Global 1968 in Egypt: Raḍwā ʿĀshūr’s Farag and the Disarticulation of Area Studies

This article reads Raḍwā ʿĀshūr’s novel Farag as an afterlife of the global anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist political culture of 1968. I argue that Farag entangles post-1968 Egypt and France from a position of decentered interlocality, which places the histories of Egypt’s 1970s student movement and France’s Third-World-Marxist left in critical dialogue. At a time when the Egyptian left was paralyzed by state co-optation, the political awakening of the novel’s protagonist, Nadā, is fostered by her exposure to the independent left of 1968 France. After she is imprisoned in Egypt several years later for participating in the student movement, however, Nadā must reckon with the incongruities of her postcolonial experience and interrogate French theory’s Eurocentric claim to universality. Thereafter, ʿĀshūr’s novel charts the tragic demise of the radical left across the Global South through the declining parallel figures of Nadā’s French mother and two Egyptian student movement leaders.