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Cairo Cosmopolitan: Politics, Culture, and Urban Space in the New Globalized Middle East

Online ISBN:
9781617970269
Print ISBN:
9789774162893
Publisher:
American University in Cairo Press
Book

Cairo Cosmopolitan: Politics, Culture, and Urban Space in the New Globalized Middle East

Published:
15 October 2009
Online ISBN:
9781617970269
Print ISBN:
9789774162893
Publisher:
American University in Cairo Press

Abstract

In the cities of the Arab world, while the media focus overwhelmingly on questions of religiosity and war, the future of urban modernity and political globalism is taking shape. As the Egyptian state reaches out to capture the apparent promises of neoliberalism, Cairenes struggle over and redefine their place, identity, and material welfare. Bringing together an interdisciplinary group of scholars, this volume explores what happens when new forms of privatization meet collectivist pasts, public space is sold off to satisfy investor needs and tourist gazes, and the state plans for Egypt's future in desert cities while stigmatizing and neglecting Cairo's popular neighborhoods. These dynamics produce surprising contradictions and juxtapositions that are coming to define today's Middle East. Luxury malls owned by the military or foreign investors compete with flourishing but criminalized open-air markets; Nubian, Upper Egyptian, and labor-migrant identities confront a renaissance of Arab nationalism; and chic new coffee houses, crumbling movie palaces, and resurgent working-class cultures offer radically clashing versions of public and gender sociability. This volume launches the Cairo School of Urban Studies, committed to fusing political-economy and ethnographic methods and sensitive to ambivalence and contingency, to reveal the new contours and patterns of modern power emerging in the urban frame. Cairo shows us that divergent cosmopolitanisms—both elite and working-class—are emerging across a broad spectrum of the polity, making new claims for political space.

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