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E-book Theaters of Citizenship : Aesthetics and Politics of Avant-Gardist Performance in Egypt

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Penilaian

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The arcades linking downtown Cairo’s boulevards were dotted with sidewalk cafés serving tea, coffee, and shisha, as well as air- conditioned bars where muthaqqafin (the cultured class) met to gossip about art and politics. The Grillon bar was a social institution among state television journalists and employees of the public arts sector, its bow- tie- clad bartenders dressed by the rules of an era when downtown was the center of Cairo’s nightlife. Over rounds of local Stella beer and Merit cigarettes, these members of a wan-ing intellectual elite dissected the nation’s drift away from their leftist ideals. President Hosni Mubarak’s economic reforms had ushered global corpora-tions into the Egyptian economy and streamlined the state sector since the 1990s. The public cultural institutions on which an older generation had thrived no longer existed for young college graduates with artistic or liter-ary ambitions. Now that satellite television dishes had sprouted on Cairo’s buildings, reshaping the cultural landscape and throwing Egypt’s prominence in the Arab world into question, these literati debated the future of national culture with particular urgency.On an August evening in 2005, a friend and I visited the Grillon to meet playwright and director Lenin el- Ramli. The rumpled, bespectacled intel-lectual in his sixties shared enduring friendships and socialist ideals with state- sector peers, despite having launched a private theater company. He was currently preparing a play for the upcoming edition of the Cairo Interna-tional Festival for Experimental Theatre (CIFET), Masks Off!, a satire on the sudden fashion for wearing masks. This allegory of the spread of face veil-ing (niqab) in urban Egypt drove home El- Ramli’s secularist cultural politics with raucous comedy. While his collaborations with Mohamed Sobhi in the 1980s and 1990s satirized feckless presidents and the decline of Arab solidar-ity, he now turned his critical eye to Egypt’s alliance with the United States and the rise of Islamist movements.1 Theater was his intellectual generation’s means of staging debates on national identity at a time of cultural polariza-tion. And Cairo audiences of various ages flocked to his plays.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

792 PAH t

Penerbit

USA : Northwestern University Press., 2020

Deskripsi Fisik

187 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9780810141773

Klasifikasi

792

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

Stage Presentation, Theater

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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