Making Sense of the Politics of the Egyptian Revolution in and through Popular Culture

Abstract

The outbreak of the Egyptian revolution in 2011 gave a huge impetus to the study of popular culture. In particular, scholars working in such diverse fields as anthropology, media studies, film studies, comparative literature, and cultural studies have highlighted the flourishing of creativity and the role of popular culture in mobilizing and articulating popular resistance to authoritarianism and challenging state media narratives of events. 1 Not only artists but also ordinary people used music, poetry, graffiti, jokes, and citizen journalism to document events, tell their stories, and express their viewpoints. Comedy and in particular political satire were used to criticize and ridicule the authorities. Citizen journalism became prominent in correcting the omissions or distortions of state-owned media and creating a revolutionary narrative. The figure of the martyr of the revolution (that is, those individuals who died at the hands of the security forces in political protests) was ubiquitous in various forms of popular culture and served to create public sympathy not merely for those individuals but, more importantly, for the cause of the revolution. The state was not the only object of criticism. Popular culture also was used to raise awareness of sexual violence against women protesters, which was perpetrated not only by the police and military but also by unknown gangs of men. Moreover, popular culture was not only expressive of resistance to dominant power. It also was an arena for pro-regime voices, such as the TV presenter Tawfiq 'Ukasha, who used his show to whip up hostility to the revolution and support for the military. 2 Yet political scientists have largely ignored popular culture and its role in the 2010-2011 uprisings. This reflects a general lack of attention to nonconventional forms of political agency alongside a narrow definition of what constitutes "the political" within the field of political science. Rather, in the wake of the Arab uprisings, political scientists have focused primarily on comparing structural or institutional factors or social movement dynamics to explain the outcomes of the 2011 uprisings across different countries. 3 As Jillian Schwedler argues, such approaches have obscured important micro-level as well as transnational processes. 4 In particular, these approaches are ill suited to capturing the shifting subjectivities and identities and contested meanings of the revolution that underpinned post-2011 political dynamics. I argue that to capture these important dynamics it is necessary to study the processes of meaning-making

January/February 2022 Print Issue: Music

“…While there is some truth to this argument, it greatly underestimates the magnitude of the state's efforts to censor mahraganat music, which have intensified since 2015. Writing about the role of popular culture in the 2011 uprisings, political scientist Nicola Pratt (2020) argues that despite its seeming avoidance of politics, mahraganat music disrupts the dominant cultural hierarchies. This disruption and its focus on the daily lives of low-income Egyptians throws mahraganat back into the realm of the political, but not through the traditional resistance/ domination binary.…”