One of the biggest mistakes any political analyst could make is to read only other political analyses. To do so is limiting in many ways and, more importantly, just downright boring. So, if you want to read something that is insightful and interesting, take a look at Issue 9 of A Public Space, edited by Brian Edwards of Northwestern University. The issue introduces the next generation of Egyptian writers and is available here. I just ordered it so my review of the issue will have to wait for another post. However, Edwards introduction, Cairo 2010: After Kefaya, is available online and offers a taste of what’s to come in the rest of the issue – and his own sense of changes taking place in Egypt for those who care to pay attention:
During the past decade, a generation of young writers who are breaking lots of rules—of what writing in Arabic is supposed to look like, of what young Egyptians can express about the world around them and how they might do so, and of what a new cohort of men and women might say about life in a city layered with centuries, even millennia, of intertwined cultural forms—has marked a significant shift in contemporary Egyptian literature.
That alone is enough reason to read the rest of Edwards’ essay and buy the issue; so little is written about Egyptian literature in the US. But a few paragraphs later Edwards makes the connection between this significant shift in contemporary Egyptian literature to significant (but not always obvious) shifts in contemporary Egypt:
These writers are a generation that came of age with (sometimes after) the massive arrival of the Internet and digital technologies in Cairo, and in the wake of the shift in global discourse about big words like democracy, Islam, and war. And while many of the topics they address in their work seem much smaller—a sexual liaison, street children stealing fruit, women calling on each other for tea, two boys playing a video game—these are not writers unconcerned with the social or the political. Rather, their work is conceived differently in relation to the big questions. Perhaps it is the enormity of Cairo, expanding at asymptotic rates via apparently uncontrollable urbanization, or the response to its social and political zahma; or perhaps they echo others in their generation internationally who have become cynical about what art and writing can do and seek something different. But the big pronouncements here are more muted or ironic…and sometimes they are even refused.
This is such a fascinating paragraph, a call to read on and see how this new generation of writers is connected to their city of Cairo, their “generation internationally” and the technology that defines our so-called global age. But it is also a call to read carefully, to appreciate subtle shifts in tone and focus and to avoid “big pronouncements” if one is to grasp the muted and ironic messages that underscore the shifts in Egyptian society.
