In a collage of images the author attempts to convey the transformation of consumer culture and how it is related to the urban reshaping of the city of Cairo to meet with the demands of globalisation. Evidently Cairo ́s urban reshaping is taking place by pushing away the unwanted slums residents, which constitute the majority of the city ́s population.

Examines how popular media and culture provided ordinary Egyptians with a framework to construct and negotiate a modern national identity.

For members of Cairo's upper classes, cosmopolitanism is a form of social capital, deployed whenever they acquire or consume transnational commodities, or goods that are linked in the popular imagination to other, more "modern" places. In a series of thickly described and carefully contextualized case studies—of Arabic children's magazines, Pokémon, private schools and popular films, coffee shops and fast-food restaurants—Mark Allen Peterson describes the social practices that create class identities. He traces these processes from childhood into adulthood, examining how taste and style intersect with a changing educational system and economic liberalization. Peterson reveals how uneasy many cosmopolitan Cairenes are with their new global identities, and describes their efforts to root themselves in the local through religious, nationalist, or linguistic practices.

This handbook provides an overview of the society, culture, geography, history, and politics of contemporary Egypt. While such historic monuments as the pyramids at Giza, the Karnak Temple, and the Valley of the Kings draw visitors to Egypt each year, the country is today a large and varied collection of some 79 million people. An important political and cultural force in the Middle East and home to one of Africa's most advanced economies, Egypt is rapidly becoming a major player in the 21st-century world. This comprehensive text examines all facets of life in Egypt, including its land, history, politics, and culture. It is written in a manner that makes the subject accessible and engaging for readers with little prior knowledge about the country, but also provides a critical analysis of the latest research for students and scholars familiar with Egypt and its people. Special attention is given to the historical period following the rise of Islam to enable a greater understanding of Egypt's contemporary government, religious practices, popular culture, and current events.

A look at some of the raging debates in the arts in Egypt

This book discusses Egyptian Muslim women’s dress as the social, political and ideological signifier of the changing attitudes towards Western modernity. It employs women’s clothing styles as a feminist act that provides rich insights into the power and limits of legal regulations and hegemonic discourses in constructing gendered and cultural borders in the modern Egyptian public sphere. Furthermore, through highlighting marginalized but significant models and historical moments of cultural exchange between Muslim and Western cultures through female dress, the book tells a third story beyond the binary model of an assumed modest oppressed traditional Muslim woman vis-à-vis consumer emancipated modern Western woman in mainstream Western discourse and literary representation.

This ground-breaking work presents original research on cultural politics and battles in Egypt at the turn of the twenty first century. It deconstructs the boundaries between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture drawing on conceptual tools in cultural studies, translation studies and gender studies to analyze debates in the fields of literature, cinema, mass media and the plastic arts. Anchored in the Egyptian historical and social contexts and inspired by the influential work of Pierre Bourdieu, it rigorously places these debates and battles within the larger framework of a set of questions about the relationship between the cultural and political fields in Egypt.

This book compares secularity in societies not shaped by Western Christianity, particularly in Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa.

Collecting has a long tradition in the Middle East but the museum as a public institution is relatively new. Today there are national museums for antiquities in most Arab countries. While in some cases the political and social climate has hindered the foundation of museums, with existing collections even destroyed at times, the recent museum boom in the Gulf States is again changing the outlook. This unique book is the first to explore collecting practices in archives and museums in the modern Arab world, featuring case studies of collecting practices in countries ranging from Egypt and Lebanon to Palestine, Jordan, Iraq and the Gulf, and providing a theoretical and methodological basis for future research. The authors are also concerned with investigating the relationship between past and present, since collecting practices tell us a great deal not only about the past but also about the ways we approach the past and present conceptions of our identities. Collections can be textual as well, as in the stories, memories or events selected, recalled, and retold in the pages of a text. As interest in memory studies as well as popular and visual culture grows in the Arab World, so collecting practices are at the heart of any critical approach to the past and the present in that region. The book will be of great interest not only to scholars and students of the modern Arab world but also to professionals in museums and collections in the region, as well as around the world.

Contains 14 chapters that focus on various aspects of economic organization and behaviour, mostly based on empirical fieldwork conducted by the authors themselves. This title takes a look at urban food provisioning in Cameroon and an investigation into entrepreneurial activities in the rapidly-changing economy of Cairo.