Anticolonial Afterlives in Egypt
The Politics of Hegemony

Through Gramsci and Fanon, Salem centers anticolonial politics by exploring the connections between Egypt's moment of decolonization and the 2011 revolution.

Sara Salem (Author)

9781108491518, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 30 April 2020

312 pages, 9 b/w illus.
23.5 x 15.7 x 2.5 cm, 0.57 kg

'Sara Salem's book makes a highly significant contribution to Marxist and postcolonial theories in politics and international relations … [of] value to scholars of the postcolonial state and its distinct articulation in the context of the Middle East. It not only succeeds in challenging conventional approaches to the region but also makes an invaluable contribution to scholars interested in the intersection of the ideational and the material in international politics.' Vivienne Jabri, Perspectives on Politics

This study presents an alternative story of the 2011 Egyptian revolution by revisiting Egypt's moment of decolonisation in the mid-twentieth century. Anticolonial Afterlives in Egypt explores the country's first postcolonial project, arguing that the enduring afterlives of anticolonial politics, connected to questions of nationalism, military rule, capitalist development and violence, are central to understanding political events in Egypt today. Through an imagined conversation between Antonio Gramsci and Frantz Fanon, two foundational theorists of anti-capitalism and anticolonialism, Anticolonial Afterlives in Egypt focuses on issues of resistance, revolution, mastery and liberation to show how the Nasserist project, created by Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Free Officers in 1952, remains the only instance of hegemony in modern Egyptian history. In suggesting that Nasserism was made possible through local, regional and global anticolonial politics, even as it reproduced colonial ways of governing that continue to reverberate into Egypt's present, this interdisciplinary study thinks through questions of traveling theory, global politics, and resistance and revolution in the postcolonial world.

Introduction. Trapped in history: revolution in Egypt
Part I. Anticolonialism and its Discontents: 1. Postcolonial and Marxist encounters
2. Hegemony in Egypt: revisiting Gamal Abdel Nasser
Part II. Hegemony and its Afterlives: 3. Laying neoliberal foundations: Infitah and a new Egypt
4. Finance capital and empty time
Conclusion. Haunted histories and decolonial futures.

Subject Areas: Central government policies [JPQB], Political science & theory [JPA], Politics & government [JP], Sociology [JHB], Revolutions, uprisings, rebellions [HBTV], Middle Eastern history [HBJF1]