A City Consumed: Urban Commerce, the Cairo Fire, and the Politics of Decolonization in Egypt

Abstract

A CITY CONSUMED: URBAN COMMERCE, THE CAIRO FIRE, AND THE POLITICS OF DECOLONIZATION IN EGYPT by Nancy Y. Reynolds Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012 (xvii + 355 pages, bibliography, index, illustrations, maps) $45.50 (cloth)A City Consumed artfully inserts the everyday into the study of nationalism and anticolonial struggle in Egypt during the ^rst half of the twentieth century. Reynolds is certainly not the ^rst to question the inevitability of an Egyptian identity rigidly de^ned by language, ethnicity, and religion or to examine how the boundaries of membership in the Egyptian nation con- tinued to shi^ well into the twentieth century (see, for example, the work of Joel Beinin and Zachary Lockman [1987], Walter Armbrust [1996], and Will Hanley [2007]). But Reynolds's focus on urban commercial, consumption, and sartorial practices, leveraging tools developed in urban consumption studies (see, for example, the work of Walter Benjamin [1978], Marshall Berman [1988], Judith Walkowitz [1992], and Lise Sanders [2006]), with a spatial emphasis on downtown Cairo brings new perspectives to the study of the politics of nationalism and diversity of pre-1952 Egyptian subjec- tivities. Using a diverse array of sources and sophisticated methodology, she challenges the reading of the 1952 Cairo Fire, instigated by Egyptian rioters in downtown Cairo, as a uni^ed, uncontested popular expression of anticolonial struggle and a moment of complete rupture with the country's colonial past. Rather, Reynolds argues, Egyptians' simultaneous celebration of and outcry over the Cairo Fire were an expression of social, economic, and cultural transformation and con^ict that continued to characterize post-1952 Egyptian politics.To build her argument, Reynolds weaves together three main themes: ^uidity, the publicness of private practices, and continuity. Reynolds argues that in the ^rst half of the twentieth century, it was the ^uidity between-not the rigid duality of-the realms of the baladi (traditional/local) and the ifrangi (European/Western) that marked everyday life in Cairo. Spatially, Cairenes were constantly moving across the city's newer and older neighborhoods on tramways. Sartorially, they were mixing di^erent modes of dress. What most illuminates this ^uidity is Reynolds's detailing of interwoven spatial and consumption practices. She describes, for example, the dense alleys resembling those in the baladi neighborhood of Gammaliya that formed in the heart of ifrangi downtown Cairo and the stores there that sold ifrangi products hung up outside open-front shops or piled on tables in the street, in a manner usually associated with the [baladi] suqs (42).Reynolds locates the gravest challenge to rigid dualism in the bastions of ifrangi commerce: downtown Cairo's imposing department stores. Customers were diverse in class, gender, ethnicity, and age, forcing department store owners to be ^exible in merchandising. Piece-good textiles, which were a^ordable to a large segment of Egyptian consumers and which relied on the cheap labor of tailors, emerged as the stores' most popular products-in contrast to the ensembles of a cosmopolitan bourgeois lifestyle carefully arranged in the stores' window displays. The subtlest manifestation of baladi/ifrangi ^uidity is found, however, in the origins of these stores. Not only does Reynolds connect most department store owners to a network of Mediterranean and Ottoman (rather than Western imperial) commerce, but she also traces the origins of most department stores to smaller stores in Muski Street in the old city. The territorial connection to older parts of the city complicates the view that such stores were imports from the metropole or that downtown itself was a purely colonial space. Moreover, Reynolds looks at department store owners' dynamic political-economic ties to economic nationalist projects and convincingly argues for the initial fluidity and territorial nature of the nationalist project predicated on a common connection to place rather than . …