Empires and Emporia: Fictions of the Department Store in the Modern Mediterranean.

Abstract

Empires and Emporia: Fictions of the Department Store in the Modern Mediterranean examines the function of nineteenth-century Egyptian and French department stores as urban spaces and literary symbols which shaped and contested the concept of citizenship in both nations. I offer a new reading of these spaces by contextualizing narratives about them within the modern history of the Mediterranean, divided as it was among the British, French and Ottoman empires. I trace the historiography of the modern Mediterranean to the vision developed by the French utopianist Saint-Simon (1760-1825). Saint-Simon imagined the modern Mediterranean as a “mother sea” bringing together Orient and Occident, connected by networks of trade and transport. Such a vision would later be realized through projects promoted by his disciples, such as the Suez Canal and the urban planning of Cairo. French and Egyptian department stores, inspired by the Saint-Simonian project, assumed a key role in modern Mediterranean culture, as they formed commercial and cultural networks in a transnational, colonial, and postcolonial context. Drawing on archival documentation as well as literary works, and invoking theories of human geography and cultural memory, I reconstruct the urban and cultural history of the Parisian and Cairene department stores to examine their role as urban and cultural landmarks, which influenced the city dwellers’ notions of gender, class and race. Through a study of Emile Zola’s Au bonheur des dames, Huda Shaarawi’s Arabic memoirs and her newspaper L’Egyptienne, Jacqueline Kahanoff’s Jacob’s Ladder, and a selection of contemporary works — Latifa el Zayat’s Al-Bab Maftuh (The Open Door), Paula Jacques’s Lumière de l’oeil and Gilda Stambouli souffre et se plaint, Robert Solé’s Le tarbouche, Waguih Ghali’s Beer in the Snooker Club, Victor Teboul’s La Longue découverte de l’étrangeté, Samir Raafat’s Cairo, the early years, and Ilios Yannakakis’s Alexandria 1860-1960 —, I reveal how the Francophilia, Egyptomania and Orientalism sustained by department stores led Egyptian and French writers to use the stores as a strategic literary symbol in rewriting a critical moment of their nation’s history, to reinvent their national identity, and to interrogate issues of modernity, cosmopolitanism, Levantinism, and social equality.