Global Dreams: Class, Gender, and Public Space in by Anouk de Koning

By Anouk de Koning

Firstly of the twenty-first century, Cairo's cityscape has obtained a extraordinary international contact. Its sumptuous five-star motels, high-rise place of work structures, immaculately fresh shops, and swanky espresso retailers serving café latte and caesar salad, besides the budding gated groups within the city's wasteland expanses, exemplify 3 many years of monetary liberalization. within the surrounding social panorama, the sluggish abrogation of the Nasser-era buildings that supplied many with reasonably cheap items and companies is dearly felt.

This new learn examines Cairo's adventure of financial liberalization in an period of globalization. It asks what occurred to a postcolonial heart classification that was the service of nationwide aspirations and desires. It explores how younger middle-class pros navigate Cairo's more and more divided panorama and discusses the increase of a tender uppermiddle category presence within the paintings, rest, and public areas of the city.

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Sample text

The introduction of Carrefour raised much momentary excitement. Older malls no longer conveyed such feelings of renewed inclusion into much-desired First World consumption and lifestyles. The fast incorporation of malls, coffee shops, and up-market restaurants into the daily lives of affluent Cairenes signals the consolidation and normalization of such reterritorializations of the First World. At the start of the twenty-first century, this conspicuously cosmopolitan Cairo had become the self-evident backdrop of the lives of affluent Cairenes.

I argue that significations and fears surrounding upper-middle class femininity have come to legitimize social segregation. I surmise that the bodies of upper-middle class women have become a battleground for new class configurations and contestations, literally embodying both power and fragility of Cairo’s upper-middle class. By way of conclusion I return to the global dreams that take center stage in Egypt’s new liberal era. I argue that Egypt’s new liberalism contains a recipe for a divided nation, eliciting simultaneous materializations of a First and a Third World in the spaces of an increasingly divided city.

Dreams of a Global Cairo 19 Egypt Telecom Commercial From left to right: 20 Dreams of a Global Cairo 1. Fellucas on the Nile with the Imbaba bridge in the background 2. Woman calling at the balcony of a Downtown apartment 3. Inside the apartment 4. Man calling in coffee shop 5. Supporters of the national football team (‘One Voice’) 6. Videoconferencing between headquarters and construction site (‘One Family’) 7. Exotic touches of a Nubian performance (‘One Soul’) 8. Shots of people using the phone, in this case an old sha‘bi fruit seller 9.

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