Anticolonial Afterlives in Egypt The Politics of Hegemony The Global Middle East Series

This study presents an alternative story of the 2011 Egyptian revolution by revisiting Egypt's moment of decolonisation in the mid-twentieth century. Anticolonial Afterlives in Egypt explores the country's first postcolonial project, arguing that the enduring afterlives of anticolonial politics, connected to questions of nationalism, military rule, capitalist development and violence, are central to understanding political events in Egypt today. Through an imagined conversation between Antonio Gramsci and Frantz Fanon, two foundational theorists of anti-capitalism and anticolonialism, Anticolonial Afterlives in Egypt focuses on issues of resistance, revolution, mastery and liberation to show how the Nasserist project, created by Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Free Officers in 1952, remains the only instance of hegemony in modern Egyptian history. In suggesting that Nasserism was made possible through local, regional and global anticolonial politics, even as it reproduced colonial ways of governing that continue to reverberate into Egypt's present, this interdisciplinary study thinks through questions of traveling theory, global politics, and resistance and revolution in the postcolonial world.

Introduction. Trapped in history: revolution in Egypt; Part I. Anticolonialism and its Discontents: 1. Postcolonial and Marxist encounters; 2. Hegemony in Egypt: revisiting Gamal Abdel Nasser; Part II. Hegemony and its Afterlives: 3. Laying neoliberal foundations: Infitah and a new Egypt; 4. Finance capital and empty time; Conclusion. Haunted histories and decolonial futures.

Sara Salem is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her research interests include political sociology, postcolonial studies, Marxist theory, feminist theory, global histories of empire, and anticolonialism. Her articles have featured in journals including Middle East Critique, Interventions: A Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society, and Review of African Political Economy.