Geopoetics as Disruptive Aesthetics: Vignettes from Cairo

Abstract

In this paper, I perform an approach for a material and affective geography of the postcolonial city that is developed from within the spaces of Cairo and its archives. I propose storytelling the city through its geopoetics, where geopoetics emphasizes the elemental materiality of space. Taking inspiration from Angela Last (2017), geopoetics in this essay denotes disruptive aesthetics: intersection between word, aesthetics, and the geophysical materiality. This essay proceeds with a series of personal vignettes based on fieldwork in Cairo, Egypt. What if the narrative of downtown Cairo as a paradigmatic starting point in its history was explored through its consumption in fire? What if dust-the banal and irritating feature of the city is made central in probing its affective making and breaking? The essay is concerned with the ways through which we narrate and make meaning of this megacity of the Middle East. *** An aesthetics of the earth? In the half-starved dust of Africas? In the mud of flooded Asias? In epidemics, masked forms of exploitation, flies buzz-bombing the skeleton skins of children? In the frozen silence of the Andes? In the rains uprooting favelas and shantytowns? In the scrub and scree of Bantu lands? In flowers encircling necks and ukuleles? In mud huts crowning goldmines? In city sewers? In haggard aboriginal wind? In red-light districts? In drunken indiscriminate consumption? In the noose? The cabin? Night with no candle? Yes. But an aesthetics of disruption and intrusion. -Édouard Glissant, Poetics of RelationThis essay proceeds through a series of fragmented vignettes that I have accumulated along the process of thinking about Cairo as a postcolonial city. From the onset, I hope to undo the authoritative 'I propose' that inhabit the essay's introduction. The propositions I make aremore appropriately-a set of tangled practices that help me work through some discomforts GeoHumanities, 00(00) 2021, 1-9

The geographies of colonial infrastructures: Mobility, im/materiality, and politics on walking trails in the Middle East

“…Yet limited research in geography on the MENA region, including within this very journal, has attended to the experiences of those living and resisting these colonial pasts and presents or used methods to challenge established geopolitical scripting of the region (see Carpi et al, 2022;Disembodied Territories, 2022;Fregonese, 2019;Nassar, 2018Nassar, , 2021. The scholarship on infrastructure also remains overly focused on urban and European and North American contexts, and what I would term conventional infrastructure (gas pipes, road networks, telecommunications).…”

“…A focus on walking trails in the MENA region further provides an account of what it means to centre methods and sites in geography in which the discursive and representative is in constant relation with the experiential and embodied. To fully understand the production of (post)colonial and settler-colonial space, increasing attention is currently drawn to material and imagination processes (Manchanda & Plonski, 2022;Nassar, 2018Nassar, , 2021). Yet despite similar calls in mobility scholarship and political geographies of infrastructure to attend to imagination and materiality in the production of mobility and infrastructures (see Barry, 2019;Cresswell, 2010;Merriman, 2016), there remains little work that fully explores these entanglements.…”

Cultural geographies II: In the critical zone? – Environments, landscapes and life

“…3 Such off-earth foci, are interestingly paired with a renewed attention to the ‘geo’. For cultural geographers, this includes re-visiting ideas of geopoetics, their relationship with geopolitics as well as a wider attention to geoaesthetics, re-routing associated questions of power and difference away from aesthetics’ usual legacies as a Western Enlightenment concept (Jackson, 2016; Last, 2015; Magrane et al, 2020; Nassar, 2021; Till, 2020).…”

Environmental ethnography

“…Animals are more amenable to traditional ethnographic methods, 1 which is precisely why environmental ethnography often looks to less charismatic and obvious forms of existence. Recent endeavors in environmental ethnography (some of which have already been mentioned above) include attending to forms of existence that are often overlooked as empty context, such as weather (Rantala et al, 2011; Simpson 2017), ice (Hastrup 2013; Veland and Lynch 2017), pollution (da Costa 2008; Nassar 2021), and forests (Kohn 2013; Tsing 2015). Others include affective and less tangible entities, such as Aboriginal Australian Dreamings (totemic formations, Povinelli 2016), the dreams of dogs (Kohn 2007), anticipation (Reeves 2017), and hunger (Phillips 2018).…”