Documenting Defiance: Women Writers and Filmmakers in Tahrir Square
In this lecture, May Telmissany will discuss her own body of work as well as writers such as Ahdaf Soueif and and filmmakers such as Nevine Noujaim and Mai Iskander who played an important role in documenting the changes in epistemic beliefs related to the idea of defiance and revolution. From January 2011, May Telmissany contributed to the events surrounding the Egyptian revolution by creating www.dawlamadaneya.com, a website dedicated to defending civil rights and raising awareness of the principles of secularism. In her book Chroniques nomades, (2010), she analyzed the grievous effects of religious fundamentalism on Egyptian society and the premises underlying a latent revolt that would come to a head a few months later. In the past two years, Canadian, Egyptian, and European media have regularly invited Telmissany to comment on the political situation in Egypt; she has given over 40 interviews and public lectures on such complex issues as the utopianism of revolutionary movements, the flaws of Egyptian militarism, the need for a new secular constitution that respects human rights, and the dangers of political Islam and the rise of religious fascism in the region.
Popular Culture as a Realm of Resistance in the Arab Spring
The open-ended disposition of these revolutionary uprisings amounts to laying claim to the emerging public space in a language that both speaks to it and at once abandons dead interlocutors.
In those terms, Hamid Dabashi describes the core action of the recent Arab uprisings: a struggle with old dictatorships (“dead interlocutors”) over the access to the public space.
The Arab Spring has lead, in many cases, to the strengthening of authoritarian or semi-authoritarian regimes, or to the replacement of older autocratic governments by younger ones.
In this lecture, Walid El Khachab, analyses three main aspects of resistance to authoritarian regimes through cultural practices: street and graffiti art; public dancing, particularly by women; and collective devotional unorthodox practices dedicated to popular saints. The battle between municipal authorities and young graffiti artists in the streets of Cairo, where the walls were constantly painted in white, then covered with graffiti, is a material instance of that dynamic between law and order and resistance. Young people who danced in the streets to defy the government of the Muslim Brotherhood were literally 'performing their resistance' to a political organization that views art as immoral. Sufi devotion to the medieval Muslim saint Imam Hussein was recently politicized, because it represented the symbolic resurrection of a martyr killed during a battle with the army of a Despot.
The agency of the Cultural in these instances still retains a political efficacy.
May Telmissany teaches Arabic studies at University of Ottawa, and is acting director of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at University of Ottawa. She teaches nineteenth- and twentieth-century Arab cultural history, Arab cinema and visual media, and intercultural research methodologies. She is an internationally acclaimed Egyptian-Canadian novelist, and an intellectual dedicated to the cause of secularism and civil rights.
Born in Cairo in 1965, May Telmissany moved to Canada in 1998 and earned her PhD in comparative literature and cinema from Université de Montréal; her doctoral dissertation dealt with the depiction of working-class neighbourhoods in Egyptian cinema and the associated criticism of nationalism. Her academic publications include a book of photographs and cultural studies, The Last Hammams of Cairo (2009); Counterpoints: Edward Said’s Legacy (2010), a collection focusing on Palestinian-American philosophical thinker Edward Said; and a monograph entitled La Hara dans le cinéma égyptien: quartier populaire et identité nationale (2011). Her research on transnational and Quebec filmmakers has appeared in academic literature and journals in Canada, Egypt, France, Germany, India, and the United States.
Walid El Khachab After founding the Arabic Studies program at Concordia University in 2004, Walid El Khachab has joined York University in 2007 and is currently Associate Professor and Coordinator of Arabic Studies, York University. He edited the collective volume: Arabes : sortir du marasme? Published in Paris, Éditions Corlet, in 2004. Since then he has published more than 50 chapters in books and academic articles, in New York, Montreal, Toronto, Cairo, Paris, and Istanbul, on Arabic cultures and Islam, particularly national identities and modernity; the politics of mysticism; self representation in cinema, literature and popular culture. He is the co-director of ACANS, the Arab Canadian Studies Research Group, based at the University of Ottawa. His recent publications include: 'Expérience de la guerre et expertise en témoignage : médias, médiations, silences', In Canadian Journal of Media Studies. Fall 2012. pp.89-114. 'Sufis on Exile and Ghorba. Conceptualizing Displacement and Modern Subjectivity'. In May Telmissany (ed) Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Duke University Press. Vol. 30. No1. 2010. pp.58-68. 'The Other Europe: Veils, (In-)Visibility and Strangers in Western Culture'. In Savas Arslan, (eds) Media, Culture and Identity in Europe. Istanbul: Bahceshehir University Press. 2009. pp.87-94.