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Daily Encounters That Make History: History from Below and Archival Collaboration

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2021

Hanan Hammad*
Affiliation:
Middle East Studies, Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, TX, USA

Extract

What does a casual confrontation in a rundown shack between a landlady and her factory-worker tenant tell us about the history of gender and class relations in modern Egypt? Could a lost watch in a red-light district in the middle of the Nile Delta complicate our understanding of the history of sexuality and urbanization? Can an unexpectedly intimate embrace on a sleeping mat illuminate a link in the history of class, gender, and urbanization in modern Egypt?

Type
Roundtable
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

1 For women's history, see Tucker, Judith, Women in Nineteenth-Century Egypt (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; al-Sayyid Marsot, Afaf Ahmad Lutfi, Women and Men in Late Eighteenth-Century Egypt (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Badran, Margot, Feminists, Islam, and Nation: Gender and the Making of Modern Egypt (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Booth, Marilyn, “Woman in Islam: Men and the ‘Women's Press’ in Turn-of-the-20th-Century Egypt,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 33, no. 2 (2001): 171201CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Baron, Beth, Egypt as a Woman: Nationalism, Gender, and Politics (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Kozma, Liat, Policing Egyptian Women: Sex, Law, and Medicine in Khedival Egypt (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2011)Google Scholar. For labor history, see Goldberg, Ellis, Tinker, Tailor, and Textile Worker: Class and Politics in Egypt, 1930–1952 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986)Google Scholar; Beinin, Joel and Lockman, Zachary, Workers on the Nile: Nationalism, Communism, Islam, and the Egyptian Working Class, 1882–1954 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987)Google Scholar; Lockman, Zachary, “Imagining the Working Class: Culture, Nationalism, and Class Formation in Egypt, 1899–1914,” Poetics Today 15, no. 2 (1994): 157–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Posusney, Marsha Pripstein, Labor and the State in Egypt: Workers, Unions, and Economic Restructuring (NY: Columbia University Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

2 Mitchell, Timothy, Colonising Egypt (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988)Google Scholar. I have previously raised this point in Industrial Sexuality: Gender, Urbanization, and Social Transformation in Egypt (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2016), 12.

3 Pollard, Lisa, Nurturing the Nation: The Family Politics of Colonizing, Modernizing, and Liberating Egypt, 1805–1922 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Shechter, Relli, Smoking, Culture, and Economy in the Middle East: The Egyptian Tobacco Market, 1850–2000 (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gasper, Michael Ezekiel, The Power of Representation: Publics, Peasants, and Islam in Egypt (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008)Google Scholar; Jacob, Wilson Chacko, Working Out Egypt: Effendi Masculinity and Subject Formation in Colonial Modernity, 1870–1940 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ryzova, Lucie, The Age of the Efendiyya: Passages to Modernity in National–Colonial Egypt (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Kessler-Harris, Alice, Gendering Labor History (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

5 Among many examples, see Gasper, Power of Representation; and Di-Capua, Yoav, “The Professional Worldview of the Affandi Historian,” History Compass 7, no. 1 (2009): 306–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Kessler-Harris, Gendering Labor History, 8.

7 Halim, Asma, Hikayat ʿAbduh ʿAbd al-Rahman (Cairo: Dar al-Thaqafa al-Jadida, 1977)Google Scholar; al-Khuli, Fikri, al-Rihla, 3 vol. (Cairo: Dar al-Ghad, 1987–1991)Google Scholar; al-Sayrafi, ʿAtiyya, Sirat ʿAmil Mushaghib: Lamahat min Tarikh al-Tabaqa al-ʿAmila al-Misriyya (Cairo: al-Khamasin li-l-Tanmiyya al-Shamila, 2007)Google Scholar.

8 Fees vary depending on the year of publication.

9 The site includes materials from the libraries of New York University, Princeton, Cornell, Columbia, the American University in Cairo, the American University of Beirut, the United Arab Emirates National Archives, and the Qatar National Library.

10 For example, Misr Company for Spinning and Weaving in al-Mahalla al-Kubra, one of the largest industrial compounds of the 20th century, issued a detailed medical report on its 27,000 workers in the late 1940s. See Sharikat Misr li-l-Ghazl wa-l-Nasij al-Mahalla al-Kubra, Taqriiran al-Amal al-Tibbiyya (Cairo: Mattba‘at Misr, 1951).

11 See Hammad, Industrial Sexuality.

12 For a discussion of research possibilities and holdings, see Adam Mestyan, “Dar al-Mahfuzat al-ʿUmumiyya (Cairo),” Hazine, 3 March 2014, http://hazine.info/daralmahfuzat; and S. J. Shaw, “Dar al-Mahfuzat al-ʿUmumiyya,” in Encyclopédie de l'Islam, 2010–21, http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/9789004206106_eifo_SIM_17042010.

13 ‘Imad Hilal, “al-‘Ardhal: Sawt al-Fallah al-Misri al-Muhtajj fi al-Nisf al-Thani min al-Qarn al-Tasi‘ ‘Ashar,” in al-Rafd wa-l-Ihtijaj fi al-Mujtama‘ al-Misri fi al-‘Asr al-‘Uthmani, ed. Nasir Ibrahim (Cairo: al-Jam‘iyat al-Misriyya li-l-Dirasat al-Tarikhiya, 2004), 201–49.

14 American Anthropological Association, “AAA Statement on Ethics,” 2012, https://www.americananthro.org/LearnAndTeach/Content.aspx?ItemNumber=22869&navItemNumber=652. I thank Lucia Carminati for recommending incorporation of the ethical code of the American Anthropological Association.