Where the dust settles: fieldwork, subjectivity and materiality in Cairo

Nassar, Aya

doi:10.1080/21582041.2017.1418521

Cited by 16 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…the spaces it makes, the space where it settles, the space that it invades A geopoetic of dust forces me to learn from it rather than from the academic accounts that have fixed it in discourse. Dust, after all, is the excellent unraveling traveler, wearing out whatever I thought, hoped, or feared to be intact (Nassar 2018).…”

Section: Dust Re-turnsmentioning

confidence: 94%

“…I realize that they reflect my anxiety of losing grips of a space I thought I was entitled to know. Since writing them, I have come see in dust a process of reconciliation (Nassar 2018). Dust after all is the perfect archive (Barak 2012;Nassar 2018;Steedman 2001).…”

Section: Dust Re-turnsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Since writing them, I have come see in dust a process of reconciliation (Nassar 2018). Dust after all is the perfect archive (Barak 2012;Nassar 2018;Steedman 2001). I pick it up from fragments of field research: unpolished pictures or discarded word documents in misplaced folders with the hope that I might recognize its space .…”

Section: Dust Re-turnsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Geopoetics as Disruptive Aesthetics: Vignettes from Cairo

Nassar

2021

GeoHumanities

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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

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Section: Dust Re-turnsmentioning

confidence: 94%

Section: Dust Re-turnsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Geopoetics as Disruptive Aesthetics: Vignettes from Cairo

Nassar

2021

GeoHumanities

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“…My aim is to relate these to more 'geosocial' studies, focusing on the granular materiality of substances to reflect on the encounter between humans and mineral materials such as sand (Clark & Yusoff 2017), or in this case, dust. This enables me to think through the physical and affective implications of the railway workers' encounters with the dust contained in the trains and depots: physical, in the sense that the focus on dust sheds light on the porosity and permeability of the body ((Agard-Jones 2013, Clarke 2019; Litvintseva 2019; Nieuwenhuis 2019) and affective, in the ways that narratives around dust transcend the phenomenological sensations of the body to encompass also feelings of nostalgia or anxiety that the railway infrastructures and the memories attached to them evoke across time and space (Bear 2007;Finkelstein 2019;Nassar 2018).…”

Section: Charline Kopfmentioning

confidence: 99%

The dynamics of toxic dust

Kopf¹

2020

Anthropology Today

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By examining railway workers' narratives of poussière (dust) and their practices of repair work in the train depot at Rufisque, Senegal, the article reveals how the workers' understanding of dust encapsulates a toxic mixture, not only of pollution and sand but also asbestos lodged in the coaches. Attendant to the corporeal and intimate stories of the workers and the histories of the trains imported from India, the article sheds light on how workers handle their daily encounters with the granular materiality of the toxic dust as it seeps into the bodies of machines and workers, conditioning their past and future. In the context of institutional as well as industrial negligence, despite an awareness of the dangers, the workers continue their unsafe practices in toxic environments for fear of losing their jobs. The article argues that disentangling the nostalgic, future and toxic aspects of the railway, helps to demonstrate how an otherwise fleeting, invisible toxicant ‐ unequally distributed and travelling across geographies ‐ remains stuck in the organisms of both men and machines.

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“…clarifies how the approach is set around the 'performance turn' in tourism through its analytic focus on the interplay between particles and the practices and coping strategies of the tourist body set in everyday situations (Edensor, 2007;Franklin, 2001). More distinctly, partigraphy extends and contributes to performative tourism studies by promoting a more-than-human approach that invigorates the agencies of particles in concrete tourism situationssimilar to recent research addressing the role of air and dust in human experience (Adey, 2015;Nassar, 2017Nieuwenhuis, 2016. Through this new 'particles-oriented' framing, partigraphy promotes a new style of performative tourism approach capable of addressing how large global challenges such as 'climate change', 'pandemics' and 'air pollution' manifests through small narratives, local livelihoods, material responses and through everyday performances.…”

mentioning

confidence: 93%