibliography, index, illustrations, maps) $85.00 (cloth)

Reviewed by Samah Selim

In January and February of 2011, Egyptians descended upon public

squares throughout the country to bring an end to the thirty-year regime
of Husni Mubarak. For those eighteen days—and on many other occa
sions throughout the following year—the people of Egypt wrested control
of public space from the physical and discursive grip of Mubarak's police
state and reconfigured the material and symbolic spaces of their cities to
express a revolutionary vision of subjectivity, community, and citizenship.
Cairo's Tahrir square—and its downtown environs—was of course the
most visible and most symbolically charged center of these insurgent acts
of occupation and celebration, and the whole world watched in wonder
and trepidation as Egyptians struggled to forge a new and radical lan
guage of being-in-the-world.
Mara Naaman's timely book, Urban Space in Contemporary Egyptian
Literature: Portraits of Cairo, was published during that heady year (and
includes a brief postscript referring to the events of the revolution). The

Samah Selim is Assistant Professor in the Department of African,

Middle Eastern, and South Asian Languages and Literature at Rutgers
University.

142

This content downloaded from 213.212.249.200 on Thu, 15 Mar 2018 08:19:50 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 Urban Space in Contemporary Egyptian Literature

book addresses the production of urban space in the modern Egyptian lit
erary imagination and offers the reader an erudite and engaging analysis
of four acclaimed novels that all take Cairo's downtown as their main set

ting. Naaman's exploration of the sometimes Utopian, sometimes brutal

and bloody history of dreams, desires, and struggles that have shaped this
seminal space in modern fiction and architectural practice subtly and per
sistently evokes the ghost of a future become the present. The book is thus
important reading for anyone seeking to understand the affective power
of "Liberation Square" within the context of modern Egyptian history and
cultural production.
The book includes a preface, introduction, five chapters, and a conclu
sion. The preface, introduction, and chapter one set out the main concep
tual and historical framework within which Naaman situates her literary
readings. Chapters two through five each deal with a contemporary novel
by a leading Egyptian author—Radwa 'Ashur's A Piece of Europe (2003),
Khayri Shalabi's Salih Hisa (2000), Idris 'Ali's Poor (2005), and Alaa al
Aswany's The Yacoubian Building (2002)—while the conclusion, "Wust al
Balad as Neo-Bohemia: Writing in Defense of a Vanishing Public Sphere,"
raises some very interesting questions about location and the relevance of
national narratives to the contemporary political imagination.
In the preface, Naaman takes note of the political impetus underlying
modern Arab fiction as a whole, tying this impetus to the framing and
contestation of real and imagined spaces: "Contemporary Arab authors,"
she writes, "have used fiction as a way of responding to crucial, and often
traumatic, historical moments . . . where questions of political authority
and power are largely enacted through struggles over public space" (xx).
She then sets out the framework for her reading of her chosen novels
against the background of a broad range of disciplinary and theoretical
interests and concerns—urban and postcolonial studies, architecture and
art history, and globalization theory:

I hope to show the way in which the notion of the modern Egyptian
subject has evolved in direct relationship to the changes manifest in
the space of the downtown. ... Ultimately I hope to show how the
contested nature of the downtown—as a spectacular imitation of

143

This content downloaded from 213.212.249.200 on Thu, 15 Mar 2018 08:19:50 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 European modernity, as Egyptian public sphere, as a site for staging
revolution, and as a modernist ruin—was and continues to be central
to the notion of what it means to be Egyptian, (xxi)

Naaman goes on to reflect on Cairo as an "oscillating landscape" whose

neighborhoods are situated as "allegorical spaces through which we can
read the history of the nation" (xxv). Through the accumulated passage of
time and the imprints of generations, streets and neighborhoods take on
the phantom nature of the palimpsest; "home" is constantly rewritten as
part of an uncertain yet imperative project of liberation. The downtown,
she writes in a poignant assessment, "remains a contingent space, marked
by traces of the past and spaces of familiarity, but never offering a sense of
a secure present" (xxv).
Naaman uses the Arabic term "Wust al-Balad" (center city; down
town) throughout the book rather than an English translation to signal
the iconic status of this particular space in modern fiction as well as
national history. She weaves a careful account of the area's dramatic archi
tectural and political history into her literary analysis of the way in which
the four novels inscribe questions of agency, identity, language, critique,
and nostalgia in spatial terms. The famous history of Khedive Isma'il's
new city, Isma'iliyya, or "Paris on the Nile," and the great Cairo Fire of
1952 (during which furious crowds burnt a large chunk of this new city to
the ground) are thus both major leitmotifs that recur at key points in the
book. Naaman's description of the process by which the novels' characters
engage in revisionist "mappings" of these histories in space is thus also
an apt description of her own critical method (7). The bulk of this critical
method is presented in the book's introduction, "The Urban as Critical
Frame," and covers a broad cross-section of works and authors: the Cairo

School of Urban Studies; Gwendolyn Wright's work on French colonial

design; Chicano border studies; and the work of Timothy Mitchell, Arjun
Appadurai, and Sabry Hafez on (respectively) colonial modernity, global
flows, and the "new novel" in Egypt.
At times, Naaman's theoretical framing sits uneasily with her evoc
ative and subtle readings of the novels themselves. Naaman closely fol
lows a certain strand of postcolonial studies that proposes a spectacular,
Western-authored (colonial) modernity as the presumed antithesis of a

144

This content downloaded from 213.212.249.200 on Thu, 15 Mar 2018 08:19:50 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 Urban Space in Contemporary Egyptian Literature

kind of authentic or antediluvian local identity and where points of con

tact or relationship are somehow inevitably defined by suspicion, corrup
tion, or violation. Isma'il's new city is offered as "a spectacular imitation
of European modernity," a place that has "internalizejed] the gaze of the
West" (xxi, 1). In such a place, the circulation of capital takes the primary
form of staged spectacles of consumption and public entertainment (the
lavish department stores, clubs, and cafes of Cairo's rich). Modernity then
becomes an ontology: a fixed and external object (of desire or refusal)
rather than a social habitus shot through with contradiction and struggle.
The notion that "Egyptians [were] mere spectators in the staging of their
own modernity" leads Naaman at times to problematic culturalist read
ings of political events (Timothy Mitchell quoted in Naaman, 12). For
example, the Cairo Fire of 1952 becomes "a debate over what it meant to
be modern" rather than a violent rejection of the political and economic
structures of a collapsing colonial regime (16). She further argues that "the
'Urabi rebellion of 1881-2, the revolution of 1919, the workers' protest in
1946, and the fires and subsequent revolution in July 1952" were all a result
of "the Khedive's complete indifference to the older districts of Cairo (in
terms of their architectural and infrastructural neglect)"—or more simply
put, to "colonial modernity" (23, 32).
Naaman's capable and sensitive close readings, however, point to the
limits—if not the inadequacy—of this theoretical staging to describe and
elicit the rich and complex texture of the novels themselves in their reflec
tions on agency, identity, and loss in the modern Egyptian context. In
chapters one and two ("Specter of Paris: The Staging of Cairo's Modern
City Center" and "Reconstructing a National Past: Radwa 'Ashur's Revi
sionist History of Downtown"), Naaman beautifully captures the way in
which both the urban-architectural and the textual function as narrative

acts that produce legibility and meaning for subjects and readers alike.
She further builds on this insight in the next chapter, "The Indigenous
Modernism of Khayri Shalabi: Popular Intellectuals and the Neighbor
hood Ghurza," by elaborating on Michel de Certeau's poetics of walking
as a form of pedestrian enunciation and Jonathon Shannon's exploration
of modernity and musical improvisation in Syria. In her reading, the pal
impsest of the city—the downtown and its "shadow thoroughfare [s]" (77)—
is metaphorically composed by the active handling or use of its material

145

This content downloaded from 213.212.249.200 on Thu, 15 Mar 2018 08:19:50 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
structures ('Ashur's narrator, The Gazer, "re-members" the downtown
by walking its streets and visually summoning its ghostly monuments)
or by the continual crossing and re-crossing of porous, shadow borders
inscribed into the urban landscape {Salih Hisa's celebration of multiple
social identities and languages; The Yacoubian Building's crumbling ver
tical hierarchies). Ultimately, the book's greatest strength lies here: in its
compelling, engaged, and almost tender attention to the materiality of
urban space as a lens that brings a whole history of collective desire, aspi
ration, and struggle into focus through the medium of fiction.
Toward the end of the book's final chapter, "The Nation Recast
through a National Bestseller: Alaa al-Aswany's Ode to Downtown Cairo,"
Naaman tentatively suggests the possibility of claiming this history-in
fiction as a living portrait of the imagined nation—"a master-narrative" as
she puts it, "for the Egyptian experience" (167). Meanwhile, the resurgent
"neo-bohemian" public sphere of the downtown that she describes in the
book's conclusion has once again metamorphosed into a fully insurgent
space of struggle and contestation (169). In this moment of exhilarating
and dizzyingly unreadable futures, Urban Space in Contemporary Egyp
tian Literature does an admirable job of underlining the ways in which
"a reworking of the past vis-a-vis our cities is an important part of the
process in determining who we are (and want to be) in the present" (176).

146

This content downloaded from 213.212.249.200 on Thu, 15 Mar 2018 08:19:50 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms