Remembering Defeat in Counter-Revolutionary Egypt

Abstract: This article analyses how a creative writing workshop in 2017 Cairo dynamically engaged with cultural memories of the 1967 defeat of the Arab armies. The article first situates 1967 as a crucial reference point in discursive attempts to tie personal life stories to national history and in making sense of a widespread feeling of postcolonial disenchantment. It is in the ruinous aftermath of the 2011 uprisings, when a view on a political horizon beyond the stifling present temporarily was reopened, that the workshop critically examined the relations between cultural memory, family history, and everyday life with, at its center, the notion of defeat in all its shapes and intensities. The article argues that the workshop can be seen as ‘an intimate public,’ carving out a space for survival lying largely outside of the sphere of politics. Nevertheless, in its affective plurality that stimulated modes of irreverence, the workshop tentatively opened up new political dispositions under the strenuous conditions of post-2013 Egypt.