Reading the Self: Autobiography and the Making and Unmaking of the Modern Subject in Egypt
The genre of autobiography is an established practice in Arabic and Egyptian letters, yet rarely used as a lens to examine the history of subject formation in modern Egypt. This seminar series attempts at a close reading of key autobiographies of the Egyptian pioneers ‘al-ruwwad’ (Mustafa Abdel Razaq, Taha Hussein, Huda Shaarawi, Abbas Mahmoud al-Aqqad,...etc) who reflected on their lives in relation to a larger historical context characterised by profound transformations and cataclysmic changes. By tracing their first person narrations and the choices they made to frame their narratives the seminars will question how their narratives were seen by later historians, Egyptians and Westerners, and how they tried to answer complex questions such as authenticity and modernity, or the role of religion in modern life or what it means to be an Egyptian. Spanning a century or so of Egyptian history those modernists underwent personal and public transformations themselves, and in many instances reflected the contradictions and conflicts of their times.
In reading these texts in the first person, we try to locate their voices, their agency and the many ways they subverted power to establish themselves as ‘ideal subjects’ and the ways they were co-opted by power, blurring the line between between autonomy and assimilation. Of particular interest is the absence of a resolution between such diametrically opposed positions. Many of those pioneers of Nahdah occupy conflicting positions in official narratives and alternative ones as well. Some were maligned during their lifetimes and then later “rehabilitated” and others were iconic figures during their lifetime, were later dismissed. It is through charting these shifting positions of the modernists that we get to understand the ingenuity of some of these figures, who saw themselves as part of a larger historical moment, claiming it as their own on one hand, and renouncing it as anathema on the other. Through following these intellectual tropes of the modernists the seminars will try to examine narratives of self-making as a way to reflect back on the present, to rethink the questions they faced and that still resonate till today.
Session (1): Tracing Modernism and Nahda
This session touches upon the designation of Nahadah and how it was contextualized and looks at how it was historicized by later historians. And also tries to engage with theoretical writings of autobiography as formative narrative.
Essential reading:
-Jens Brockmeier and Donal Carbaugh (eds.), Narrative and Identity, 2001.
chapter 2: Self-Making and world-making, Jerome Burner pp. 25-36
-Carl Becker, Everyman his Own Historian, 1931
-لويس عوض، تاريخ الفكر المصري الحديث، الجزء الأول:
الباب الأول، ص 7-52
Optional reading:
-Thomas Mathien and D.G. Wright (eds.), Autobiography as Philosophy, Routledge (2006)
Chapter 1: Philosophers' autobiographies pp. 14-30
-Samah Selim, The Novel and the Rural Imaginary in Egypt 1880-1985
Chapter 2: 'The Garrulous Peasant: Ya'qub Sannu', Abdallah al-Nadim and the Construction of the fallah in early drama and dialogue' pp. 25-59
Session (2): Mustafa Abdel Razaq, Huda Shaarawi, Ahmed Lutfi al-Sayyed: Modernist visions, liberal visions?
This session will examine the perception that what characterized al-Nahada was a significantly liberal vision of progress. How was such vision translated through the writings of someone like Mustafa Abdel-Razeq? Or the memoirs of Huda Shaarawi? Rather than look at how their legacies were assessed, revisiting their autobiographies might offer an insight to what they might have tried to do in the light of the historical contingencies back then.
Essential reading:
-لويس عوض، تاريخ الفكر المصري الحديث، الجزء الأول:
الباب الثاني، ص 53-102
-أحمد لطفي السيد، قصة حياتي
(Read as much as you can)
-هدى شعراوي، مذكرات
-من آثار مصطفى عبد الرازق
نبذة عن حياته: ص 5 - 78 (optional reading)
صفحات من سفر الحياة: ص 79-123 (optional reading)
مذكرات مسافر: ص 387-460
Optional reading:
-Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller’
-Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age 1798-1939): Chapter VIII: Egyptian Nationalism pp. 193-221
Session (3) & (4): Taha Hussein, Abbas Mahmoud al-Aqad and Mey Ziada: Between Emancipation and Conservatism
Many of the pioneers of Nahada proposed emancipatory visions for the future but many also were caught in the question of the limits of such emancipation. Some of the responses were to institute a modernity “bounded” by tradition.
لويس عوض، تاريخ الفكر المصري الحديث، الجزء الأول:
الباب الثالث: الوزارة الأولي.. والدستور الأول.. والبرلمان الأول ص 103- 174
طه حسين، الأيام-
-عباس محمود العقاد، أنا
مي زيادة، غاية في الحياة-
-هدى شعراوي، مذكرات
Session (5): The Self is Rational? Tawfik al-Hakim, Lewis Awad, and Zaki Naguib Mahmoud and narratives of the rational self
In the final session we will explore the autobiographical writings of some of the key rationalist in Arabic modernism trying to understand how they addressed questions of authenticity, progress, religion and freedom.
توفيق الحكيم، رحلة بين عصرين
توفيق الحكيم، سجن العمر
زكي نجيب محمود، قصة عقل
لويس عوض، أوراق العم
