20th-Century Arabic Literature in Five Egyptian Photographs

20th-Century Arabic Literature in Five Egyptian Photographs

This presentation asks how people’s relationship to art changes when an elite logocentric culture becomes photo-centric. My case studies are from Egypt during the years 1925-70. From Palestinian expatriates such as Ishaq M. al-Husseini to stridently nationalistic local authors like ‘Abbas M. al-‘Aqqad, writers were obliged to take an active part in Egypt’s camera culture in order to thrive as public literary figures. I argue that the increasingly popular handheld camera exerted pressure beyond the world of image-making. It deeply influenced poetry, fiction, the essay, and music composition.

In my field of Arabic literary criticism, the middle decades of the 20th century are best known for poetic modernist experiments and the rise of the novel. I wish to incorporate photographs into our understanding of what Arabic literature was during colonialism through the era of national independence, and what literature can be in our scholarly field now. As we academics try to remodel and justify humanities disciplines in a technocratic university culture, we benefit from examining a recently-past era of fascination with a key artistic technology. The moment that we deem film cameras “antique,” we also seize the opportunity to revisit them and produce new cultural histories.

Samuel England is Associate Professor of Arabic at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In the Department of African Cultural Studies, he teaches Classical and modern Arabic, Mediterranean cultures, and sub-Saharan African sources. He also teaches Middle Eastern historical topics in the International Studies Major. Prof. England’s research covers Classical Arabic poetry and prose, premodern courts in the Middle East and Europe, Crusades literature, Arab nationalist film and drama of the past century, and Romance-language treatments of Islam. He is the author of the book Medieval Empires and the Culture of Competition  (Edinburgh University press, 2017), which explores the relationship between intellectual conflict and the larger political question of imperial governance. Currently, he is writing a second book, on modern literature and image-making. The working title is Dictating the Classics: Heritage in Modern Arab Regimes. It asks how Arab political and cultural elites in the 20th century used the Arabic past to promote themselves in a variety of mass media. In addition to book work, Prof. England has published articles in the Journal of Arabic Literature, Alif, and Middle Eastern Literatures. He is also a mediocre but enthusiastic photographer.