Writing in Cairo: Literary Networks and the Making of Egypt's Nineties Generation

Abstract

Cultural institutions—e.g., publishers, journals, prizes, among others—have played significant but frequently overlooked roles in shaping groups and movements in the modern Arabic literary tradition. "Writing in Cairo: Literary Networks and the Making of Egypt’s Nineties Generation" explores how a number of such locally situated, but often globally inflected, institutions participated in the formation and evolution of an experimental, diversely composed literary group at the turn of the twenty-first century.

This dissertation draws on literary criticism and theory from book history in an interdisciplinary approach that investigates the development of Egypt’s “nineties generation” of writers over the 1990s and up to the 2011 Egyptian revolution. The group was initially dismissed by local critics, due in part to the young writers’ marked shift away from issues concerning the national collective and because this was the first Egyptian literary generation defined particularly by emerging women writers. Departing from existing scholarship that favors Pierre Bourdieu’s conception of the literary field, I employ concepts and terminology from Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory and incorporate interviews and research I conducted over several years in Cairo to propose a methodological intervention by investigating the generation as more than just the authors and literary traits that have come to define it. "Writing in Cairo" reveals that key cultural institutions—the newspaper Akhbar al-Adab (Literary News); two small, local presses, Dar Sharqiyyat and Dar Merit; and the internationally focused translator, publisher, and prize grantor the American University in Cairo Press—were significant actors that influenced the production, circulation, and reception of the nineties generation and their texts in ways that have not been previously understood.

This project is part of a growing body of scholarship in postcolonial studies, modern Arabic literature, and the sociology of literature, among other fields, that seeks to reorient literary studies to include critical discussions of what are often considered simple intermediaries in cultural production. The institutions I examine were not mere gatekeepers or a medium through which others crafted discourses about the value and place of this generation but were themselves constitutive of it. Close readings of foundational nineties generation texts, including Nora Amin’s Qamis wardi farigh (An Empty Pink Shirt, 1997), Hamdi Abu Golayyel’s al-Fa‘il (2008; A Dog With No Tail, 2009), Miral al-Tahawy’s al-Khiba’ (1996; The Tent, 1998), and Mustafa Zikri’s Mir’at 202 (Mirror 202, 2003), demonstrate how radically shifting paradigms of authorship and readership, which were linked to the institutions I study, were part of the fabric of the literature and how it was read. The issues my research raises have larger implications for canon formation and how local cultural institutions help shape national and global literary histories and inform present-day conceptions of world literature.