1st Edition

Remembering Cosmopolitan Egypt Literature, culture, and empire

By Deborah Starr Copyright 2009
224 Pages
by Routledge

212 Pages
by Routledge

224 Pages
by Routledge

Remembering Cosmopolitan Egypt examines the link between cosmopolitanism in Egypt, from the nineteenth century through to the mid-twentieth century, and colonialism. While it has been widely noted that such a relationship exists, the nature and impact of this dynamic is often overlooked. Taking a theoretical, literary and historical approach, the author argues that the notion of the... Read more

Introduction  Part 1: Colonial Anxieties and Cosmopolitan Desires  1. Literary Alexandria  2. Poetics of Memory: Edwar al-Kharrat  3. Polis and Cosmos: Ibrahim Abdel Meguid  Part 2: Counterpoint New York  4. Why New York?: Youssef Chahine  Part 3: A Mobile Levant  5. Gazing Across Sinai  6. A Mediterranean Vigor that Never Wanes: Yitzhaq Gormezano Goren  7. Unmasking Levantine Blindness: Ronit Matalon.  Conclusion

Biography

Deborah A. Starr is Associate Professor of Modern Arabic and Hebrew Literature at Cornell University. Her research and teaching interests include contemporary literature and film, minorities of the Middle East, cosmopolitanism, postcolonial studies, and urban studies.

"[An] incisive study, which clearly establishes the fact that the phenomenon of cosmopolitanism could be both historical and ahistorical—a binary that is by no means contradictory, and can in fact be deployed to foster harmony in contemporary diversities in which ‘adversarial discourse’ (p. 149) dominates. All students of history and theorists on political ideas will forever be beholden to this remarkable effort by Starr." - Amidu Olalekan Sanni, Lagos State University, Nigeria; British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 39:1