Acting Egyptian: Theatre, Identity, and Political Culture in Cairo, 1869–1930 by Carmen M. K. Gitre (review)

To write about Arabic theatre and performance, whether historically or as a contemporary phenomenon, is to find oneself caught between the metaphorical rock of resistance and the hard place of identity. It would not be overstatement to contend that the majority of scholarly literature on Arabic theatre can be found between these two conceptual paradigms, and in the inevitable scholarly backlash around their ubiquity and seeming fixity. In her Acting Egyptian: Theatre, Identity, and Political Culture in Cairo, 1869–1930, Carmen M. K. Gitre inevitably contends with the place of resistance and the question of identity in modern Egyptian theatre and performance. She, however, cleverly breathes new life into these topics by shifting her gaze away from the spectacles of the theatre itself. Instead, by focusing on contestations over and resistances to hegemonic identity within Egypt's modern civil life, and by turning her own scholarly gaze to the fluid interstices that separate the theatre from the world around it, Gitre writes a rigorous and enjoyable book of social history that points to exciting new avenues for Arabic theatre research.

Her story begins in the Egyptian village of Dinshaway where, in 1906, a skirmish erupted between local peasants and occupying British forces out for a pigeon hunt, leading to the murder of a local woman and the death of a British captain. Gitre's interest, however, is not just in the incident itself as one of the sparks for sustained anti-British sentiment in colonial Egypt, but rather in the theatrical representation of the incident staged in August of that year in Cairo titled The Pigeon Hunt. Gitre's contention is that "while the Dinshaway play was an attempt to rehabilitate the fellahin [peasantry] of Egypt, it was not in their own words"; instead, the play spoke "for women and peasants, casting them as an undifferentiated mass of pious, innocent victims" (5; emphasis in original). This distinction is the animating reasoning of Gitre's book. Put another way, the book is an attempt to excavate how, in the social space of colonial Egypt, subaltern classes performed, contested, and refused a vision of national identity that was posited by the nascent effendiya bourgeoisie, the local modernizing intelligentsia. Gitre organizes the chapters to lay the necessary historical framing from which this central question can be posed.

The first two chapters deal with the formation and self-fashioning of effendiya nationalism as a hegemonic social identity in Egypt. In the first chapter, Gitre details the processes that went on behind the scenes of the debut of Verdi's Aida at Cairo's Khedivial Opera House. In doing so, she presents a methodology utilized throughout the book. After first positing a central object or incident, Gitre moves deftly between what happens onstage and off, utilizing a multidisciplinary range of tools to unpack the event's numerous ramifications. The debut of Aida allows her to discuss the role of colonialism and anti-colonialism in hegemonic Egyptian identity-formation, the development of urban architecture, social stratification in turn-of-the-century Cairo, and the many valences of Egypt's contested modernity.

Chapter 2 narrows the focus onto the effendiya, the nascent bourgeoisie and (mostly male) articulators of an official Egyptian national culture. By surveying Cairo's vibrant periodical culture, Gitre contends that the effendiya fashioned an Egyptian national identity "by blending elements of Western culture and technology with local practices and ways of life" (43). This was the grounds on which Cairo's lively theatre scene developed. She positions the effendiya's turn to Western technologies and their ownership of the means of representational production as central in their attempts to utilize the theatre as a kind of public school to proliferate their vision of a national political and cultural identity. The second chapter thus turns to effendiya articulations more directly by homing in on the nascent periodical press as a key site for these articulations and for...