Creating Spaces for Culture: Self-Efforts and the Production of Marginality in Cairo’s Culture Palaces
Using ethnography and available statistical data, this article explores forms of social and literary life within Cairo’s state-sponsored culture centers. Based on the frequent media representation of Egypt’s public cultural infrastructure as ruins, it examines whether Cairo’s culture palaces could b...
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| 发表在: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/esma, |
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| 主要作者: | |
| 格式: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| 语言: | Anglais |
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Égypte Soudan mondes arabes
2025
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| 主题: | |
| 在线阅读: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| 总结: | Using ethnography and available statistical data, this article explores forms of social and literary life within Cairo’s state-sponsored culture centers. Based on the frequent media representation of Egypt’s public cultural infrastructure as ruins, it examines whether Cairo’s culture palaces could be considered as “ruins of the welfare state,” and if so, what types of life these may facilitate. This article suggests that the notion of ruination is relative to individual and collective efforts (guhûd zâtiyya or self-efforts), in local communities, to keep culture palaces alive. The article also argues that ruins, once repaired by community self-efforts, have the potential to produce alternative forms of life and generate dreams of social mobility. Using the example of al-Warraq neighborhood residents repurposing the Rawd al-Farag Culture Palace for their community’s cultural needs, I argue that cultural lives are enabled and produced in the margins of Cairo’s contemporary urban landscapes, particularly within state-sponsored cultural infrastructure teetering on the brink of decay. Through guhûd zâtiyya, state-supported cultural centers can be transformed into marginal yet productive spaces where people reinvent their lives around literature and entertain dreams which, paradoxically, carry the promise of them leaving social marginality. |
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