Cairo Cosmopolitan
Politics, Culture, and Urban Space in the New Globalized Middle East
Published on 1. August 2009
564 pages
978-1-61797-390-1 (ISBN)
Description
Bringing together a distinguished interdisciplinary group of scholars, this volume explores what happens when new forms of privatization meet collectivist pasts, public space is sold off to satisfy investor needs and tourist gazes, and the state plans for Egypt's future in desert cities while stigmatizing and neglecting Cairo's popular neighborhoods. These dynamics produce surprising contradictions and juxtapositions that are coming to define today's Middle East.
The original publication of this volume launched the Cairo School of Urban Studies, committed to fusing political-economy and ethnographic methods and sensitive to ambivalence and contingency, to reveal the new contours and patterns of modern power emerging in the urban frame.
Contributors: Mona Abaza, Nezar AlSayyad, Paul Amar, Walter Armbrust, Vincent Battesti, Fanny Colonna, Eric Denis, Dalila ElKerdany, Yasser Elsheshtawy, Farha Ghannam, Galila El Kadi, Anouk de Koning, Petra Kuppinger, Anna Madoeuf, Catherine Miller, Nicolas Puig, Said Sadek, Omnia El Shakry, Diane Singerman, Elizabeth A. Smith, Leïla Vignal, Caroline Williams.
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Diane Singerman | Paul Amar
Cairo Cosmopolitan
Politics, Culture, and Urban Space in the New Middle East
Book
08/2009
The American University in Cairo Press
€28.50
Available (delivery time upon request)
Person
Diane Singerman is associate professor in the Department of Government at the School of Public Affairs of American University. She is the author of Avenues of Participation: Family, Politics, and Networks in Urban Quarters of Cairo, and editor of Cairo Contested (AUC Press, 2009).
Paul Amar is assistant professor of law and society at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is co-editor of The Middle East in Brazil: South-South Relations, Migrations and Recognitions and Police Planet: The Global/Local Origins of Authoritarian Security.
Content
- Intro
- Half Title Page
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Contesting Myths, Critiquing Cosmopolitanism, and Creating the Cairo School of Urban Studies
- Cairo: The City Cosmopolitan
- 1 Cairo as Neo-Liberal Capital? From Walled City to Gated Communities
- 2 Cairo as Capital of Socialist Revolution?
- 3 Cairo as Regional/Global Economic Capital?
- 4 Cairo as Global/Regional Cultural Capital?
- Cairo Consumer and Investor Geographies
- 5 Egyptianizing the American Dream: Nasr City's Shopping Malls, Public Order, and the Privatized Military
- 6 Café Latte and Caesar Salad: Cosmopolitan Belonging in Cairo's Coffee Shops
- 7 From Dubai to Cairo: Competing Global Cities, Models, and Shifting Centers of Influence?
- 8 Keeping Him Connected: Globalization and the Production of Locality in Cairo
- Cairo Heritage and Touristic Globalization
- 9 Reconstructing Islamic Cairo: Forces at Work
- 10 Urban Transformations: Social Control at al-Rifa'i Mosque and Sultan Hasan Square
- 11 Pyramids and Alleys: Global Dynamics and Local Strategies in Giza
- 12 Belle Époque Cairo: The Politics of Refurbishing the Downtown Business District
- Cairo Subcultures and Media Contestation
- 13 Upper Egyptian Regionally Based Communities in Cairo: Traditional or Modern Forms of Urbanization?
- 14 Place, Class, and Race in the Barabra Café: Nubians in Egyptian Media
- 15 When the Lights Go Down in Cairo: Cinema as Global Crossroads and Space of Playful Resistance
- 16 A Round Trip to Isma'iliya: Cairo's Media Exiles, Television Innovation, and Provincial Citizenship
- Cairo Celebratory Spaces and Vernacular World-Crossing
- 17 Mulids of Cairo: Sufi Guilds, Popular Celebrations, and the 'Roller-Coaster Landscape' of the Resignified City
- 18 The Giza Zoo: Re-Appropriating Public Spaces, Re-Imagining Urban Beauty
- 19 Egypt's Pop-Music Clashes and the 'World-Crossing' Destinies of Muhammad 'Ali Street Musicians
- Afterword
- Whose Cairo?
