Pascale Ghazaleh (American University Cairo / EUME Fellow 2017-19) talk on “Archives, Heritage and Discontent: Who Owns Egypt’s Past?” was held in the framework of the EUME Berliner Seminar on 18 October 2023 and  was part of the conversation series Restitution and its Vantage Points: Beyond the Preservation Paradigm of the BEYONDREST Research Group. The talk was chaired by Banu Karaca (PI ERC BEYONDREST)

Since 2011, Egypt has undergone such profound changes that parts of the physical landscape are unrecognizable to visitors who have not seen the country since before the uprising. Politically, economically, and culturally, boundaries have shifted. The urban landscape has changed, sometimes dramatically: in downtown Cairo alone, new landmarks have sprung up, for example in Tahrir Square, now anchored by an obelisk that refers to a past far more ancient and pervasive than that of the uprising. Elements that were part of the background have taken center stage, while features Egyptians took for granted seem never to have existed. Despite these far-reaching transformations, the past weighs heavy on the regime and the population alike, shaping horizons of possibility and limiting what may be articulated in word or deed. How, then, has heritage been imagined and produced in Egypt since 2011? In what ways has the regime co-opted the past to project itself into the future? What alternative visions of the past exist, and how have they been articulated?

For more information, please have a look here: https://shorturl.at/eBW45

Pascale Ghazaleh: Archives, Heritage and Discontent: Who Owns Egypt’s Past?

In the first decade of his reign, Vladimir Putin de-emphasized ideology to consolidate control and reinstate legitimacy of state power. The 2011 protests led him to shift gears and assume an ideological approach to consolidating legitimacy. This approach, however, led to the empowerment of “ideological entrepreneurs,” some of whom the Kremlin views as a liability. Who are the ideological entrepreneurs and how does the Kremlin manage them? What are the components of the Kremlin’s ideological operation and how does it impact ordinary Russians? Maria Lipman addressed these questions in her talk.

Speaker:
Maria Lipman - Editor, Point & Counterpoint

02/05/2019 - The Kremlin and Its Ideological Toolbox

"A War for the Better Past: Political Visions in Post-Soviet Counterfactual Histories" by Oleksandr Zabirko in the framework of the Prisma Ukraïna workshop "When the Muses are not silent: Intellectuals’ and Artists’ Responses to the Ukraine-Russia Conflict and post-Maidan Developments in Ukraine" in Berlin on 19 June, 2018

As one of the most popular types of speculative fiction, the “alternative” or “counterfactual histories” constitute a literary genre, in which one or more historical events occur differently than in the historical record. While in the Western fiction the literary models of time travel and counterfactual history function as the elements of the unreal “secondary world” and thus construct a distance between the fantastic and the mundane, contemporary Russophone  authors exploit the generic conventions of fantasy or science fiction in order to suggest a continuity between fiction and reality. Being omnipresent in various media, this aestheticized, counterfactual reality captivates its consumers and is arguably capable of substituting the real world, thus making it possible to read and interpret current geopolitical conflicts (like the war in Donbas) through the prism of speculative fiction. Focusing on geopolitical and social modeling in post-Soviet speculative fiction, the paper claims that the images of the Other, the archaic communal structures and the transformations of historical time provide here an aesthetic ground for a large patriotic consensus of a community united by common resentment.

O. Zabirko: A War for the Better Past: Political Visions in Post-Soviet Counterfactual Histories

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Pascale Ghazaleh: Archives, Heritage and Discontent: Who Owns Egypt’s Past?

Forum Transregionale Studien

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