Nawal Mustafa

PhD Candidate, Department of International Relations

The London School of Economics and Political Science

The Empire Chants Back: Revolutionary Movements,

Protest Politics, and the Arts of Discontent in Colonial Egypt

In 1919, Egyptian revolutionaries constructed their subjecthood, their very sense of ethical self, through a series of compelling performances, emotively powerful as they were visually disruptive. In the first instance, revolutionary subjects are constituted by an assemblage of power-knowledge relations, which form a global space which legitimizes certain narratives, identities, and modes of claim-making while marginalizing others. In 1919, revolutionary activism was shaped by a global order in crisis, an assemblage that was in the process of being contested and dramatically reconfigured. The postwar order as an assemblage was structured by epistemic-cultural fields which encompassed the following features: 1) discourses of national self-determination which were used to define and contest global understandings of legitimacy; and 2) the discourses propagated by empires such as Great Britain which portrayed their subjects as objects of rule within a hierarchical, racialized, and gendered colonial order. This global discursive terrain encompassed a series of overlapping fields which, as a social space, greatly influenced the character of counter-discourses, symbolic performances, and the anti-colonial and nationalist identities Egyptians constructed to advance their claims for political independence.

This paper contends that by analyzing the performativity of subjectivities as sites of interaction, it is possible to identify and trace how certain global power-knowledge relations operate at their points of application, namely in terms of their structural and constitutive effects on this field (Foucault 1982). As will be discussed, the tropes, images, and iconography of the 1919 revolution formed a direct response to such discourses and their ordering concepts. Within British colonial discourse for example, Egyptian society was frequently portrayed as being incapable of exercising self-determination given its social construction as being effeminate, emasculate, and infantilized, a racialized and gendered representation which symbolically portrayed the nation as not meeting the extant standards of civilization (Baron 2005).

British officials frequently justified protracted rule and unprecedented social interventions into Egyptian society on the grounds that Egyptian family life needed reform to produce good government. During the occupation, officials such as Lord Cromer frequently equated the familial and domestic lives, even the sexual practices of the Khedives, the rulers of Egypt, with the broader society as a whole. Ottoman practices such as veiling, the seclusion of upper-class women within harem households, and polygamy were systematically referred to in colonial discourse to construct Egyptian society as incapable of achieving self-rule, development, and good government (Cromer 1910/2010: 580-581).

The Oriental, as Edward Said reminds us, was equated with the identity of groups which occupied the margins of Western societies such as the irrational delinquent, women, and the lower classes, Orientals were rarely seen or looked at; they were seen through, analyzed not as citizens, or even people, but as problems to be solved or confined (Said 1979: 207). The other in colonial discourse was frequently feminized and infantilized in a binary which contrasted with the equally essentialized Western masculine and sovereign subject. Cultural, religious, and gendered constructions of difference were not mutually exclusive, but formed an assemblage of signifiers which together enabled the imagination of both self and other to be possible (Yegenoglu 1998: 1-2). Gendered relations of power are thus not marginal in this discussion, but are key to understanding how colonial discourses were articulated, how imperial power-knowledge networks and relations functioned both discursively and in practice, and finally, how such articulations influenced attempts by revolutionaries, especially women, to reclaim their very humanity (Williams and Chrisman 1994: 23).

As in other colonial contexts, family politics and gender relations in the Middle East were frequently used to measure stages of development and civilizational progress (Kabeer 1994, Stoler 2002). Lord Cromer, formerly Evelyn Baring before his promotion, served as the Consul General, the senior British official post in Egypt from 1882-1907. His views left an indelible imprint on the character of the occupation. He summarily expressed a position which illustrates how systematic the gendered aspect of the discourse was, There can be no doubt that a real advance has been made in the material progress of this country during the past few years. Whether any moral progress is possible in a country where polygamy and the absence of family life blights the whole social system is another question (Cromer quoted in Pollard 2005: 93). This view was further elaborated in his autobiography, Modern Egypt, which was readily available to the Egyptian public:

Looking then solely to the possibility of reforming those countries which have adopted

the faith of Islam, it may be asked whether anyone can conceive the existence of true

European civilization on the assumption that the position women occupy in Europe

is abstracted from the general plan. As well can a man be blind from his birth be made

to conceive the existence of color? Change the position of women, one of the main

pillars, not only of European civilization but at all events of the moral code based

on the Christian religion, if not Christianity itself falls to the ground. The position

of women in Egypt, and in Mohammedan countries generally, is, therefore a fatal

obstacle to the attainment of that elevation of thought and character which should

accompany the introduction of European civilization, if that civilization is to produce

its full measure of beneficial effect (Baring 1910/2010: 883).

In another instance, he added, Inasmuch as women, in their capacities as wives and mothers, exercise a great influence over the characters of their husbands and sons, it is obvious that the seclusion of women must produce a deteriorating effect on the male population, in whose presumed interests the custom was originally established, and is still maintained (Baring 1910/2010: 580). Colonial officials were unhesitant in depicting Egyptian society not only in feminizing, but in infantilizing terms. Various officials characterized Egyptians as small children who were underdeveloped, stunted, and in need of proper tutelage under British parental supervision. In his critique of practices of veiling, seclusion, and polygamy, practices which were quite common throughout the Ottoman Empire at the time, Cromer viewed Egyptians as not possessing family values, which were deemed to affect their political judgment. According to this conception, British overseers should play the role of parents guiding the nation to its proper stage of development, The effects of polygamy are more baneful and far-reaching than those of seclusion. The whole fabric of European society rests upon the preservation of family life. Monogamy fosters family life, polygamy destroys it. The monogamous Christian respects womenthe Moslem on the other hand, despises women (Baring 1910/2010: 581).

Domestic and gendered familial practices, especially on the part of the ruling elite, thus inflected representations of the other and were used to justify an increasingly ambitious program of colonial intervention in the name of reform. Lord Milner echoed this sentiment in his volume England in Egypt that the childlike and dependent Egyptians lack the strenuousness and the progressive spirit which would characterize any equally intelligent race tilling a less bounteous soil and breathing a more bracing atmosphere. Such a race will not of itself develop great men or new ideas, or take a leading part in the progress of mankind. But under proper guidance it is capable of enjoying much simple content (Milner 1898/2002: 314).

Dominant discourses often influence and structure the shape of counter-discourses which reappropriate certain tropes, symbols, and slogans in order to disrupt existing power relations. As Homi Bhabha once argued, (1994: 122-123), discursive representations of colonial selves and others were ambiguous and ridden with internal tensions, a tenuous dynamic which provided ample space for actors to contest and negotiate the terms of self-representation: the masters tools were used to dismantle his house. As various postcolonial theorists have noted, genderin the sense of constructed understandings of both masculinity and femininitywas equated by both colonial authorities and nationalists as synonymous with the state of the nation, and its progression along linear stages of development in order to assess issues such as good government or the capacity to self-govern (Rai 2013). The relationship between such discourses is best understood as the socially constructed interplay between the two sets of identities, a process which occurred in a mutually constitutive fashion. Like their counterparts in other colonial contexts, Egyptians constructed the national self through renegotiating both masculine and feminine identities as sites of social power.

In an unexpected sense, British colonial administrators and Egyptian nationalists agreed on one matterthe family unit was viewed as a direct metaphor for the nation. The status of women as mothers and wives was viewed as not only central to the development of the national family, but as an aspect of assessing the