Alexandrian Cosmopolitanism: An Archive

Notes

no t e s introduction 1. Very occasionally, as when transliterating the phrase from a folkloric adage, I reproduce colloquial Egyptian pronunciation. I borrow in this paragraph some phrases from my 2002 article “On being an Alexandrian.” This article is a version of a presentation titled “Cosmopolitan Alexandria and Postcolonial Melancholia: The Case of Youssef Chahine” that I gave on a panel at the Modern Language Association convention in 2001 organized by Deborah Starr of Cornell University, on which Natalie Melas of the same university and Faiza Shereen (then) of the University of Dayton also presented. My presentation drew on the broader argument in the doctoral dissertation that I had started to write. The dissertation, “The Alexandria Archive: An Archaeology of Alexandrian Cosmopolitanism,” filed at the University of California, Los Angeles, in March 2004, made the central argument about colonialism and cosmopolitanism that I build on here. The dissertation comprised four chapters addressing C. P. Cavafy, E. M. Forster, Lawrence Durrell, and Edwar alKharrat . I have been writing about various aspects of Alexandria and cosmopolitanism since the early 1990s. Some, but not all, of these texts are in the bibliography of this book. It is understood, however, that one’s positions have been somewhat modified and revised. In what follows, I use the term Arabo-Islamic, despite its limitations, in a task-specific way, to designate the centuries from the Arab conquest of Egypt in the seventh century to Napoleon’s occupation at the end of the eighteenth in the context of Alexandria. 2. For a compilation of accounts of Alexandria, by travelers and in guidebooks , in different centuries, see Manley, The Nile: A Traveller’s Anthology, 43–56. 3. Flaubert, Flaubert in Egypt, 29. 4. Flaubert, Voyage en Égypte, 43; translation mine. I allude to Flaubert’s Tentation de saint Antoine (The Temptation of Saint Anthony). For a cogent discussion of Flaubert in Egypt, see Behdad, Belated Travelers, 53–72. 5. Poole, The Englishwoman in Egypt, 15, 16, 25, 19; see also the editor Kararah’s gloss on the languages used (16). Ilbert, in Alexandrie 1830–1930, vol. 1, xxvi–xxvii, having surveyed European travelers’ shifting attitudes to Alexandria in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, observes Notes 314 their Orientalist turn and the European linguistic usage in the city deemed unattractive. 6. According to Reimer in Colonial Bridgehead, statistics for the population of Alexandria in the period before 1848 are not readily available. However, the census of 1848 shows that of a total population of 104,189, Ottoman subjects were 7,087, and European subjects and protégés were 4,824. In 1878 there were 42,884 Europeans resident in Alexandria. The 1882 census figure for European subjects and protégés was 49,693 of a total of 231,396—hence “almost a quarter of the population of the city and a tenfold increase over the European population in 1848.” Speaking of the 1830s and 1840s, Reimer remarks that “internal, not international, migration was the primary reason for growth,” a fact that he is keen underscore “since it is sometimes imagined that the city was more European or Levantine than Egyptian. It was said in the nineteenth century, ‘Pour aller en Egypte, sortir d’Alexandrie,’ but the saying is simply a reflection of European myopia.” Reimer, Colonial Bridgehead, 93, 108; see also 89, 160. See also Ilbert, Alexandrie 1830–1930, vol. 1, 91–96. According to Ilbert, the foreign colonies constituted 14 percent of Alexandria’s population in 1897 and 17 percent in 1927. Ibid., 419. On Alexandria’s population growth between 1798, the year of the French occupation, and 1882, the beginning of the British occupation, see Ilbert, Alexandrie 1830–1930, 1:158–59. For the population growth after the British occupation in 1882—the city’s population having more than doubled between that year and 1927—see Alexandrie 1830–1930, 1:245, 361–62. Ilbert (1:362–63) also demonstrates that the ratio of foreign to indigenous residents was higher in Alexandria than in Cairo. For the composition of the foreign population of Alexandria between 1897 and 1927, see Ilbert, Alexandrie 1830–1930, 1:395–96 and 2:761. Reimer’s Colonial Bridgehead and Ilbert’s Alexandrie 1830–1930 are based in the discipline of urban history, and both treat a somewhat earlier period from the one I cover in this book. While the two books deal with colonialism (to rather different effect), neither offers a critique of representation nor focuses on the...