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.
