Cairo Collages

Mona Abaza (1959-2021) was Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology, Egyptology and Anthropology at The American University in Cairo. Over her vibrant career, her writing ranged from women in rural Egypt, the relation between Islam and the West, urban consumer culture, to Egyptian painting and the Arab Spring

'Rarely has a book immersed a reader into what it really means to inhabit a city, with all of its inscriptions, wayward intersecting lives, its resounding contradictions, promiscuous aspirations, and stubborn constraints. Much more than collage, this is a compendium of Abaza’s creative engagements with her messy surrounds, a tour de force of a life she has made Cairo worth living.'AbdouMaliq Simone, University of Sheffield'Cairo Collages comes to crown Mona Abaza's already impressive contribution to studies on Cairo since the mid 1950s. Using her own apartment building as a topos through which to read political, economic, social, and aesthetic transformations in the country as a whole in the aftermath of 2011 Abaza ably balances meticulous insight with heart-wrenching black humor on the janus-faced city whose very name encapsulates its contradictions: at once victorious and vanquisher.'Samia Mehrez, The American University in Cairo'From a long standing witness of impeccable credentials, we are presented with a harrowing portrait of Cairo since the January Revolution. People disappear into themselves or abroad or rounded up by the state as the revolutionary tide recedes and reaction is restored. Mona Abaza discerns order behind chaos, plumbing the depths of a new political morality. A brilliant rendition of endless movement in space and time, the daily nightmare and creativity of life in the megalopolis of the Global South.'Michael Burawoy, University of California, Berkeley‘Collage relies on cuts and juxtapositions of discontiguous and unlikely elements and thus provides a productively evocative aesthetic form for urbanisation in the present, as Mona Abaza deftly captures. Cairo after the revolution in quotation marks emerges in Abaza’s graceful, sardonic and chaotic scenes through an ethnography of ethics: one in which the cut necessary for collage becomes not only the site of violence and rupture but also suture, repair and care. Cairo Collages demarcates the quiet coup of the quotidian city that is anything but everyday.’Ryan Bishop, University of Southampton

• Introduction 1 Tale I: Al-‘imaara (the building) as topos2 Tale II: Commute3 Tale III: My exhausted and exhausting building4 My flat: Nostalgia and al-zaman al-gamiil (the ‘beautiful old times’)5 The elevator saga: The degeneration of everyday material conditionsTale IV: Order ConclusionAppendix I: Interview with E.D.Appendix II: Excerpts from interview with Laila al-Raa’iReferencesIndex