Umm Kulthūm: Artistic Agency and the Shaping of an Arab Legend, 1967-2007 (review)

Laura Lohman's book is a nuanced assessment of Umm Kulthum's later life and reception after her death in 1975. Lohman contends that studying the Egyptian singer's later career is essential to comprehending why her reverent reception has continued into the twenty-first century. During her lifetime Umm Kulthum was criticized for intoxicating people with her performances and thereby contributing to Egypt's defeat in the 1967 War, but since her death she has been revered as a selfless patriot who devoted herself to Egypt and to Arab nationalism. Lohman argues that rather than retiring after the war in 1967, Umm Kulthum continued to exercise her artistic agency, making strategic decisions about her public image and her art that sustained her career and shaped her hagiographic posthumous reception.

Lohman's historical study is extensively documented, citing numerous periodicals from the Arab world as well as insights from journalists and Egyptians of different generations, with whom she spoke during her sojourn in Cairo in 2003. She also analyzes a wide variety of other sources, such as auto/biographies, dramas, artwork, physical memorials, and sound and video recordings. Although Lohman could not include recordings with this book, she directs the reader to view the singer's performances and listen to recordings on YouTube. In addition, she presents numerous photographs throughout the book, as well as her analyses and musical transcriptions of specific songs. Her transcriptions include transliterated Arabic lyrics, English translations, and (in Chapter Two) indications of audience feedback. Yet the efficacy of these illustrations would be enhanced if the reader were directed to them in the text, since they sometimes appear several pages after their analysis.

The book's structure is clear: Following the Introduction, the first three chapters are organized chronologically and thematically, focusing on specific time periods in Umm Kulthun's later career. In Chapter 1 Lohman examines the singer's fundraising efforts in 1967 following the Six-Day War, when she presented concerts in Cairo, in several governorates throughout Egypt, and in Paris. She explains that after the war Umm Kulthum used her charitable acts, press statements, and propaganda work to highlight her patriotism and to redefine her relevance for Egyptian society. In Chapter 2 Lohman illustrates how Umm Kulthum continued this tactic of establishing new contexts for her work in 1968, when she presented a series of concerts throughout the Arab world. Although these concerts had been planned before the war, the singer reframed their purpose as selfless acts of fundraising for Egypt and as demonstrations of Arab cultural unity. Lohman demonstrates that Umm Kulthum also earned significant personal gains from these concerts by expanding her popularity and intensifying her relationships with international audiences. Chapter 3 evaluates the singer's final years of public activity (from 1969 to her last concert in 1972), as she continued to shape her legacy in Egypt and abroad. Here Lohman focuses on how Umm Kulthum portrayed herself publicly as a mother, believer, humanitarian, national symbol, and political activist, and artist. She argues that through careful self-presentation and strategic actions, the singer sustained her career after Gamal Abdel Nasser's death and facilitated her entry into the Egyptian cultural heritage.

The book's final three chapters focus on Umm Kulthum's posthumous reception. In Chapter 4 Lohman critically examines hagiographic treatments of the Umm Kulthum, the singer's role in perpetuating such accounts, and possible reasons for their sustained predominance. She asserts that Umm Kulthum has yet to be thoroughly critiqued for diverting public criticism of Nasser's regime in the years following the 1967 War. She suggests that instead, hagiographic reception of the singer has encouraged a nostalgic view of Nasser and an idealized vision of Egypt's political history. In the next chapter Lohman investigates posthumous representations of Umm Kulthum as an Egyptian woman, focusing on how the singer's unconventional life...