Alexandrian Cosmopolitanism: An Archive by Hala Halim (review)

Challenging depictions of the Egyptian city of Alexandria as the cosmopolitan city par excellence, this book reframes the very narrative of “Alexandrian cosmopolitanism” as “a Eurocentric colonial discourse” (3). Hala Halim-assistant professor of Middle Eastern Studies and Comparative Literature at New York University, born in Alexandria, and a connoisseur of its archeological, historical, and literary scenes-reexamines historical ‘facts’ presumed by cosmopolitan discourse, including cosmopolitanism’s very origins in Hellenistic Greece. The core of the book is a masterful “critique of the critique,” in which Halim proposes an alternative reading of works canonized as world literature masterpieces supposedly representing the city’s spirit, and excavates others that have been overlooked. Scrupulously documented with ninety pages of notes and nearly forty pages of works cited, the book is a key reference for studies of Alexandria.

Halim dedicates the first part of the introduction to research by Alexandrian historians about the city’s flourishing between the seventh and nineteenth centuries during the Islamic period, a period denigrated in many sources as one of decline. Halim offers instead “a historiographical brushing against the grain” (37). She reminds us of “the diversity of cultures and intellectual currents in Islamic Alexandria” (34), and underlines the colonial context in which the discourse on cosmopolitanism was born. In her critique of that discourse, Halim reviews scholarship on the subject that systematically traces the origin of the phenomenon to ancient Greece. She critiques the “Eurocentric genealogy of cosmopolitanism” (7) by exposing critical scholarship that “has brought out other [non-Western] genealogies and articulations” of the concept (11). Furthermore, she uses the concept of class to deepen her critique of a discourse that identifies the cosmopolitan individual as belonging, by definition, to deracinated elites (13).

Halim then turns to the central impetus of her project; namely, interrogating “the canonization of a given set of writers,” and excavating “overlooked” texts to highlight their “unexpected solidarities” (3). In her first chapter, she analyzes poems by the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy (1863-1933), side by side with some of his prose texts. She draws a picture of a poet much more aware of and sensitive to the works of his Egyptian colleagues than western readings would suggest. Although much of his writing was suffused with “Hellenic” chauvinism and far from unfamiliar with Orientalist imagery, Cavafy was also the author of lesser known, non-canonical poems that demonstrate an anti-colonial sensitivity. Furthermore, “his intercultural positionality opened his texts to competing discourses from multiple cultures-Western European, Greek, and Egyptian” (119).

In “Of Hellenized Cosmopolitanism and Colonial Subalternity,” the book’s second chapter, Halim analyzes two of E.M. Forster’s (1879-1970) canonized works about the coastal city, Alexandria, a History and a Guide (1922) and Pharos and Pharillon (1923). She shows how the History organizes Alexandria’s cityscape according to a “European imperative” (124), noting Forster’s “obliviousness to non-European(ized) areas of the city” (151). She systematically confronts both narratives with sociological, historical, and urban facts, and compares them with the author’s own “Notes on Egypt” (early 1920s), “an explicitly anticolonial text” (121). Halim shows that, despite proclaiming a deep love for the city’s spiritual legacy, Forster in fact displayed a deep “contempt for Egyptian Christianity” (140) and relied upon a “monolithic image” of Islam (141).

In the third chapter, “Uncanny Hybridity into Neocolonialism,” Halim identifies Hellenism and Orientalism as the two frames of reference for Lawrence Durrell’s (1912-90) seminal Alexandria Quartet (1960). Noting how Durrell’s depiction of the city in the Quartet relates to Freud’s concept of the “uncanny,” she explains that the “text produces […] an image of Eastern superstition, irrationality, and excess” (198). Underlining instances that describe the city as alien to the country and continent in which it is set (for example, Alexandria is “built like a dyke to hold back the flood of African darkness” [203]), Halim uncovers what she calls the “racist paranoia” of the Quartet (204). Most significantly, she critiques those readings that insist on finding...