Theaters of Citizenship

Front matter

PETFOrMAnce WOTKS

SERIES EDITORS: This series publishes books in theater and performance studies, Patrick Anderson and focused in particular on the material conditions in which Nicholas Ridout performance acts are staged and to which performance itself

might contribute. We define “performance” in the broadest sense, including traditional theatrical productions and performance art, but also cultural ritual, political demonstration, social practice, and other forms of interpersonal, social, and political interaction that may fruitfully be understood in terms of performance.

Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Chapter 1. Theaters of Citizenship: Youth, Performance, and Identity in the Late Mubarak Era 3

Chapter 2. After the Festival: The Intertwined Rise of Cultural and Political Avant-Gardes 19 Chapter 3. Live from Cairo: Youth in the Time of New Media 47 Chapter 4. Making Women Matter in Avant-Garde Theater 73 Chapter 5. Instrumentalizing Performance in Self-Help Citizenship 95

Chapter 1 + Theaters of Citizenship Youth, Performance, and Identity in the Late Mubarak Era

The arcades linking downtown Cairo’s boulevards were dotted with sidewalk cafés serving tea, coffee, and shisha, as well as air-conditioned bars where muthaqqafin (the cultured class) met to gossip about art and politics. The Grillon bar was a social institution among state television journalists and employees of the public arts sector, its bow-tie-clad bartenders dressed by the rules of an era when downtown was the center of Cairo’s nightlife. Over rounds of local Stella beer and Merit cigarettes, these members of a waning intellectual elite dissected the nation’s drift away from their leftist ideals. President Hosni Mubarak’s economic reforms had ushered global corporations into the Egyptian economy and streamlined the state sector since the 1990s. The public cultural institutions on which an older generation had thrived no longer existed for young college graduates with artistic or literary ambitions. Now that satellite television dishes had sprouted on Cairo’s buildings, reshaping the cultural landscape and throwing Egypt’s prominence in the Arab world into question, these literati debated the future of national culture with particular urgency.

On an August evening in 2005, a friend and I visited the Grillon to meet playwright and director Lenin el-Ramli. The rumpled, bespectacled intellectual in his sixties shared enduring friendships and socialist ideals with state-sector peers, despite having launched a private theater company. He was currently preparing a play for the upcoming edition of the Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre (CIFET), Masks Off!, a satire on the sudden fashion for wearing masks. This allegory of the spread of face veiling (niqab) in urban Egypt drove home El-Ramli’s secularist cultural politics with raucous comedy. While his collaborations with Mohamed Sobhi in the 1980s and 1990s satirized feckless presidents and the decline of Arab solidarity, he now turned his critical eye to Egypt’s alliance with the United States and the rise of Islamist movements.! Theater was his intellectual generation’s means of staging debates on national identity at a time of cultural polarization. And Cairo audiences of various ages flocked to his plays.

In the alleyway off the Grillon, younger downtown muthaqqafin dug into bowls of fava beans at the sidewalk restaurant of Saad al-Harami. Several worked part time as freelance journalists or acting teachers; others were unemployed. Amateur theater was the topic of many of their conversations, a cherished means of sustaining student-day debates and gaining an audience for intellectual voices of a new generation. Instead of staging the plays of canonical Egyptian playwrights, these dramatists used news articles and translated texts to generate scripts for contemporary theater. One friend who had dropped out of the prestigious Theater Institute (Ma’had al-Masrah) because he found its curriculum old-fashioned spoke of devising a play based on a Paulo Coelho book, with Indian music to accompany the spiritual theme. Cairo dramatists in their twenties and thirties shared with El-Ramli’s generation an enthusiasm for theater as a stage for national identity politics and a means of self-representation. But they played the role of public intellectuals through adaptation, hybridization, and improvisation more than authorship. Their version of avant-garde culture traversed genre and national boundaries.

This book analyzes the evolving use of urban theater as a stage for citizenship during the decline and fall of the Mubarak regime. When the former president’s minister of culture trimmed the budgets of state theaters, diverting millions toward an annual international theater festival, young Egyptian dramatists took to seeking space outside state institutions to make critical theater. These university graduates from urban families found in the venerable art a public forum in which to represent their generational concerns intellectually and aesthetically, if not politically. Wherever theater was performed, it created a platform for modern identity politics that echoed that of the storied theaters of Egypt’s heritage. Middle-class creatives who struggled to find work in an increasingly globalized private cultural sector that favored a tiny, bilingual elite found in amateur theater a place to pursue many ambitions. Throughout the shifting economic tides produced by globalization policies in the early 2000s, and waves of political repression, they invested their time and resources in building a milieu for youth culture to call their own. Independent theater became a lively stage of citizenship, gathering waves of generational representation of Egyptian identity.

Among the policies of neoliberal globalization in what I call the late Mubarak era (2001-11), one that affected youth sharply was the reduction of state subsidies for public universities and cultural centers. As with the structural adjustment programs that had handed economic power to foreign corporations in Egypt, the shrinking of state cultural institutions proved most detrimental to the middle class.” The state sector had traditionally employed journalists, television producers, and artists, making culture a respectable career for college graduates. However, my friends ensconced in downtown Cairo’s cafés lacked such avenues for employment and social influence. Their generation experienced a growing cultural and economic distance from the

Theaters of Citizenship S aging ranks of established, state-employed intellectuals. Most dramatists under forty thus affiliated themselves with the independent arts movements that some of their seniors dismissed as amateur. The new generation styled its distance from state institutions as a mode of freedom, however, claiming its underground as a space of independent thought, like the informal spaces Stefano Harney and Fred Moten call “the undercommons of enlightenment.”? They capitalized on a fashion for transnational theater in an era of globalization to claim the mantle of Egyptian avant-gardists of the future. These “youth of the theater” (shabab al-masrah) used the double sense of the word “youth” (in Arabic as in English) to signal the rejuvenation of Egyptian theater. Their relative optimism about the future of national culture in the era of globalization reasserted the role of theater as a stage not just for intellectual debate but also for the reconceptualization of the avant-garde as a popular, inclusive cultural space.

The idealistic cultural workers who launched independent theater in Egypt, through activist campaigns in 1990 and 2005, were part of a wider movement of underground organizing that generated the 2011 revolution. As Egyptians who came of age in the Mubarak era demanded cultural and political rights from state institutions, they demonstrated the force of alternative representational practices when formal politics was stifled by dictatorship. Thus, the performances and activism developed in independent theater of the late Mubarak era built repertoires of citizenship. As independent dramatists developed contemporary, critical narratives of middle-class identity, they also practiced collaborating, debating, and organizing cultural production. Their collaborations evolved into repertoires that sustained concepts of citizenship in the undercommons of a neoliberal oligarchy. Cultural production had a relatively wide margin of freedom under Mubarak, as was the case with his predecessors in Egypt who protected artists and dramatists from excesses of state violence. The policy of cultural democracy, launched in the 1990s, specifically designated the arts as a site of liberal secular expression.* Television dramas and literary novels were consequently critical sites of debate on national culture and social class in Egypt’s era of globalization.’ Independent arts movements in the decade before the revolution further opened up the space of cultural debate, turning a closed intellectual landscape into a proliferating web of venues for cultural democracy. They generated new platforms for expression that allowed institutionalized modernist ideology to branch out into diverse politics of citizenship. Analyzing the cultural politics of independent performance repertoires offers insights into the ways in which participatory citizenship was rehearsed on the eve of Egypt’s revolution, and enacted in its aftermath.

6 Chapter 1 Egyptian Theater and Identity Politics in the Twentieth Century

Egypt was unchallenged as the leading Arab producer of film, television, and music throughout the twentieth century. Its official national dialect spread through the Arab world via broadcast, in radio concerts by Umm Kulthum, the cinema of Youssef Chahine, and television versions of stage plays like the 1970s Madrasat al-mushaghghabin (School for Troublemakers), still on reruns in the 1990s.° For many contemporary Cairenes, the golden age of Egyptian theater was that in which movie stars Adel Imam and Ahmad Zaki had gotten their breaks. “Do you know that Adel Imam is in a play on Haram Street right now?” many a helpful Cairo taxi driver asked when I mentioned I was researching theater in 2004. As proud as many Cairenes were of their television and cinema, theater elicited a special nostalgia. Whether my interlocutors had acted in university festivals or watched stage comedies on television, they spoke of theater as an art of uncensored satire and youthful irreverence. It was a place where director Mohamed Sobhi could satirize President Mubarak’s fake referendum with two different words for “yes” in his 1999 musical Carmen, and youth could make fun of teachers in School for Troublemakers. The historical shifts within Egyptian theater made it both a school for national identity and a space in which to critique its authoritative conception.

After 1919, when Egypt rose in revolution against British occupation and Ottoman rule, cosmopolitan intellectuals began promoting theater as a means of fostering modern thought. Pioneering playwright Muhammad Taymur advocated for national theater with the argument that this cultural form was a mark of a modern, European-style society.” Until this time, theater in Egypt had mainly been the province of traveling Syrian troupes who adapted French and Italian stories, with exceptions such as Egyptian Jewish playwright Yaqub Sanu’, whose satires at Cairo’s Comédie Française theater ran afoul of the Ottoman khedive.* Egyptian playwrights before the Second World War largely continued this tradition of comedy and farce, despite the efforts of Taymur and French-educated Tawfiq al-Hakim to lift theater above light entertainment. Songs were a key attraction in plays, and actors were renowned primarily as singers and dancers.’ After the war, the liberal Wafdist government promoted theater for education more systematically. It was taught in the national network of amateur cultural centers called the People’s University (established in 1945), where classes in art, theater, and literary writing supplemented school curricula with aesthetic repertoires of cosmopolitan identity. The years after the 1952 revolution marked a high point of state support for theater, as President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s regime funneled public money into building new theaters in Cairo, including the Tali’a (Avant-Garde), near the National Theater (formerly the Comédie Frangaise), and Al-Salam Theater for the new Comedy and Modern Theater troupes.

Leading playwrights of the Nasser era, such as Yusuf Idris and Al-Hakim, published widely read polemics that questioned the politics of staging

European-style theater in a postcolonial nation. Their arguments for theater that suited Egypt’s “theatrical mold” and drew on folk characters were influential in evolving definitions of modern national culture that extended beyond the cosmopolitan urban class that older liberals addressed.'° Meanwhile, the regime sponsored budding playwrights and directors on study-abroad programs in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.'!! The combination of vigorous debates about and major state funding for theater led to a vibrant and critical “theater of the sixties” (masrah al-sittiniyat) that intellectuals like El- Ramli continued to lionize. When private theaters were legalized again in the 1970s, that golden age was used to stand for a project of national unity, pan- Arabism, and socialism, across its varied genres and forms. However, it had been a crucial means of contesting state policy as well as supporting its leftist principles.

Fans of irreverent comedy and literary drama alike valued theater as a venue for sociopolitical critique. Like their Syrian counterparts, Egyptian playwrights of the late twentieth century capitalized on the protection afforded to the arts to hold the state and its leaders to account. The language of theater was often high Arabic (fusha), and the double valence of al-adab as “literature” and “politesse” in Arabic granted critical drama a courtly stature.'* Literary writers across the Arab world channeled its cultural respectability to criticize authorities. Lisa Wedeen writes of a rich visual and verbal repertoire in Syria under Hafez al-Assad that framed the ruling family as a corrupt patriarchy. It included jokes, literature, and particularly theater.!* The comparable use of political allegory in Nasser’s Egypt staged the revered president as a misguided protagonist who needed guidance from ethical intellectuals, represented often by a Hamlet figure.'* If theater was a space of cultural exception to the sustained emergency of democracy in Syria, it served a comparable function under successive Egyptian dictators.!° When more comic styles of drama blossomed with the reemergence of private theaters in the 1970s, playwrights continued to invoke literary tradition to authorize their political critiques. For instance, Ali Salem’s 1970 Comedy of Oedipus: You Killed the Beast turned the Greek drama into a satire of Nasser’s policies, setting the stage for Salem’s earthier School for Troublemakers.

Critical drama on Egypt’s main stages fell into decline in the Mubarak era, when state support for playwriting diminished. Moreover, the regime’s expanding economic power proved difficult to represent in traditional drama. When Cairo’s National Theater staged King Lear in 2001 and Hamlet in 2003, it produced costume dramas in ornate Arabic that left all the major critics unimpressed. They denounced the use of big budgets to stage classic plays that failed to resonate with current social or political concerns.'® After all, charismatic Arab presidents who were once represented as kings had been replaced by technocrats. Thus, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad was represented as a sadistic puppet in the show Top Goon and his violence played for dark laughs.'” Egypt’s Mubarak did not even appear as a dramatic character; his regime’s power was visible instead in capillary intrusions into citizens’ lives. My theater friends in the early 2000s consequently found the Egyptian canon of political drama unsatisfying for their purposes. “How did the political theater of the sixties change anything?” one actor-director asked rhetorically. These new-generation dramatists recognized that Egyptian theater’s status as a stage for national debate had diminished in the age of television. One advantage of theater’s lower new profile, however, was that it was minimally censored by state authorities. '* Independent theater, in particular, could stage more daring narratives than television dramas.

Independent theater in the late Mubarak era was critical rather than directly political, addressing a mode of neoliberal state power that “manifested in multiple, often contradictory strategies that encounter diverse claims and contestations, and produce diverse and contingent outcomes.”!? The Ministry of Culture invited troupes to participate in its theater festivals and offered opportunities at state theaters on an ad hoc basis. Meanwhile, state security regularly shut down independent plays about which informers had complained. Theater makers began self-regulating their work, developing strategies in response to the uneven exercise of power. Their strategies exemplified what Gilles Deleuze calls the society of control, in which subjects modulate their relationships to power.*° Adjusting the nationalist tone of political theater in earlier decades, contemporary dramatists now spoke back to state pedagogy in alternative performances of citizenship that centered on gender and generational identity. Not only did they largely reject the literary respectability of the older generation, then, but they also turned aesthetic dissent into new avant-garde style. Neoliberal state policies combined with a history of intellectual critique in theater to shape an independent theater that set new cultural standards. It spoke of individual citizens and their desires rather than of masses awaiting enlightenment. While claiming the mantle of critical intellectuals, then, independents were also proud outcasts of cultural institutions and their approved narratives of identity.*!

The iconoclastic politics of identity in independent theater scrambled the cultural genres of state theaters, each assigned to produce plays for a segment of the citizenry. As “the theater of established authors” (masrah al-rasikhin), the National Theater addressed educated audiences with high-toned drama. Tragedy was a signature of its program, which typically consisted of one translated play in literary Arabic and one in Egyptian Arabic each year. Colloquial musical comedies and romantic melodramas formed the mainstay of Cairo’s Al-Salam Theater, by contrast. In 2004, veteran playwright Alfred Farag’s Gawaz ‘ala waraqit al-talaq (Marriage on a Divorce Paper) revived Nasserist nostalgia with its staging of a doomed love affair between a young aristocrat and the daughter of his chauffeur. There were few such national heroes in independent theater, with its marginalized young men (see chapter 3). Their performance of the role of ethical citizen was more tenuous, as they struggled to reconcile national ideals with oppressive realities. Independent dramatists challenged the progressive symbolism of middle-class protagonists in mainstream theater by showing how that social class had been eroded morally and materially.

Even intellectuals of an older generation recognized that the old avant-garde dramatic genres no longer worked in a new era. They applauded Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni for taking the initiative to reimagine Egyptian theater when he founded CIFET in 1988. Aimed at bringing Egyptian theater into conversation with global trends, the festival also relieved avant-gardists of a tradition of representing the nation positively. New experimental theater would focus on diverse stories and attend to form as well as content. The influence of CIFET enriched Egyptian repertoires of proscenium naturalism with dance theater, storytelling, and other styles fashionable at transnational festivals. The festival certainly raised debate on how such transnational exchange might threaten the cultural specificity of Egyptian theater, at academic seminars and in the pages of literary journals.” Given the nationalist commitments of state theaters, it was unsurprising that new styles and genres seen at CIFET had the most visible impact on independent theater. Younger dramatists seized the opportunity to mediate their stories through texts and techniques outside the Egyptian literary canon. Their embrace of new performance styles gave their repertoires a cosmopolitan cachet, echoing the authoritative language that literary predecessors had claimed for their own critical theater.

New embodiments of the citizen in independent theater resembled the Europeanized liberal aesthetics of Egypt’s historical avant-garde. In many ways, independent theater was an extension of the twentieth-century state cultural project of fashioning modern identity through artistic self-representation. However, staging neoliberal politics of personhood engendered subtle differences from the performance repertoires of classical modernism.” A key difference of theater in the neoliberal context was that it relied on more varied arbiters of value than just the state cultural establishment. As such, its repertoires aligned with different institutional values. If the Ministry of Culture or Cultural Development Fund was unable to help a troupe, the troupe could appeal to a foreign cultural center (see chapter 2) or private teaching institution (see chapter 5). Since building cultural alliances was a multipronged endeavor for an independent troupe, these troupes assembled flexible repertoires of genre and character. These evolved as the troupes’ performance venues changed, and the sprawling independent movement itself evolved considerably during the decade of my study. The exuberant cosmopolitanism that led some critics to question independent theater as a new national avant-garde indexed shifting politics of citizenship during these turbulent years in Egypt. While the aesthetics of citizenship in golden-age theater centered on iconic national figures, independent theater staged the gender and class politics of neoliberal identity.

It is in this sense that independent theater of the late Mubarak era was a theater of neoliberal citizenship, responding to the erasure of popular voice in economic and political institutions with self-styled representational practices. In an era of international arts festivals, satellite television, economic globalization, and military dictatorship, the nation and the stage were no longer metonymic spaces. State theaters could not claim to represent the iconic citizen. Yet avant-garde performance repertoires did enrich the means of narrating contemporary crises of citizenship. In particular, the shift in independent theater away from text-based dramatic literature opened up scenarios of alienation and narratives of stasis rather than progress. New theater staged gender and class anxiety through experimental repertoires for embodying fractured selves. In the plays, theater workshops, and activist campaigns of independent theater, young characters embodied living critiques of a nation that left them without a future.

Narrating Youth and the National Future

The hero of many a classic Egyptian drama was a young student, son, or lover whose story was also that of the modernizing nation. In the theater of the early 2000s, these protagonists were often alienated youth. Dancerchoreographer Muhammad Shafiq’s 2004 dance theater show Aqulu lakum (I Say to You) had ten performers onstage, nine of them men, occupying separate spaces to voice fragments of poetry, play a guitar, or eat watermelon. The visually striking performance devised for CIFET staged what Shafiq considered a key truth about his generation: “99% of Egyptian youth don’t know what to do. They are torn apart [mushattatin].”** The circular narrative of the performance marked the repetitive experience of time for many unemployed graduates who participated in independent theater. There was no grand, modernist coming-of-age; narratives were built instead through smaller movements of bodies and shifts in their relations. Performance repertoires in independent theater evolved in tandem with generational conceptions of identity to stage the experience of being young in a time without hope.

Youth had been icons of a progressive Egyptian modernity since the interwar period, when they represented cosmopolitan middle-class (effendi) culture in sports media and photography.” In the post-1990s wave of globalization, they were hailed as cosmopolitan consumers of new media and consumer goods.*° The young men who swaggered through downtown Cairo on Friday evenings, with trendy hair and tight jeans, consciously played the role of modern youth inherited from Egypt’s cinematic and musical heritage. In the late Mubarak era, however, being young and urban, even college educated, held little promise of attaining full citizenship. The academic and bureaucratic institutions that had channeled upward mobility were eroded by structural adjustment reforms, and only exclusive private schools could now guarantee their graduates economic independence. Young models seen in Egyptian advertisements for glitzy holidays and television talent contests were visibly upper class. For the Mubarak regime, a bright national future was represented by the president’s son and heir-apparent, Gamal, whose smiling face began appearing on television and giant billboards in Cairo. The gaping difference between iconographies of youth for members of the business elite, on the one hand, and the reality of struggle for most urban youth, on the other, fueled an underground youth culture. Independent theater became one creative space for middle-class Egyptians in search of an aesthetic vocabulary to replace a lost iconography of youthful hope and desire.

In the early twenty-first century, when the median Egyptian population was under thirty-five years old,?” youth moved at different speeds through life and urban space. A middle-class Cairo man in his twenties, like my friend Khaled, typically lived with his parents in a modest suburb like Al-Haram or Helwan. Khaled had a public university degree and worked several freelance jobs, saving a little money in the hope of marrying and renting his own apartment. The world of theater offered a space of community and cultural capital while his search for permanent employment dragged on. Between appointments in central Cairo, he caught up with university friends at downtown cafés, where they discussed creative projects and kept youthful dreams alive. Their plays about the temporality of everyday despair paradoxically helped these young artists think of a future in which they could lead more respectable lives. Most of the youth who talked theater at such cafés were men. The few young women free to socialize here were children of artists and intellectuals, journalists on the beat, or foreign residents of downtown like me. We inhabited a bohemian world in which youth stretched beyond student years and slow journeys to adulthood were the norm. A daring few even conducted love affairs in downtown pieds-a-terre. Their unconventional lifestyles attracted criticism from many elders who worried about unemployment among educated youth. Senior dramatist Saleh Saad, whose teenage daughter was part of this crowd, once organized a play because he was concerned about youth wasting their time at cafés. Theater work gave structure and narrative to slow lives.

In performance, young creatives were able to situate their unconventional lives within a history of avant-garde youth culture. Like José Esteban Mufioz’s queer performers, alienated from mainstream theater, these artists constructed minor narratives that “offer[ed] the minoritarian subject a space to situate itself in history and thus seize social agency.”?® Mufioz’s concept of disidentification, an alternative to the binary of good and bad subjects, resonates with the work of young Egyptian theater makers who turned the negative associations of unemployed leisure into time for art. Rather than being sexual rebels or drug users, they used theater to enact an alternative respectability. They played the role of new-generation intellectuals by debating at downtown cafés, where they sometimes joined the weekly gatherings (nadwas) of senior intellectuals. At the same time, they questioned the very institutions of Cairo’s intellectual life, as they formed a fugitive community seeking to remake the system rather than reproduce its concepts of professionalism.”? The combination of utopian idealism and nihilistic anger that fueled the independent theater scene permeated its narratives of youth who made visible the failures of their society.

Across the stages of youth theater festivals, the alienated young man was a familiar dramatic character. At the Sakia cultural center’s 2004 theater festival, the Panorama troupe staged an allegorical chess game between an older and a younger man, the latter condemned to defeat by unfair rules. Young dramatists mined Egyptian dramatic literature for texts about shell-shocked soldiers and disgruntled youth, or constructed collages of translated texts to tell a contemporary story. In the language and aesthetics of drama, their generational predicament could be represented with intellectual refinement. Whether independent dramatists devised their own scripts or borrowed from foreign literatures, they performed a gesture of rejecting the classic texts of Egyptian drama. The canonical repertoire offered few scenarios that represented life in this generation. Independent dramatists’ disidentificatory practice of “rethinking and recycling encoded meaning” by adapting cultural texts gave middle-class youth a larger repertoire of scenarios for self-representation.*° They won considerable critical recognition for their new styles of theater, in an era when mass media claimed more representational authority than live performance. Their minoritarian representational practices fit the predicament of theater itself, as it was pushed to the margins of cultural life. At the same time, these practices—which Mufioz terms utopian gestures—staged the social future as if it could be transformed through youthful interventions. Independent theater was itself such an intervention, one that contested representations of youth in mass media by showing what more representative narratives looked like.

Turning youth from a stage in the life cycle to the stage of theater, where it built cultural repertoires, transposed a temporary identity into one with its own space.?! As a cherished part of youth culture, amateur theater was meant to be just a stage in the lives of educated Egyptians. University students who wrote satirical dramas had once graduated, gone on to work in media, and looked back fondly on their days in theater. Now, graduates who dwelt longer in the time between college and employment brought collaborative student-day practices to independent troupes, fostering more inclusive and equitable spaces of theatrical production. Youth who restricted their unconventional personal lives to the corners of downtown Cairo and Alexandria could go to independent performances and see these represented as legitimate culture onstage. Independent theater repurposed generational alienation and cultural conflict into positive identities, building narratives of the national future out of youthful frustration, hope, and desire.

Independent theater troupes built an extensive network of youth culture in the late Mubarak era. As youth was reconceptualized within independent theater, its dramatic scenarios came to legitimize what had been underground cultural politics. In Diana Taylor’s seminal theory of repertoire, reenacted performance scenarios carry cultural memory forward in time. Through techniques of “cultural masquerading and strategic repositioning,” contemporary performances invoke historical scenarios to claim a link to authoritative sources.*” Independent Egyptian dramatists mobilized the authenticating relationship between contemporary theatrical scenes and historical scenarios of youth in both directions. They used the historical respectability of theater as a space of youthful critique to win recognition for their stories, and their experiences to infuse scenarios of youth culture with contemporary detail. By recycling dramatic repertoires from home and abroad, they showed how far Egyptian youth culture had diverged from its representation in canonical modernist theater. The scenes of cosmopolitan youth represented in this theater countered globalization from above through undercommons repertoires that showed new-generation intellectuals to be adept at producing modern culture despite their exclusion from cultural institutions. Their repertoires carried not just representations of modern youth, but also alternative narratives and symbols of citizenship that resonated with many Egyptians.

Intellectual Labor and Cultural Movements in the Neoliberal Era

Underground political and cultural movements made their activist potential felt during a time of heightened popular discontent in the late Mubarak era. In April 2008, a protest wave against ongoing economic reforms brought dissident movements briefly into the national spotlight. The April 6 movement, organized by striking textile factory workers in Al-Mahalla Al-Kubra and aided by Cairo-based youth activists, drew swift repression by the regime’s Central Security Forces. It was nevertheless a sign that the Mubarak regime was losing credibility. The protest against disinvestment in a flagship public-sector factory made spectacularly visible the discontents of privatization across class lines. Meanwhile, Egypt’s political leadership ignored emerging networks of grassroots organizing. It worked to win ideological support instead, through policies that included investing in cultural production. After the international arts festivals launched in the 1990s, it was the turn of the General Organization of Cultural Palaces (Al-Hay’ah al-‘Amma li Qusur al-Thaqafa) to get a boost in state funding, aimed at rejuvenating youthful interest in the arts in Egypt’s provinces. Jessica Winegar describes this as an enlightenment program to cultivate faith in the secular-oriented nationalism of the regime.*? By investing in culture rather than industry, the Mubarak regime sought loyalty from an educated middle class that was assumed to embrace its secular liberal values. Egypt’s culture wars of the 1990s, in which the Ministry of Culture claimed to defend literati against their Islamist critics, urged state intellectuals to focus on ideological rather than economic concerns.**