Fellows 2017
MOHAMMED EZZELDIN
City University of New York
Bucerius Fieldwork Grant
Affect, Memory and Counter-Publics: Arwa Salih and the Post 1967 Generation in Egypt
ABSTRACT
My dissertation engages with the questions of revolutionary failures, utopia and generational memory in Egypt in the last five decades. The research is imbued by a personal concern on how we orient ourselves historically to amputated revolutionary openings and suppressed emancipatory potentials, and the way revolutionary legacies are transmitted from one generation to another. Thus, I revisit the story and the memory of Arwa Salih, one of the militant leaders of the student movement in 1970s Egypt whose political activism was cut short with the implementation of draconian neoliberal policies following the crackdown on the popular uprising known as the bread riots in 1977 – an event considered by some historians as a precursor to the 2011 revolutionary scenes.
BIOGRAPHY
Mohammed Ezzeldin is a Ph.D. candidate at City University of New York where he currently works on a dissertation on generational memory, temporality and revolution in Egypt between 1967 and 2011. He previously graduated from the political science department in Cairo University and received his M.A. in Arab Studies from Georgetown University. His thesis discussed the controversial history and memory of banditry in Egypt following the WWI. He also teaches history in Rutgers University and Queens College of New York.
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