Arts and the Uprising in Egypt The Making of a Culture of Dissent?

The January 2011 Egyptian uprising had dramatic, far-reaching effects on cultural production in Egypt. It sparked new developments and transformations in content and genre and laid open challenge to the powerful role traditionally played by the country's ministry of culture in the field of artistic expression. The eight chapters in Arts and the Uprising in Egypt offer a timely and much-needed survey of key realms of cultural production in Egypt since January 2011. They show how this explosion of cultural expression was of a piece with the change in people's relationship to power and authority that took place after the uprising and yet how this cultural resurgence had its roots in political struggles that predated 2011. Editors Samia Mehrez and Mona Abaza argue that a binary discourse of utopian success and failure is inadequate to the task of describing the paradoxes, complexities, and irreversible processes that are the true driving force of revolutionary change. The chapters in this book detail the main areas where cultures of dissent are forming-cultural policy, photography, education, film, satire, music, the visual arts, and literature-providing rich insight into the artists and initiatives that have played an integral role in the transformation of Egypt's public sphere since the fall of Mubarak.
Arts and the Uprising in Egypt will be of interest to scholars of cultural production, revolution, and mass media in the Middle East, as well as art curators and critics, and music and cinema scholars.

Samia Mehrez is professor of Arabic literature in the Department of Arab and Islamic Civilizations and director of the Center for Translation Studies at the American University in Cairo. She is the author of The Literary Atlas of Cairo (AUC Press, 2010) and The Literary Life of Cairo (AUC Press, 2011), and editor of Translating Egypt's Revolution: The Language of Tahrir (AUC Press, 2012).
Mona Abaza is a professor in the Department of Sociology at the American University in Cairo. She is the author of Twentieth-Century Egyptian Art: The Private Collection of Sherwet Shafei (AUC Press, 2011) and The Cotton Plantation Remembered: An Egyptian Family Story (AUC Press, 2013).

Introduction
Samia Mehrez and Mona Abaza
Chapter 1: Lost in Revolution: Paradox in the Cultural Field
Dalia Hussein and Jordan Daniels
Chapter 2: On Walls, Revolutions, and Universities
Eric Knecht and Matthew Parsons
Chapter 3: Joking and Poking: Egyptian Political Satire
Anny Gaul
Chapter 4: Transpositions: The New Soundscape of Egypt
Ammar Dajani
Chapter 5: Romanticized Ruptures: Revolution and Egyptian Cinema
Alia Ayman
Chapter 6: A "Precarious Moment": Visual Arts and the Uprising
Ada Petiwala and Benjamin Pitler
Chapter 7: Life Is Pink: Literary Texts Post 2011
Mai Serhan and Alexia Underwood
Chapter 8: (En)gendering Revolution: Women Photographers the Day After
Reemah Al-Urfali and Caitlyn Doucette