The Center for Arab and Middle Eastern Studies
And
The Anis Makdisi Program in Literature
American University of Beirut
Cordially invite you to a lecture
Junk as Archive:
Vernacular photography, writing practices
and middle-class youth culture in mid-20th
Century Egypt
December 10, 2013 at 6:00 pm
Auditorium B, West Hall
Abstract: Through the 20th century, generations of middling Egyptians kept diaries and created photographic
albums and scrapbooks, yet such sources have rarely made it into public depositories or attracted serious
attention from scholars. This talk has several objectives. It will look at such sources both as texts and as
material objects embedded in social contexts, both then and now. What do they tell us about the
transformation in reading and writing practices that took place in Egypt between the late 19th and through
the early 20th centuries and changed ideas about what "texts" and "writing" are for? What do they tell us
about the changes in social authority that such texts carried, enabled, and embodied? I will unpack some of
this material paying particular attention to issues of class, gender, love, patriarchy, and individuality. Genres
of intimate writing allowed young middle-class-claiming people to articulate parallel selves as self-consciously
modern subjects, while simultaneously accommodating such selves within wider patriarchal contexts. Finally,
this talk will look at contemporary entanglements of these private objects whereby their ambiguous
existence between a piece of junk for some and a valuable collectable for others-between somebody's
"memory" and another person's historical sources-expose the possibilities, limits, and silences of history
writing.
Biography: Dr. Lucie Ryzova is a social and cultural historian of modern Egypt, based at the Faculty of History,
University of Oxford. Her work focuses on vernacular modernity, local Egyptian middle class culture, social
history of photography, and the ethnography of reading and writing in early 20th century Egypt. She also
works on contemporary topics, especially the production of heritage in contemporary Egypt and low-income
masculinity and spatial practices in contemporary Cairo. She is the author of L'Efendiyya ou la modernite
contestee (2005), The Age of the Efendiyya: Passages to Modernity in Colonial-National Egypt (2013), and a
number of articles.