Nationalism, Nationalization, and the Egyptian Music Industry: Muhammad Fawzy, Misrphon, and Sawt al-Qahira (SonoCairo)

Introduction

The first large record companies, established in the late 19th century, were based in America, Britain, France, and Germany. By the early 20th century they had already established highly profitable global empires of production and distribution (including copious quantities of music recorded far from the corporate bases of power),² extending along preexisting colonial networks (Gronow 1981, 1983, 56).³

Local challenges (often small, but symbolic) to this productive hegemony arose naturally in tandem with economic and technological development in colonized areas, as well as the rise of independence movements and national consciousness. If the significant forces underlying the appearance of locally owned recording companies among nations recently emerged from colonial domination were largely economic and technological, such developments were often catalyzed and facilitated—if not driven—by nationalist discourses of independence and self-sufficiency. However, so long as there existed a shared capitalist framework, the local company might directly cooperate with the global one (for instance, pressing its records locally, or—conversely—sending masters to be pressed abroad).⁴

But nationalism could assume multiple and contradictory forms. Hobsbawm observed that states confronted nationalism as a political force distinct from state patriotism. Appropriated by the state, nationalism could become a powerful affective asset. However, he also called attention to the risks inherent in merging a comprehensive state patriotism (e.g., "all citizens of France are French") with a more exclusive, grassroots nonstate nationalism (e.g., "only the French are French") (Hobsbawm 1990, 90–3). Likewise, Anderson distinguished "official nationalism" from popular national movements; dynastic empires strove to fit what was often a limited grassroots concept of nation (e.g., Russian) to a much broader empire (e.g., the Russian empire) (Anderson 2006, 86ff).

In the newly independent postcolonial world nationalism was further complicated by the relative instability and—hence—insecurity of newly established regimes. As a popular sentiment, nationalism implied liberation from colonial tyranny, and empowerment of the people, but new governments typically could not tolerate such empowerment, even if they had depended upon it (or promises to provide it) in their own acquisition of power. Adopted by revolutionary regimes as a ruling strategy, popular heartfelt nationalism frequently—and ironically—was radically transformed, institutionalized as a patriotism demanding unquestioning loyalty to the state: requiring citizens to cede political and even economic capital, or risk labeling as a dangerous "counterrevolutionary." In this so-called "third world," problems in retrofitting nationalism to suit state agendas did not always inhere in broadening them to cover a diverse or far-flung population (though this was sometimes the case), so much as in ensuring domination over a potentially restive population rife with threats (real or perceived) to newly established power, especially challenges to its legitimacy.⁵

Whether in the hands of the state or the broader population, whether deliberately manipulated as crafted ideology or reflecting popular grassroots sentiments, contradictory nationalist discourses often presented remarkably similar symbolic and rhetorical forms (e.g., "for the sake of the country"). State and individual alike perforce operate in a shared field⁶ of nationalism (a field of ideological production). Such a field functions, within the broader social space, as a symbolic game or market with a particular logic, in which certain forms of cultural capital (practical knowledge of nationalist logic, including its discursive forms) can be exchanged for other kinds. Thus, in a capitalist system, corporations often deploy nationalist discourse as a means of acquiring wealth (e.g., "support America—buy American"), exchanging cultural capital for economic capital. Meanwhile, the state might deploy the same discourse as a means of consolidating power, exchanging cultural capital for political capital (e.g., "support America—do not criticize the state"). Conflict over the "rules of the game" (e.g., what exactly is nationalistic behavior?) is characteristic of fields; as Bourdieu observes: "Every field is the site of a more or less overt struggle over the definition of the legitimate principles of division of the field" (Bourdieu 1985, 734).

Thus, the logic of the field of nationalism and its concomitant discourse may support individual political-economic liberation (the nationalist concept...