Egypt 1919
The Revolution in Literature and Film
- Re-examines the 1919 Egyptian Revolution in light of the momentous events of 2011
- Draws on theoretical approaches in memory studies to investigate the construction of 1919 as a moment of ecstatic nationalist unity
- Analyses and contextualises representations of the 1919 revolution as narrated in a wide range of novels, films, plays, memoirs and television dramas.
- Provides a new analysis of canonical novels by Naguib Mahfouz and Tawfiq al-Hakim
The 1919 anti-colonial revolution is a key moment in modern Egyptian history and a historical reference point in Egyptian culture through the century. Dina Heshmat argues that literature and film have played a central role in the making of its memory. She highlights the processes of remembering and forgetting that have contributed to shaping a dominant imaginary about 1919 in Egypt, coined by successive political and cultural elites. As she seeks to understand how and why so many voices have been relegated to the margins, she reinserts elements of the different representations into the dominant narrative. This opens up a new perspective on the legacy of 1919 in Egypt, inviting readers to meet the marginalised voices of the revolution and to reconnect with its layered emotional fabric.
Introduction
- The Poetics of Disillusion
- The Fear of the Rabble
- 1919 and the Trope of the Modern Nation
- The Revolution on the Screen
- The Politics of Rehabilitation
- Rewriting History in the 1990s
- Rewriting History in the Wake of 2011
Conclusion
BibliographyIndex
Dina Heshmat offers astute analyses of a broad array of creative works, verbal and visual, that have served both to consecrate and canonize Thawrat 1919 as a nationalist triumph, and to interrogate that narrative of unity and class concord. Alternative voices articulate this historical ‘moment’ or ‘space’ instead as a longer, multi-strand, fragmented set of routes: of exuberance and anger, resistance and celebration and carnival, reminding us that revolutionary moments – and their memorialization – are complex communal events.
