'The street' and 'the slum': Political form and urban life in Egypt's revolt

Nasser Abourahme

City, 2013, vol. 17, issue 6, 716-728

Abstract: How, after two years of revolt that if anything were meant to shift the very terms of political subjectivity, do we make sense of what appears to be the unlikely popularity of Egypt's latest military rulers? Much of the commentary and imagery would seem to suggest that the military, garbed in revolutionary cover, have succeeded where countless others have failed in postcolonial polities and achieved some kind of hegemony and broad consensus. By contrast, this article argues that if the military have been able to seize the initiative to drive themselves as a populist wedge between restoration and revolution this is not because they have attained consent but because they have been able to mobilize organizational and discursive machinery much more quickly and effectively than anyone else. That is, to take advantage, in this interstitial temporal space between end and beginning, of the organizational weakness of Egypt's revolutionary street politics. A weakness only magnified in the rush to electoral politics. What this disjuncture, underlines, then, with increasing urgency, is not the question of "voluntary servitude" but the question of form. Both the party and the much-heralded horizontality of 'the street' appear lacking; the latter capable of sublime insurrectional moments-the re-enacted rupture-but not the necessary sustained assault on institutions. The form-to-come will have to emerge from the struggle itself, and the article gestures to the possibility of new collectivities that might be found in the coordination between the revolutionary subjectivities and networks that emerged from the revolt and the life-worlds of Egypt's 'informal' urban poor that have both participated in and provided the enabling conditions of revolt.

Date: 2013
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DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2013.864485

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