Politics and Popular Culture in Egypt: Contested Narratives of the 25 January Revolution and its Aftermath

Though still ubiquitous in English-language scholarship and media, the term 'Arab Spring' is heavily contested in the Middle East. The breadth and depth of these contestations is no more apparent than in the explosion of popular cultural products and social media commentary in the largest and most populous Arab country, Egypt. From pop music to grafitti, these sources have played a vital role in articulating political meaning 'from below' in a vastly expanded public sphere. Yet there has been surprisingly little sustained analysis of how Egyptians have narrated their own history/ies of the 25 January Revolution.

This project will put 'the people' back at the centre of scholarly understanding of Egypt's tumultuous transition amidst official attempts to script a history-still-in-the-making and erase alternative narratives of events unfolding since 2011. It will reveal how struggles over the definition of Egyptian national identity have been central to this process and dependent upon malleable constructions of 'self' and 'other'. More broadly, it will investigate how moments of domestic political crisis represent opportunities to recreate notions of 'East' and 'West' with wider implications for how we understand the geopolitical.

Our investigation will consist of two strands:

1) We will examine a diversity of popular cultural texts to uncover popular narratives of the 25 January revolution and analyse how these have evolved since 2011. Particular attention will be paid to how 'the Egyptian people' are represented over time and what this tells us about how Egyptians see 'the West', delineating the role these identities have played in narrating and contesting political dynamics.

2) In parallel, we will examine official narratives of the 2011 uprising and how various stakeholders at the helm of the state have sought to justify their claim to power and discredit opposition, including through attempts at censorship and cultural policing. Exploring areas of divergence and convergence with popular narratives, we will also analyse how popular culture has subverted, resignified, reinforced or reconstituted hegemonic discourses of the nation, national identity and domestic or foreign 'others.'.

Both popular and official strands will focus on four seminal moments:
i) the removal of former President Mubarak in February 2011,
ii) the electoral victory of the Muslim Brotherhood in 2012,
iii) the overthrow of former President Morsi in 2013,
iv) the presidential victory of Abdel Fattah El-Sisi in 2014.

This project will be ambitious in the scope of Egyptian popular cultural texts examined and the use of social media to gather new digital sources and provide substantial innovation in the relatively underexamined field of Middle East cultural studies. Collaboration between the universities of Warwick, Reading and Manchester will merge expertise in international relations, history and cultural studies to develop an interdisciplinary methodology for the study of popular perspectives on predominantly top-down debates concerning Arab democratisation and authoritarianism. Through a postcolonial reading of sources, we will advance post-Orientalism scholarship that has struggled to de-center the West as the subject of analysis, bringing to the fore Egyptian voices that have been marginalized and increasingly subject to suppression by the state.

The project will provide real policy benefits, revealing the complex cultural battleground that has framed politics in Egypt since 2011 and illuminating how Egyptian representations of the 'West' have been implicated in the post-25 January transition. Engaging this audience from the outset will strengthen inter-cultural dialogue and understanding at a time when UK policy-makers are struggling to respond to ongoing upheavals in the Middle East.

This research has several groups of non-academic beneficiaries and two main pathways to impact. One of the goals of the project is to engage with these groups from the outset and bring beneficiaries together in order to create an institutionalized pathway for knowledge transfer in the long term. This first pathway to impact will include:
1) Politicians and policy makers within political parties, government and inter-governmental organizations concerned with foreign relations towards the Middle East;
2) Practitioners within government, inter-governmental organizations and NGOs concerned with the Middle East;
3) Working groups, think tanks, cultural foundations, and political commentators with an interest in international relations (and specifically relations between the West and Middle East);
4) The specialist press dealing with current developments in the Middle East and those providing analysis to business and commerce;
5) Egyptian producers of popular culture, particularly 'cultural activists', such as the film-making collective 'Moisireen' and graffiti artists such as 'Women on Walls'.

How will they benefit from this research?

Policy-makers, practitioners, think tanks and the general public will benefit from deeper understandings of the recent political transformations in the Middle East and subsequent popular expressions and conceptualisations of geopolitics. The relationship of such representations with official discourses will illuminate both domestic tensions underlying contested narratives and new opportunities for engagement with the Arab region in the sphere of cultural production. More broadly the project will elucidate the multifaceted role that 'culture' plays in international relations.

In particular they will benefit from a deeper understanding of:
a) how popular and official perceptions of the 'Arab Spring' in Egypt relate to eachother and the implications of this for Egypt-West relations and foreign policy making;
b) the contestation over the narratives that frame Egypt's transition and the ways in which these narratives are deployed to legitimize particular policy choices;
c) the diversity and vitality of debate within the Arabic-speaking world and the opportunity provided by popular culture as a forum for intercultural dialogue and cultural hybridity, thereby challenging essentialist ideas of 'self' and 'other.'

This pathway to impact will include partners such as the Cabinet Office, the British Council and Chatham House with whom the investigators have an established rapport. Policy briefings, workshops, and a project website will be used to engage and connect these beneficiaries.

The second pathway to impact will be achieved through widening participation and has two main targets.
1) The wider public:
Traditional media formats such as a project website will be used alongside more dynamic social media forums such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter that facilitate user participation and dissemination. Public engagement will be sought in both Egypt and the UK via a seminar at the annual Downtown Contemporary Arts Festival (D-CAF) in Cairo and a public sceening of award-winning 'The Square' at the Warwick Arts Centre. The Commissioning Arts Editor for BBC Radio 4, Tony Philips has already expressed a strong interest in developing a series based on the project's findings (see more details in pathways to impact).
2) Secondary school students:
This beneficiary group will be engaged with the idea of social media (ubiquitously used by this demographic) as a historical resource and encouraged to consider popular culture, from music to film, as a political forum. We will organize two school events through Widening Participation schemes at Warwick and Reading and will seek further funding to design a module on popular culture and politics in the Arab World to be taught by secondary school teachers at A-level.