Mass culture and modernism in Egypt.

Abstract

The dissertation is about the relationship of popular culture to modernism and national culture in Egypt. The research is based on films, television serials, songs, various types of writing, and approximately three years of living in Egypt. The dissertation begins from the premise that a conceptual distinction between colloquial and classicist types plays a distinctive role in forming a national culture in Egypt. Although the official language of Egyptian nationalism was and is classical Arabic--a style of expression associated with religion and high culture--Egypt still legitimized itself in territorial terms through the spoken vernacular. Popular culture played a key role in the process of standardizing a colloquial vernacular. Colloquial expression developed in the new media rather than in print because there was no classicist tradition to threaten. The result was that middle-class national identity was suspended between parallel vernaculars, either of which could be emphasized depending on the context of a given artistic expression. The essence of Egyptian modernism as expressed in popular culture produced from the turn of the century through the 1960s was the creation of an imagined synthesis between classicist and colloquial types. The Egyptian modernist of pre-1970s popular culture maintained an unbroken relationship with the past, while at the same time participating actively in the rapidly changing milieu of technological progress. Egyptian modernism, unlike the Western variety, operated under the premise that a modernist omelette can be made without breaking the traditionalist eggs. Since the mid-1970s a new style of antimodernist popular culture has become prevalent. The demise of the modernist style, in which the central focus was a synthesis of opposing types, took place in several ways: through mocking institutional pillars of modernism; implying antimodernism through symbolic humiliation of the figures who formerly represented social synthesis; or through selective viewing--audiences deliberately focusing on subversive elements of works which, taken as a whole, reaffirmed modernism. Increasingly works of popular culture portray stark social opposition with no synthesis of social types. Egypt now seems poised either to restate modernist ideology more insistently, or to turn towards other ideological models.