Sarah Nagaty, "The Collective Dream: Egyptians Longing For A Better Life" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023)

The Collective Dream: Egyptians Longing For A Better Life (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) links two seminal moments in Egypt’s history – the Revolution of 25th January 2011 and the presidency of Gamal Abdel Nasser – through various cultural manifestations. It conceives the concept of “collective dreaming” to map out the subliminal feeling that runs deep through experiences of socially transformative moments. Sarah Nagaty has extensively studied the structure of feelings that encompasses the experiences not only of activist minorities but the broader mass of revolutionary movements. In certain historical moments, hopes and aspirations bind together millions of people from all walks of life: students, workers, farmers, and middle-class professionals. Nagaty calls this phenomenon the “collective dream”, something which has been carried through generations of Egyptians.

In this episode, Ibrahim Fawzy sat down with Sarah Nagaty to discuss the conceptual roots of the collective dream and the overlooked histories of Nubian displacement during the construction of the High Dam. They also explored how thinkers like Raymond Williams and Lauren Berlant shaped Nagaty’s method of reading revolutionary time and cultural memory, as well as how vernacular poetry, reportage, and graffiti served as vital archival traces of collective feeling.

Ibrahim Fawzy is a literary translator and writer based in Boston. His interests include translation studies, Arabic literature, ecocriticism, disability studies, and migration literature.

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