Egypt's Culture Wars

Drawing heavily on Pierre Bourdieu's work on the cultural field; its internal structure, values, and battles; and its relationship to the economic, political, and religious fields, Mehrez (Arabic literature, American U. in Cairo, Egypt) analyzes the cultural landscape of Egypt under President Mubarak (1981-present). She begins with an examination of the dominant values of the literary field and the ways in which literary producers negotiate their positions, particularly vis-a-vis the state, focusing on writer Sonallah Ibrahim as a model of autonomy. She then shifts attention to state intervention in the cultural field, exploring issues of cultural sovereignty, struggles of values and authority in the fields of education and gender studies, cultural contestations over the state's dominant icons of family and nation, changing economic and political contexts of literary producers and production, and representations of the urban space of Cairo. The remaining chapters move away from literature to focus serially on mass media, cinema, the visual arts, and the academy and on the issue of censorship in "high" and "low" culture. This is a paperbound edition of a work first published in 2008. Distributed in the US by International Publishers Marketing (IPM). Annotation c2010 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

SAMIA MEHREZ is professor of Arabic literature in the Department of Arabic and Islamic Civilization 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).