A City Consumed: Urban Commerce, the Cairo Fire, and the Politics of Decolonization in Egypt

by Nancy Y. Reynolds

Though now remembered as an act of anti-colonial protest leading to the Egyptian military coup of 1952, the Cairo Fire that burned through downtown stores and businesses appeared to many at the time as an act of urban self-destruction and national suicide. The logic behind this latter view has now been largely lost. Offering a revised history, Nancy Reynolds looks to the decades leading up to the fire to show that the lines between foreign and native in city space and commercial merchandise were never so starkly drawn. Consumer goods occupied an uneasy place on anti-colonial agendas for decades in Egypt before the great Cairo Fire. Nationalist leaders frequently railed against commerce as a form of colonial captivity, yet simultaneously expanded local production and consumption to anchor a newly independent economy. Close examination of struggles over dress and shopping reveals that nationhood coalesced informally from the conflicts and collaboration of consumers "from below" as well as more institutional and prescriptive mandates.

Genres: Egypt, Politics

376 pages, Hardcover

First published July 11, 2012

Reviews

[Sara Razek · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reynolds shatters the colonial city model which draws clear demarcation lines between traditional urban localities and modern (European) ones via examining the urban space of modern Cairo up till the Cairo Fire in 1952. She contends that pre-1952 Cairo was characterized by spatial as well as identity fluidity, thereby undermining much of the later nationalist historiography that argued that Cairo’s downtown chic district was exclusively European and inaccessible to native Egyptians. In order to back up her argument, she analyzes films, advertisements and the built environment of downtown Cairo dotted as it was with large department stores, such as Chemla and Cicurel.
It’s a book that’s very much in the mold of what Raymond Williams meant by lunching cultural materialism as a critical school that not only borrows from but also builds on (and ultimately differs from) the work of traditional Marxist theorists.