Working Out Egypt: Effendi Masculinity and Subject Formation in Colonial Modernity, 1870–1940 by Wilson Chacko Jacob (review)

In 1894, Mustafa Kamil, an Egyptian nationalist and reformer, visited two world exhibitions in Belgium and France. He was provoked by both, but especially the Antwerp exhibition. “Most of his anger … was directed at the representation of the East as a feminized and sexualized body. … Europe is [represented as] active and virile, the East degenerate and feminine” (3). The story of Kamil’s encounter with the East as spectacle highlights the political and existential dilemma of the colonized subjects’ struggle to forge a modern self under the colonial gaze. It also forms unchartered territory for many, not all, historians of the Middle East who are caught up in the East versus West metanarrative, and use it as the analytical lens for writing colonial and postcolonial histories. Working Out Egypt concerns the dynamics of power and representation and their implications for subject formation in postcolonial settings. It attempts to write an alternative history of subjectification, where the modern national subject is not merely a product of colonial imaginings, a mimic self caught up in the East versus West paradigm, but potentially an active agent in the production of representations and discourses, both national and global. Wilson Chacko Jacob intervenes in debates on subject formation within colonial modernity and opens up new possibilities for understanding colonial and postcolonial histories.

The focus of Jacob’s historical inquiry is the formation of modern national subjects, the effendiyya (plural of effendi), a masculine social group characterized by a bourgeois identity and representing the modern “exemplary national subject” (45). This social group, first ridiculed and vilified under the colonial gaze as the servile and effeminate other of the masculine Western subject, became the target for reformation by proponents of colonial liberalism who aimed to create a class of men distinct from peasants and the aristocracy who could facilitate the governance of the colony. Kamil was “the new effendi imagined by Milner [a British colonial administrator], but not the one he had wished for” (49). This modern national subject occupied a contested site while also actively involved in the production, enactment, and representation of his own subjectivity. A new Egyptian selfhood was constructed in fiction, in newspapers and magazine articles, in cartoons, and in institutions, “against the backdrop of a highly charged matrix of negative racial-ized and gendered signifiers” (59). These constructions were multifaceted and reflected the diversity and complexity of material and ideological givens as well as the aspirations and realities of emerging national selves.

Jacob explores novel spaces and modes of the cultural production of effendi masculinity in the first decades of the twentieth century and demonstrates the ways in which various sites and actors competed over spaces of representation. This same effendi was also the protagonist, or “the nahda hero,” of a large number of canonical novels in modern Arabic literature (Elsadda, Gender, Nation, and the Arabic Novel: Egypt, 18922008 [Syracuse University Press and Edinburgh University Press, 2012], xxxiii). Jacob sheds light on the development of interest in physical culture and care of the body represented in print culture and institutionalized in organizations such as the Boy Scouts. Despite the Islamic roots of the relationship between a sound body and a sound mind, Jacob highlights the link with colonial modernity as a trigger and motivation for the revival of interest, hence a site of contestation between nationalists and imperialists. In the colonizers’ eyes, the Egyptian male was portrayed as weak, not fit, undisciplined, and not sufficiently masculine. Attention to physical fitness, body-building, and the celebration of a modern male physique became a prerequisite for the formation of the masculine modern self and a condition for nation-building and anti-colonial struggle.Jacob unearths several occasions for the emergence of the national masculine subject: the translation of Edmond Demolins’s A quoi tient la supériorité des Anglo-Saxons? in 1899...