On the Semicivilized

Julia Elyachar is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University and author of Markets of Dispossession: NGOs, Economic Development, and the State in Cairo, also published by Duke University Press.

“Situating herself in the ‘middle’ of the ‘east,’ Julia Elyachar unsettles the barnacled and cruel binaries of civilizational discourses by exploring the statutory infrastructures of extraterritorial articulation, population mobilities, and commerce in post-Ottoman geographies, and in Cairo in particular. Creatively recuperating all the shaken ways of feeling, moving, and acting in common that exceed the confines of territorial capture and unitary sovereignty, On the Semicivilized is a channel to an entire world of embodied operations fueling insurgently quotidian collective lives. Long-standing notions of improvement are dissected and refused, and it would be hard to foresee how anyone could ‘improve’ on this genealogy of the nuts and bolts of urban power and political affect.” - AbdouMaliq Simone, author of (The Surrounds: Urban Life within and beyond Capture) “In this wide-ranging and engaging book, Julia Elyachar documents the political despair and sense of endlessly delayed futures that characterize lives in Cairo since the defeated revolutionary movement of 2011 while evoking the destructiveness of the new military regime. On the Semicivilized is a thoughtful and nuanced account for all those who want to sense the forms of life that followed from an abortive neoliberalism and a defeated popular revolution.” - Timothy Mitchell, author of (Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil)

• Acknowledgments  ixIntroduction. On the Move  11. Fixing Space, Moving People  352. Infrastructures of the Semicivilized  593. Sorting Things Out  864. Commons Goods  1085. Phatic Labor and the Channels of Commerce  1296. Across the Barzakh  152Notes  179References  195Index  221