RGP Cycle Two Grantees and Projects

Alia Mosallam: The History Workshops in Egypt: In search of a new language for histories, hope and despairs

This project has focused on one central idea - making Histories accessible, especially marginal histories of mainstream revolutionary events. How I have gone about this is two fold; the first is to create spaces through workshops - for groups of students, artists and activists - to re-explore revolutionary moments in history and challenge how they can be re-told. The second is to build a website containing archives (retrieved by my own research or donated by generous Historians of Egypt) to make the sources of these narratives accessible.

Through this presentation I will trace the experience of the first of these history workshops in Upper Egypt with 20 participants from 12 different governorates. This workshop was held on the Nubian Island of Suhail. The choice is based on our criteria of choosing communities and areas that have been written out of (or rendered marginal to) Egyptian history, despite their centrality to the country’s social, cultural and political history. Upper Egyptian histories were central to the workshop’s topics, and more specifically those of Nubian communities by whom we were hosted.

The workshops became an attempt to to create a critical consciousness as to how history is written and could be read, through exploring primary sources - the archives, oral testimonies, newspapers, novels, the internet and even architectural sites. But most importantly through exploring ways to ‘re-tell’ retrieved narratives, it became a space to develop a new language.

For, in a time where despair hangs heavily on the hearts of those who ‘believed’ in a better world - the workshops helped create a space where a new language to articulate this ‘weight’ was explored. At this present moment, hope is not what it used to be, and neither is despair. Revolutions are not what we were taught they were, but neither are military dictatorships. In the midst of this period where rhetoric has been used and recycled and rendered obselete; experiences like these create spaces where old histories can be discovered a-new, and where the present can be dealt with through reading into the past.

Through resorting to re-producing these narratives in non (/para-academic) forms (such as story-telling and film), we hoped that these untapped narratives can be made accessible to both the aspiring (non)/historian, as well as the communities we explore.

A visual summary of the workshop can be found here.

Alia holds a PhD in Political Science that explores a popular history of Nasserist Egypt, through stories told, and songs sung by people behind the 1952 revolution. Namely, the workers who built the High Dam, the Nubians displaced by it and members of resistance in Port Said and Suez between 1956 and 1973. This is part of her continued research on popular movements that shape Egyptian history, but are seldom told. She is now engaged in teaching youth inside and outside academic institutions in Egypt (and beyond) to search deeper into their communal histories and explore ways to re-tell them. She teaches at the AUC, the Cairo Institute for Liberal Arts and Sciences, and holds a series of workshops ‘Reclaiming Revolutionary histories’ with students, activists and artists in governorates all over Egypt. She has also worked with a number of theatre practitioners to document revolutionary experiences of the present, explore alternative histories of the past, and recreate them on the stage. She continues to look for these stories, and songs, in an attempt to recover a lost history of popular movement; and in hopes that one day, we may write our own.

Her publications include her work on Youth activism in the volume “Democratic Transition in the Middle East”; a workers’ history of the Aswan High dam in the Journal of Water History; and a forthcoming publication on the History Workshops in the History Workshop Journal. She also writes for Mada Masr.