A television nation

The relationship between the Egyptian mini-series and politics

By Anand Balakrishnan, Cairo Magazine 7.4.2005

Halfway through Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt, anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod introduces �Amira,� an Upper-Egyptian woman whose prodigious appetite for al moselsel (soap opera mini-series) proves the thesis that "you are what you eat". Amira's everyday conversation is peppered with references to Egyptian mini-series and the morals she draws from them. Her emotions are exaggerated, her displays of sentimentality are epic. And when Amira tells her own life story, she does so in "the form of melodrama", casting herself in the role of the long-suffering heroine who returns in each episode to face failed marriages, exploitative landlords and violent employers.

Amira - whose life has collapsed into one of the melodramas she loves - is, as Abu-Lughod admits, a bit of an outlier. But when placed within a literary tradition where the Upper-Egyptian fellah has a tendency to stand in for the nation, it is easy to read in the figure of the couch-surfing Saidi woman an image of contemporary Egypt: one nation, addicted to television.

Dramas of Nationhood is the first major work to analyze this TV watching nation. According to its introduction, 10 years went into researching and writing the book. Ten years spent watching television melodramas with Egypt's subalterns to write a book that no one who watches television will ever read. This is not a gossipy introduction to the world of Egyptian television. It is an academic work that analyzes the "post-Orientalist epistemes" in the relationship between Egyptian melodramatic series and the (re)production of the nation/state.

Abu-Lughod is not presenting a new idea. She grounds her study of Egypt's miniseries on pre-existing scholarship that analyzes phenomena as disparate as American soap operas and Indian religious miniseries. What is new about her analysis is the region of study - the Middle East. In a region over-colonized by Western political scientists and journalists writing "behind the scenes" accounts, a book that takes seriously the oeuvre of Usama Anwar Ukasha ("the Naguib Mahfouz of Egyptian television") comes as a breath of fresh air. Like Walter Armbrust's Mass Culture and Modernism in Egypt, Dramas of Nationhood is the rare book about Egypt that delves into the realm of popular culture to understand its relationship to the abstractions of nationalism, religion and politics.

And despite its occasional descent into academese and theoretical ADD, Dramas of Nationhood tends to approach its subject with relative accessibility. Abu-Lughod's access to Egyptian society on multiple levels - from the intellectual classes of Cairo to the families of the Said - gives the book a pleasantly epic sweep. And her most provocative claim, that the miniseries not only reflects societal trends but remakes people in its own image, is one that has profound implications for the understanding of Egyptian politics. Interminable presidential terms, a cabinet whose reshuffles are best described as "episodic", and a healthy dose of family drama: it all makes more sense when the "Amira syndrome" is understood as the rule and not the exception.

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