Gazing at Egypt's museums: toward a new internationalism

Abstract

PurposeThis paper aims to examine the transformation of the concept of cultural tourism within the sociopolitical empowerments, changes of visual realms and normative contexts, which is embedded within museums as institutions.Design/methodology/approachThese discussions will be conceptualized through investigating the shifts in the metamorphosis of the architectural vocabulary of Egypt's museums between nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This analysis will be highlighted through connecting both the notion of the “tourist reflexivity” of John Urry and Jonas Larsen in The Tourist Gaze 3.0 (2011) and the notion of the “interstitial spaces” and “new internationalism” of Homi Bhabha in The Location of Culture (1994). The analysis expands to interrogate these two notions as prelude for reflecting on representations of colonial and postcolonial museums in Egypt, starting from the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities, Cairo (c. 1863) to the most recent, the Egyptian Grand Museum, Cairo (c. 2002).FindingsThe analysis revealed that while colonial museums endeavored to stage external cultural authority and postcolonial ones staged traditions' liminality through “New internationalism”, they created spatiotemporal interstices. This finding, while is a timely example with the rising global cultural encounters that emerged during this transformative age, it challenges the collective imaginations of architects to liberate from traditional nationalism.Originality/valueThe paper offers novel theoretical and architectural analysis of Egypt's museums through the exigency of nationalism and “new internationalism”. The encounter between both notions is a timely example given the recent involvements by the “Modern State” and the recent pandemic upheaval that revealed the inevitability of globalism and the discursivity of such notions.

Knowledge spaces in architecture and urbanism – a preliminary five-year chronicle

“…Examples of recent contributions to this knowledge space include the work of Allahham (2019), which scrutinizes the transformation of the semiological meaning of the contemporary mosque, with a special focus on grand state mosques; the work of Kiyanenko (2019) which interrogates Western authors and their ideas related to environmental design research (EDR) and the way in which they have impacted Russian architectural discourse; the work of Alaily-Mattar et al. (2021) which utilizes a methodological strategy and a conceptual impact model that unravels the contextual impacts of star architecture projects; the work of El-Ashmouni (2021) which probes the notion of cultural tourism and museums as institutions and the associated socio-political authority, changes of visual realms and normative contexts; and the work of De Paris et al. (2021) that explores the concepts of adaptability and flexibility and the associated factors that enhance the effectiveness of indoor environments.…”

“You must go here”: architecture, yelp and the tourist gaze

“…Despite these assertions, others have argued that a strong connection to local culture or history is not the only reason tourists might appreciate architecture (Stephenson, 2014) and even in historic tourist destinations, people still associate contemporary buildings with place (McMullen, 2020). Moreover, modernist architecture has the capacity to represent new social relations in well-travelled tourist destinations (El-Ashmouni, 2021).…”