Utopia Incarnate: A Gastrocritical Reading of Cuban and Egyptian Cultural Production, 1960-2000

A groundbreaking analysis of the cultural afterlives of mass utopia in Cuba and Egypt.

Utopia Incarnate maps a shared mass utopian discourse of plenty in Cuba and Egypt in the second half of the twentieth century. Taking a comparative, "gastrocritical" approach, Eman Shaban Morsi traces the centrality of tropes of meat, as a literal and figurative embodiment of the contradictions of modernization, in plays, songs, poems, political speeches, cartoons, and films from both countries. Consolidated and entrenched in the early 1960s, at the height of their respective socialist revolutionary projects, this rhetorical and conceptual repertoire provided--and continues to provide--writers and artists with means for expressing ideals of citizenship, critiquing state policies, and imagining a just and equitable society. But, as the distance between what could have been (the promised world of abundance) and what was (the lived reality of rampant economic shortages) grew in subsequent decades, it became impossible to conjure early revolutionary visions of plenty without irony. In developing a framework of ironic repetition to explicate the paradoxical legacies of mass utopia in these two contexts, Morsi provides a new model for "South-South" literary and cultural comparison.