Walter Armbrust

When the lights go down in Cairo: Cinema as secular ritual

Can habits of spectatorship contribute to social transformation? This essay looks at moviegoing in downtown Cairo as a secular ritual that can potentially enable kinds of social change not necessarily envisioned by the state, approved by normative society, or engineered through films themselves. Although filmwatching in Cairene cinemas does, in some cases, verge on the carnivalesque, spectatorship in this context is important primarily as a zone of ambiguity in which middle‐class identity is defined by a tension between establishment visions of order and youthful experimentation.

The Trickster in Egypt's January 25th Revolution

The term “counter-revolution” evokes a straightforward contestation of political claims in a revolutionary situation. But contestation is not a zero-sum game: this side wins; the other side loses, and power remains the same. A revolutionary situation is unpredictable. New formulations of political claims may emerge in a protracted moment of “liminal crisis”—a kind of political ritual with no master of ceremonies capable of ending it. Indeed, the meaning of the political prize itself might be open to reinterpretation. My paper examines counter-revolution through the lens of Taufiq ‘Ukasha, an Egyptian talk show host and former member of the deposed National Democratic Party. Since the Revolution ‘Ukasha has become increasingly prominent as an unacknowledged spokesman for Egypts Military Council, which assumed executive powers in the wake of the Mubarak regimes collapse. I argue that ‘Ukasha should not be understood simply as a filul—a remnant of the old regime. He is rather a “trickster,” a creature at home in the betwixt-and-between of open-ended liminality, and as such not an instrument of a socially grounded political power. In an environment in which the usual points of social and political orientation are called into question, the significance of a trickster is that he or she can become an object of emulation, an instrument of “schismogenesis”—the creation of a new social formation. A trickster, as a creature of pure liminality, is particularly prone to generating perverted forms of social knowledge. In ‘Ukashas case, this new social formation is an unprecedented formulation of Egyptian militarism.

A History of New Media in the Arab Middle East

The modern Arabic-speaking Middle East is incomprehensible without taking into account the central importance of mass media. Existing literature on media in the Arab Middle East tends to clump (with some important exceptions) at either end of a historical spectrum: analyses of the adoption of the printing press in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and scholarship on “new” (primarily digital) media as they have unfolded over the past two decades. Much work on contemporary “new media” suffers from an implicit technological determinism. Historical literature is generally more sound, but not necessarily well focused on media as a phenomenon that deserves analysis in its own right. I argue that “new media,” stripped of its technological determinism, is a useful concept. A history of new media over the past hundred and fifty years or so will make media an object of study on par with “economy” or “society,” or “culture.” One would not want to fall into the trap of assuming the existence of such an object as a given. There is, however, a great deal to be gained from understanding the media system historically as it emerges and takes on the status of a socially constructed reality in the Arabic-speaking world.

Trickster Defeats the Revolution: Egypt as the Vanguard of the New Authoritarianism

Abstract Egypt’s January 25 Revolution often has been viewed as an explicit contest between the Hosni Mubarak regime and its cronies, who were able to prevail by pulling the levers of a ‘deep state,’ and revolutionaries espousing progressive visions, albeit visions divided between those of Islamists and non-Islamists, and often seen by each as mutually incompatible with the other. The defeat of the January 25 Revolution’s progressive aspirations can be understood, to a substantial degree, as a victory by the old regime. However, revolution understood as a Liminal Crisis allows us to see the rise of ‘Abd al-Fattah al-Sisi not as a straightforward restoration of the old regime, but as both a revolutionary outcome and as an instantiation of a New Authoritarianism that has been making significant strides toward power in the wake of the 2011 revolutions. Liminality is understood here as the intermediate stage in a transition as described in Victor Turner’s Ritual Process and recently reinterpreted in the context of politics by Bjørn Thomassen. The potential dangers of liminality often are controlled by ritual, but this is not the case in revolutions, which become liminal crises precisely because there is no conventionalized means for closing off the state of being in-between. In such circumstances Tricksters—beings at home in liminality and often-elaborated in myth, folklore, and literature—become potentially dangerous in politics. Sisi can be seen as a Trickster politician. But more broadly, the structuring of liminality through the global political-economic order of contemporary capitalism both creates a generalized precarity outside the most elite levels of society, and at the same time predisposes those compelled to live in precarity to be attentive to political Tricksters. Hence liminality can be seen as both the beginning and the end of revolution.

An Upper Egyptian in the American Press

A hit film that pokes fun at Westernized Egyptians has managed to anger Israel and the American University in Cairo as well as point up deep differences in this Arab country’s society. Sa’idi in the American University tells the story of Khalaf, a bumpkin southern Egyptian who wins a scholarship to study at the university whose students—many from Cairo’s upper class—are known for their Americanized attitudes.1

Veiled cinema: A conversation with Yousry Nasrallah

This interview with Yousry Nasrallah introduces an increasingly important Egyptian director to American audiences through his latest film, On Boys, Girls, and the Veil. The film is a documentary about a phenomenon sometimes misleadingly called “the veil” by Westerners. Nasrallahs film discusses relations between men and women through their own conversations about the wearing of clothes designed to restrict vision. The interview relates Nasrallahs work to the larger tradition of Egyptian filmmaking.