Sarah H. Awad

The (Street) Art of Resistance

This chapter focuses on the interrelation between resistance, novelty and social change. We will consider resistance as both a social and individual phenomenon, as a constructive process that articulates continuity and change and as an act oriented towards an imagined future of different communities. In this account, resistance is thus a creative act having its own dynamic and, most of all, aesthetic dimension. In fact, it is one such visibly artistic form of resistance that will be considered here, the case of street art as a tool of social protest and revolution in Egypt. Street art is commonly defined in sharp contrast with high or fine art because of its collective nature, anonymity, its different kind of aesthetics and most of all its disruptive, “anti-social” outcomes. With the use of illustrations, we will argue here that street art is prototypical of a creative form of resistance, situated between revolutionary “artists” and their audiences, which includes both authorities and society at large. Furthermore, strategies of resistance will be shown to develop through time, as opposing social actors respond to one another’s tactics. This tension between actors is generative of new actions and strategies of resistance.

Documenting a Contested Memory: Symbols in the changing city space of Cairo

This article looks at how symbols in the urban environment are intentionally produced and modified to regulate a community’s collective memory. Our urban environment is filled with symbols in the form of images, text, and structures that embody certain narratives about the past. Once those symbols are introduced into the city space they take a life span of their own in a continuous process of reproduction and reconstruction by different social actors. In the context of the city space of Cairo in the five years following the 2011 Egyptian revolution, I will look on the one side at efforts of activists to preserve the memory of the revolution through graffiti murals and the utilization of public space, and from the other, the authority’s efforts to replace those initiatives with its own official narrative. Building on the concept of collective memory, as well as Bartlett’s studies of serial reproductions and theorization of reconstructive remembering, I will follow the reproduction of different symbols in the city and how they were perceived and remembered by pedestrians.

Collective memory and social sciences in the post-truth era:

The past has never been as relevant for the present as it is in today’s Post-truth world. Not just because many of our political leaders are promising to bring us back to a past that never existed – the Great America of Trump, the Lost Empire of Farage or the French Resistance of Le Pen – but because it seems more and more likely that they are bringing us back to the past as it actually happened – a past where populism successfully brought nationalist leaders to power. In this context, it seems particularly crucial to understand how we relate to our history, how we learn from it and the consequences it may have for the world we live in. These are the questions this special issue explores by adopting a cultural psychological perspective on collective memory – the lay representations of history – and proposing both theoretical and empirical contributions. In this editorial, we will try to first make the case for the political and social importance of collective memory. Second, we will argue why theoretical discussions – not just empirical research – are necessary to tackle these issues. Third, we will discuss the role we believe, cultural psychology should play in the current context and the dangers of turning it into a field disconnected from social and political realities. Finally, we will present the contents of this issue and how we hope it tackles some of the problems raised in this editorial.

Agency and Creativity in the Midst of Social Change

The present chapter explores agency as a process of group creativity where individuals collaborate using signs with the aim of changing social reality. This is illustrated with a case study of the Egyptian street graffiti that emerged in the first year after protestors took to the streets on 25 January 2011 and on the artwork centered around Tahrir Square. Revolutionaries used graffiti as a tool to communicate their message, claim public space, and make an impact on the public. We look at how revolutionary graffiti emerged as a form of resistance during the 2011 Egyptian revolution, bringing underground artists to the surface in a collaborative effort. The phenomenon is studied from a creativity perspective, discussing what characteristics support seeing this art as an expression of agency through group creativity and what social factors facilitated it to come about. We argue that revolutionary graffiti offers an understanding of creative agency as a collaborative group process using imagination to move beyond reality and present a peaceful and liberating form of expression that would not have emerged individually. Thus, the case study of Egyptian graffiti is used to draw attention to agency found in groups, contrary to Freud’s and Le Bon’s tendencies to relate groups to violence and chaos.

Creating Alternative Futures: Cooperative Initiatives in Egypt

This chapter looks at the capacity of communities to come together in times of rupture and imagine a collective future that promises better living conditions. We will address the process by which individuals assembled beyond the Egyptian uprising in 2011 and experimented with their aspired social change, through analyzing three case studies of cooperatives that came out of the protests. The case studies will be used to illustrate the role of imagination in bridging the gap between how society actually works from one side and its potential on the other. The cases are also used to highlight the potential of cooperatives in opening up venues for decentralized everyday forms of resistance of state power.

Introducing the street art of resistance

The world we live in today is defined more by borders and walls than by common spaces. Mental and physical barriers separate us from them. They divide those in power from the masses, and separate people by nationality, ideology, and identity, thus marginalizing all those who do not conform to the societal norm. But these barriers, no matter how concrete, are permeable, open to interpretation, negotiation, and destruction. This book is about the multiple ways people use imagination to reconfigure those barriers and create meaningful spaces. We will look at walls that have become an arena for contentious dialogues through which social and political resistance is manifest.