Incurable Past
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€72.99
1950s
1960s
A01=Meriam N. Belli
appropriation
Author_Meriam N. Belli
Bakhtin
Category=NHQ
civics
collective memory
Dar al-Watha'iq
documents
education
effigy
Egypt
Egyptian National Archives
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
ethnography
Free Officers
haraq al-limby
historical utterances
history
Jamal Abd al-Nasser
Limby
local
Mariophany
Meriam Belli
Middle East
nineteenth century
official
oligarchy
popular culture
Port Said
republic
revolution
twentieth century
vernacular
Virgin Mary
Zaytun
Product details
- ISBN 9780813044040
- Weight: 456g
- Dimensions: 154 x 231mm
- Publication Date: 30 May 2013
- Publisher: University Press of Florida
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Mid-century Egypt seems to shift its shape in light of ordinary peoples’ memories. In An Incurable Past, Mériam Belli examines collective memory, oral histories, and everyday communications to reveal not just the history of mid-twentieth-century Egypt but also the ways in which ordinary people experience and remember the past. Using official archives, government publications, press reportage, fiction, textbooks, cinema, art, and public rituals, Belli constructs a ground-breaking theoretical framework of “historical utterances” which provokes questions about the relationship between remembrance and reality. Belli argues that such personal testimonies and public representations allow us a deeper understanding of Egypt’s many sociocultural layers in the 1950s and 1960s. She spotlights three topics of vernacular expression in modern Egypt: education, the anti-colonial Limby Festival, and the 1968 apparition of the Virgin Mary at a Coptic Orthodox Church in Cairo. Linked by the mid-century shift from communal life to an industrial and individuated society, these expressions also disclose the contradictory influence of ideologically homogenising state policies.
Examining history not as it was but as it is remembered, this book contextualises the classist and deeply disappointing post-Nasserist period that has inspired today’s Egyptian revolutionaries.
Examining history not as it was but as it is remembered, this book contextualises the classist and deeply disappointing post-Nasserist period that has inspired today’s Egyptian revolutionaries.
Mériam N. Belli is assistant professor of history at the University of Iowa, USA.
