Abstract

This essay revisits the 1998 bicentennial commemorations of the short-lived French Republic of Egypt, which was celebrated--and protested--in Paris and Cairo. The conflicting arguments about whether to call the event an "expedition" or "occupation" followed the outlines of an wider dispute in postcolonial theory about whether colonial culture is primarily about violence or exchange. Close attention to two texts from the French Occupation--Vivant Denon's Voyage dans la basse et la haute Égypte and Hasan al-'Attar's "Maqama fi-l-fransis"--suggest that the traditional distinction between these terms, violence and exchange, is perhaps not so tenable after all.

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