Copyright by Daniel Jason Gilman 2010 The Dissertation Committee for Daniel Jason Gilman certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: After Umm Kulthm: Pop music, postcolonial modernity, and gendered national subjectivity in Cairo Committee: ____________________________ Ward W. Keeler, Supervisor ____________________________ Kamran Asdar Ali ____________________________ Pauline Turner Strong ____________________________ S. Keith Walters ____________________________ Yaron Shemer After Umm Kulthm: Pop music, postcolonial modernity, and gendered national subjectivity in Cairo by Daniel Jason Gilman, B.A.; M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2010 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The research for this dissertation was funded by a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Award and by a Center for Middle Eastern Studies Fellowship, the latter funded by the University of Texas. I am grateful to these institutions for the support they have given me, without which I could not have spent sufficient time in Cairo for the strange and organic work of ethnography to catalyze. The writing was partially subsidized by a David Bruton, Jr. Graduate Fellowship, also from the University of Texas. Everybody needs an editor, but I have been fortunate enough to have three. My supervisor, Ward Keeler, and advisor Kamran Ali have done most of the heavy lifting in the editing and critiquing of my dissertation. Both of them have made numerous invaluable critiques of my work as it has developed, and it is far stronger for their kind but constructively critical observations. Among their colleagues, Kaushik Ghosh, in his formal capacity as a workshop instructor, performed the role of editor as well. Sofian Merabet gave me some excellent advice for theorizing about Egyptian popular culture and its flows throughout the Arab world, and John Hartigan, Jr. pointed me toward some useful theorizations on race and whiteness. Polly Strong has pushed me to deepen and broaden my intervention in anthropology of gender, particularly my notion of the gendered national. Keith Walters and Yaron Shemer also gave me some sage advice on how to approach the dissertation pragmatically and fruitfully, and helped me to think through “where it’s all going.” In addition, some of my colleagues at the University of Texas and beyond read and critiqued drafts of various chapters herein, and engaged me in iv illuminating conversations about the theoretical, practical and ethical considerations of ethnographic field work and writing. For their time and thoughts, I would like to thank Hannah Rose Baker, María Luz García, Zeina Halabi, Linda Ho Peché, Mathangi Krishnamurthy, Emily Lynch, Ken MacLeish, Miriam Robinson-Gould, Anthony Shenoda, Ryan Skinner, and Heather Teague. My Cairene academic advisor through Fulbright-Hays, Dr. Abd al-amd awws, gave me a great deal to think about, often in the form of philosophical arguments about pop culture and field work methodology, and always over homemade ahwa ziyda or karkadayh. I am grateful to him for his generosity of time and thought, even though we rarely (and possibly never) saw eye-to-eye. Dr. Nabila Alfy offered me an incalculable amount of collegial support and facilitation, without which some of my most cherished ethnographic moments could not have occurred. I also thank Dr. Mohamed Omran and Dr. Zeinab Taha for taking time out of their hectic schedules to meet with me and allowing me to pelt them with questions, some of which must have seemed somewhat less than materially valuable to them; both of them also played the role of facilitators by introducing me to a network of academics and music professionals. Most Egyptians whom I name in this paper have been given pseudonyms, in accordance with ethical standards of ethnographic practice. A very few of my respondents and interview subjects, though, can be identified without the use of pseudonyms, since they are famous people in their own right in Egypt, and their comments to me would not make contextual sense without acknowledging their fame and its origins. After confirming with each of them that I may identify them by their real v names, I would like to express my gratitude to the artist Mohamed Mounir, the writer Marwa Rakha, and the members of the band Wust el-Balad. All other interlocutors’ names given herein are pseudonymous, and so I offer my sincere thanks to all of these Egyptian friends, colleagues, and acquaintances who gave of their time and trouble to discuss, argue, and learn with me about pop music, Egyptian society, and Middle Eastern politics, and how they as young people fit into all of it. I have tried my best to do right by all of you, and any failings in this dissertation are mine, not yours. Among my American colleagues in Cairo who shared both shop talk and utterly non-intellectual leisure time with me, I would like to thank Raja Adal, Frances Ames, Christine Baker, Dale Correa, Hope Fitzgerald, Nadia Ilahi, Aatif Iqbal, Christopher Micklethwait, Karem Said, Johanna Sellman, Anthony and Maryann Shenoda, Ryan Skinner, Daniel Stolz, and Laura Sylvester. I am especially grateful to all those who partook of a glass of wine or a bottle (or two) of beer with me; while I dislike drinking alone in general, it is so much worse in a country where the act itself as well as the circumstances draw attention. Cheers to you all! Finally, I would like to thank my family for their love and support over all these years, but especially in the difficult years of writing. While they universally value scholarship and educational achievement, my graduate career has tested their forbearance in some ways they did not anticipate. They have not always understood why I was motivated to study a topic so far removed in some ways from the world in which I grew up, and it has been hard on them (and me) to spend such long periods of time far away from them, but they have always supported me in the endeavor. My love to you all. vi After Umm Kulthm: Pop music, postcolonial modernity, and gendered national subjectivity in Cairo Daniel Jason Gilman, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2010 Supervisor: Ward W. Keeler I argue that the ways in which members of the youth generation in Cairo, Egypt consume Arabic-language popular music, and the aesthetic criteria by which they evaluate the worth of various songs and singers, constitute a key component, along with corresponding criteria of political, racial, gendered, and cultural authenticity of Egyptian subjectivity, of a new form of Egyptian gendered national subjectivity in postcolonial modernity. These aesthetic and authenticating criteria are fundamentally interrelated, as one’s consumer preferences within genres of Egyptian popular music are often taken as indicative of the nature of one’s Egyptian subjectivity. For previous generations in postcolonial Egypt, discriminating taste for high modernist aesthetics in popular music, especially the singer Umm Kulthm, comprised an aspect of desirable cultural modernity and authenticity. This aesthetic has been superseded among contemporary youth by an emphasis on direct emotional evocation as an index of authenticity. Correspondingly, youth in Cairo have come to judge the authenticity of their Egyptian subjectivity against the political subjectivity of their elders’ generations, and the authenticity of their gendered, racial, and cultural subjectivities against those of the West and those of other Arab countries, most particularly Lebanon. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Illustrations……………………..………………………………………….………xi Notes on transliteration…..………………………………………………………..xii Chapter 1. Introduction. Introduction………………………………………………………………….1 Origin myths…………………………………………………….…………..2 Egyptian musical genres………………………………………….…………5 arab……………………………………………..……………….....6 Shabiyya…………………………………………..………………...8 Shabbiyya………………………………………...………………..11 Theorizing………………………………………………..…………………15 Biography of the gendered national………………………………...16 Nationalism and postcolonialism…………………………………...18 Egyptian pop culture………………………………………………..21 Ethnographic method……………………………………………………….29 Shabbiyya as ‘bad music’…………………………………………………33 Chapter 2. The Golden Age and its aftermath. Part I: The Golden Age………………………………………………….....43 The Lady enters…………………………………………………….45 arab aesthetics in detail…………………………………………..47 “Umm Kulthm was of her time, not ours”………………………..51 Part II: The Dark Nightingale……………………………………..……….57 viii Part III: 1977 and all that……………………………………………..……65 Chapter 3. I capture the king: an interview with Muammad Munr. Part I: The king………………………………………………………..…...69 “Life isn’t easy”……………………………………………….…..72 Searching for wsa……………………………………………….75 Part II: Positive provocation……………………………………….……...83 Part III: “The arab of shabbiyya”……………………………….………91 Transitioning………………………………………………………96 Chapter 4. Egyptian voices and Lebanese looks: a national(ized) hierarchy of aesthetics. Part I: “Calling something cheap dear”……………………………….…..98 “Commerce, not talent”………………………………………….100 Part II: The ‘New Look’ and whiteness as unattainable ideal……….…..102 Hayf Wahb and the Lebanese Other…………………………...110 Part III: Bint al-balad and the ethnicization of Egyptians………….……116 Ruby and domesticized disreputable fame………………………122 A real Egyptian voice……………………………………………129 Part IV: ‘Going Lebanese’ in globalized capitalism……………………..137 Chapter 5. Nationalist