W Armbrust
Biographic Data
| ID | 16008 |
|---|---|
| NAME | W Armbrust |
| GIVEN NAMES | W |
| FAMILY NAME | Armbrust |
| SIGNATURE | ARMBRUST W |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Oxford |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3040-0171 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 34 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 39 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 34 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1995 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Meandering Through the Magazine
In the context of the Middle East, conventionally, ‘new media’ have been viewed as digital media that have emerged over roughly the past two to three decades. The advent of any new medium has always disrupted the affordances of existing media—a fact widely recognized in historically inflected media studies. My paper explores the illustrated magazine in interwar Egypt. In this case the form of the printed artifact itself necessitated novel reading…
Disasters (EG)
An array of Egyptian lifeworlds in 2016
Zaḥma
An array of Egyptian lifeworlds in 2016
Dollar Crisis
An array of Egyptian lifeworlds in 2016
ʿAshwāʾiyyāt (EG)
An array of Egyptian lifeworlds in 2016
Martyrs and Tricksters
The Egyptian Revolution of 2011 began with immense hope, but was defeated in two and a half years, ushering in the most brutal and corrupt regime in modern Egyptian history. How was the passage from utmost euphoria into abject despair experienced, not only by those committed to revolutionary change, but also by people indifferent or even hostile to the revolution? This book explores the revolution through the lens of liminality—initially a commun…
Martyrs and Tricksters
An important look at the hopeful rise and tragic defeat of the Egyptian Revolution of 2011The Egyptian Revolution of 2011 began with immense hope, but was defeated in two and a half years, ushering in the most brutal and corrupt regime in modern Egyptian history. How was the passage from utmost euphoria into abject despair experienced, not only by those committed to revolutionary change, but also by people indifferent or even hostile to the revol…
A Massacre Foretold
Al-Gama’a [The Society], a 28-part television biopic of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hasan al-Banna, was broadcast in the fall of 2010, just before the January 25, 2011 Revolution. The writer of the series, Wahid Hamid, was an important screenwriter for both television and the cinema and a figure known for his affinity with the state’s security apparatus. Al-Gama’a functioned as a rhetorical capstone for decades of anti-Brotherhood state discourse.…
Trickster Defeats the Revolution
Egypt’s January 25 Revolution often has been viewed as an explicit contest between the Hosni Mubarak regime and its cronies, who were able to prevail by pulling the levers of a ‘deep state,’ and revolutionaries espousing progressive visions, albeit visions divided between those of Islamists and non-Islamists, and often seen by each as mutually incompatible with the other. The defeat of the January 25 Revolution’s progressive aspirations can be un…
Media Review
THE EGYPTIAN DRAMATIC TELEVISION SERIAL al-Da‘iyya (“The Preacher”; al-‘Adl 2013), broadcast during Ramadan in 2013 (beginning on July 8, ending on August 7), was a minor footnote to dramatic events. The thirty-episode serial began five days after Muhammad Morsy, the only elected civilian president in Egypt's postcolonial history, had been deposed by the military to widespread though far from universal public approval. It ended seven days before …
The Trickster in Egypt's January 25th Revolution
The term 'counter-revolution' evokes a straightforward contestation of political claims in a revolutionary situation. But contestation is not a zero-sum game: this side wins; the other side loses, and power remains the same. A revolutionary situation is unpredictable. New formulations of political claims may emerge in a protracted moment of 'liminal crisis'-a kind of political ritual with no master of ceremonies capable of ending it. Indeed, the …
The dawn of the Arab uprisings
A History of New Media in the Arab Middle East
The modern Arabic-speaking Middle East is incomprehensible without taking into account the central importance of mass media. Existing literature on media in the Arab Middle East tends to clump (with some important exceptions) at either end of a historical spectrum: analyses of the adoption of the printing press in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and scholarship on "new" (primarily digital) media as they have unfolded over the p…
Islamically marked bodies and urban space in two egyptian films
Since the 1970s Egyptian cinema has grappled with two closely related issues. First, filmmakers sought to neutralize the occurrence of Islamically marked bodies through visual conventions that either carefully excised them from the urban fabric, or alternatively, cast them as a political challenge to the state's modernist project. Secondly, filmmakers struggled to digest the material decline of urban space that had, in earlier eras, functioned as…
Bravely Stating the Obvious
Over slightly more than the past decade a number of mass mediated Egyptian comedies have depicted and criticized the United States. American. journalists report on these productions with regularity, usually labeling them as straightforward manifestations of anti-Americanism, and often conflating anti-American, anti-Israeli, and anti-Semitic speech of all types. Many of these reports argue that anti-Americanism is unrelated to American and Israeli…
The Formation of National Culture in Egypt in the Interwar Period
This paper is part of a History Compass conference cluster tracing the formation of national culture in Egypt. Guest editor, Walter Armbrust, here introduces the cluster of articles which were originally part of a conference in Oxford on January 12–13, 2007, organized by Walter Armbrust, Ronald Nettler, and Lucie Ryzova, and funded by the Middle East Centre (St. Antony's), The Faculty of Oriental Studies, The Khalid bin ‘Abdullah Al‐Sa’ud Profess…
Long Live Patriarchy
This paper is part of a History Compass conference cluster tracing the formation of national culture in Egypt. Guest edited by Walter Armbrust, this cluster of articles was originally part of a conference in Oxford on January 12–13, 2007, organized by Walter Armbrust, Ronald Nettler, and Lucie Ryzova, and funded by the Middle East Centre (St. Antony's), The Faculty of Oriental Studies, The Khalid bin ‘Abdullah Al‐Sa’ud Professorship (Professor Cl…
Pensée 2
My thoughts on the Internet were recently jogged by an experience with a slightly older medium, namely, satellite television. In late March 2007 I attended the Third Annual Al-Jazeera Forum, in Doha. Notwithstanding the attendance of a few academics like me, the forum was largely a networking opportunity for professional journalists, just as MESA is for professional Middle East studies academics. However, unlike MESA, forum presenters, as well as…
Imperial Dreams Prefigured
Book reviewed: McAlister, Melani. Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East. Melani McAlister's Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East, 1945–2000 argues that one of the most significant factors in post-World War II U.S. foreign policy has been cultural engagement with the Middle East. In understanding this encounter, none of the conventional categories of culture, economics, and politic…
The Ethnography of Media
Lila Abu-Lughod. Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. 324 pp. Lila Abu-Lughod's Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt joins a steadily growing body of ethnographies on the effects of mass media. In this case the focus is mainly on how two communities of women—maids employed by wealthy, mostly foreign, patrons in Cairo, and rural villagers—respond to narrative ge…
Histories of the Modern Middle East
Reflecting cutting-edge scholarship and covering more than two centuries of change, this seminal collection represents key trends in the historiography of the modern Middle East. The authors each combine a methodological theme with concrete, original research, relating theoretical issues to the actual writing of history. Their topics range from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to globalization, from well-established historical figures to new acto…
Mullahs on the Mainframe
Mullahs on the Mainframe: Islam and Modernity among the Daudi Bohras. Jonah Blank. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. vii. 408 pp., notes, glossary, bibliography, index
Islamists in Egyptian Cinema
Middle East Section
Mass MediationsNew Approaches to Popular Culture in the Middle East and Beyond
Offering a stimulating diversity of perspectives, this collection examines how popular culture through mass media defines the scale and character of social interaction in the Middle East. The contributors approach popular culture broadly, with an interest in how it creates new scales of communication and new dimensions of identity that affect economics, politics, aesthetics, and performance. Reflected in these essays is the fact that mass media a…
Trickster Defeats the Revolution
Egypt’s January 25 Revolution often has been viewed as an explicit contest between the Hosni Mubarak regime and its cronies, who were able to prevail by pulling the levers of a ‘deep state,’ and revolutionaries espousing progressive visions, albeit visions divided between those of Islamists and non-Islamists, and often seen by each as mutually incompatible with the other. The defeat of the January 25 Revolution’s progressive aspirations can be un…
Islamists in Egyptian Cinema
The Trickster in Egypt's January 25th Revolution
The term 'counter-revolution' evokes a straightforward contestation of political claims in a revolutionary situation. But contestation is not a zero-sum game: this side wins; the other side loses, and power remains the same. A revolutionary situation is unpredictable. New formulations of political claims may emerge in a protracted moment of 'liminal crisis'-a kind of political ritual with no master of ceremonies capable of ending it. Indeed, the …
The Formation of National Culture in Egypt in the Interwar Period
This paper is part of a History Compass conference cluster tracing the formation of national culture in Egypt. Guest editor, Walter Armbrust, here introduces the cluster of articles which were originally part of a conference in Oxford on January 12–13, 2007, organized by Walter Armbrust, Ronald Nettler, and Lucie Ryzova, and funded by the Middle East Centre (St. Antony's), The Faculty of Oriental Studies, The Khalid bin ‘Abdullah Al‐Sa’ud Profess…
When the lights go down in Cairo
Can habits of spectatorship contribute to social transformation? This essay looks at moviegoing in downtown Cairo as a secular ritual that can potentially enable kinds of social change not necessarily envisioned by the state, approved by normative society, or engineered through films themselves. Although filmwatching in Cairene cinemas does, in some cases, verge on the carnivalesque, spectatorship in this context is important primarily as a zone …
Pensée 2
My thoughts on the Internet were recently jogged by an experience with a slightly older medium, namely, satellite television. In late March 2007 I attended the Third Annual Al-Jazeera Forum, in Doha. Notwithstanding the attendance of a few academics like me, the forum was largely a networking opportunity for professional journalists, just as MESA is for professional Middle East studies academics. However, unlike MESA, forum presenters, as well as…
Mullahs on the Mainframe
Mullahs on the Mainframe: Islam and Modernity among the Daudi Bohras. Jonah Blank. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. vii. 408 pp., notes, glossary, bibliography, index
Long Live Patriarchy
This paper is part of a History Compass conference cluster tracing the formation of national culture in Egypt. Guest edited by Walter Armbrust, this cluster of articles was originally part of a conference in Oxford on January 12–13, 2007, organized by Walter Armbrust, Ronald Nettler, and Lucie Ryzova, and funded by the Middle East Centre (St. Antony's), The Faculty of Oriental Studies, The Khalid bin ‘Abdullah Al‐Sa’ud Professorship (Professor Cl…
Veiled cinema
This interview with Yousry Nasrallah introduces an increasingly important Egyptian director to American audiences through his latest film, On Boys, Girls, and the Veil. The film is a documentary about a phenomenon sometimes misleadingly called “the veil” by Westerners. Nasrallah's film discusses relations between men and women through their own conversations about the wearing of clothes designed to restrict vision. The interview relates Nasrallah…
A Massacre Foretold
Al-Gama’a [The Society], a 28-part television biopic of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hasan al-Banna, was broadcast in the fall of 2010, just before the January 25, 2011 Revolution. The writer of the series, Wahid Hamid, was an important screenwriter for both television and the cinema and a figure known for his affinity with the state’s security apparatus. Al-Gama’a functioned as a rhetorical capstone for decades of anti-Brotherhood state discourse.…
Islamically marked bodies and urban space in two egyptian films
Since the 1970s Egyptian cinema has grappled with two closely related issues. First, filmmakers sought to neutralize the occurrence of Islamically marked bodies through visual conventions that either carefully excised them from the urban fabric, or alternatively, cast them as a political challenge to the state's modernist project. Secondly, filmmakers struggled to digest the material decline of urban space that had, in earlier eras, functioned as…
Preaching Islam
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On Boys, Girls and the Veil
The Fundamental Question [Middle East] 1994 65 min. VHS Dir/Prod
The Fundamental Question [Middle East] 1994 65 min. VHS Dir/Prod: Ahmed A. Jamal for Channel 4, BBC and Global Designs. Courtesy of Landmark Media, Inc., 3450 Slade Run Drive, Falls Church, VA 22042. Tel: 800-342-2030. Fax: 703-536-9540 - Volume 30 Issue 2
Sexuality and Film
Globalist Illusion
Title: The Past and Present of Djemma el Fna, Director: Steve Montgomery. Released: 1995, Distributor: Filmakers Library Inc., Length: 18 minutes
Mass Culture and Modernism in Egypt
Mass Culture and Modernism in Egypt. WALTER ARMBRUST. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996; 275 pp. (paper). The creativity and intellectual sharpness of Armbrust's book will come as a relief to readers who had begun to suspect that and thin ethnography were made for each other. Armbrust's ethnography, conducted in middle-class Cairo, as rich as any work based in Egypt's Bedouin camps and peasant villages. Moreover, this richness achieved t…
When the lights go down in Cairo
Can habits of spectatorship contribute to social transformation? This essay looks at moviegoing in downtown Cairo as a secular ritual that can potentially enable kinds of social change not necessarily envisioned by the state, approved by normative society, or engineered through films themselves. Although filmwatching in Cairene cinemas does, in some cases, verge on the carnivalesque, spectatorship in this context is important primarily as a zone …
Veiled cinema
This interview with Yousry Nasrallah introduces an increasingly important Egyptian director to American audiences through his latest film, On Boys, Girls, and the Veil. The film is a documentary about a phenomenon sometimes misleadingly called “the veil” by Westerners. Nasrallah's film discusses relations between men and women through their own conversations about the wearing of clothes designed to restrict vision. The interview relates Nasrallah…
Mass Culture and Modernism in Egypt
Mass MediationsNew Approaches to Popular Culture in the Middle East and Beyond
Offering a stimulating diversity of perspectives, this collection examines how popular culture through mass media defines the scale and character of social interaction in the Middle East. The contributors approach popular culture broadly, with an interest in how it creates new scales of communication and new dimensions of identity that affect economics, politics, aesthetics, and performance. Reflected in these essays is the fact that mass media a…
Middle East Section
Histories of the Modern Middle East
Reflecting cutting-edge scholarship and covering more than two centuries of change, this seminal collection represents key trends in the historiography of the modern Middle East. The authors each combine a methodological theme with concrete, original research, relating theoretical issues to the actual writing of history. Their topics range from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to globalization, from well-established historical figures to new acto…
Mullahs on the Mainframe
Mullahs on the Mainframe: Islam and Modernity among the Daudi Bohras. Jonah Blank. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. vii. 408 pp., notes, glossary, bibliography, index
Islamists in Egyptian Cinema
Imperial Dreams Prefigured
Book reviewed: McAlister, Melani. Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East. Melani McAlister's Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East, 1945–2000 argues that one of the most significant factors in post-World War II U.S. foreign policy has been cultural engagement with the Middle East. In understanding this encounter, none of the conventional categories of culture, economics, and politic…
The Ethnography of Media
Lila Abu-Lughod. Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. 324 pp. Lila Abu-Lughod's Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt joins a steadily growing body of ethnographies on the effects of mass media. In this case the focus is mainly on how two communities of women—maids employed by wealthy, mostly foreign, patrons in Cairo, and rural villagers—respond to narrative ge…
Pensée 2
My thoughts on the Internet were recently jogged by an experience with a slightly older medium, namely, satellite television. In late March 2007 I attended the Third Annual Al-Jazeera Forum, in Doha. Notwithstanding the attendance of a few academics like me, the forum was largely a networking opportunity for professional journalists, just as MESA is for professional Middle East studies academics. However, unlike MESA, forum presenters, as well as…
Bravely Stating the Obvious
Over slightly more than the past decade a number of mass mediated Egyptian comedies have depicted and criticized the United States. American. journalists report on these productions with regularity, usually labeling them as straightforward manifestations of anti-Americanism, and often conflating anti-American, anti-Israeli, and anti-Semitic speech of all types. Many of these reports argue that anti-Americanism is unrelated to American and Israeli…
The Formation of National Culture in Egypt in the Interwar Period
This paper is part of a History Compass conference cluster tracing the formation of national culture in Egypt. Guest editor, Walter Armbrust, here introduces the cluster of articles which were originally part of a conference in Oxford on January 12–13, 2007, organized by Walter Armbrust, Ronald Nettler, and Lucie Ryzova, and funded by the Middle East Centre (St. Antony's), The Faculty of Oriental Studies, The Khalid bin ‘Abdullah Al‐Sa’ud Profess…
Long Live Patriarchy
This paper is part of a History Compass conference cluster tracing the formation of national culture in Egypt. Guest edited by Walter Armbrust, this cluster of articles was originally part of a conference in Oxford on January 12–13, 2007, organized by Walter Armbrust, Ronald Nettler, and Lucie Ryzova, and funded by the Middle East Centre (St. Antony's), The Faculty of Oriental Studies, The Khalid bin ‘Abdullah Al‐Sa’ud Professorship (Professor Cl…
The dawn of the Arab uprisings
A History of New Media in the Arab Middle East
The modern Arabic-speaking Middle East is incomprehensible without taking into account the central importance of mass media. Existing literature on media in the Arab Middle East tends to clump (with some important exceptions) at either end of a historical spectrum: analyses of the adoption of the printing press in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and scholarship on "new" (primarily digital) media as they have unfolded over the p…
Islamically marked bodies and urban space in two egyptian films
Since the 1970s Egyptian cinema has grappled with two closely related issues. First, filmmakers sought to neutralize the occurrence of Islamically marked bodies through visual conventions that either carefully excised them from the urban fabric, or alternatively, cast them as a political challenge to the state's modernist project. Secondly, filmmakers struggled to digest the material decline of urban space that had, in earlier eras, functioned as…
The Trickster in Egypt's January 25th Revolution
The term 'counter-revolution' evokes a straightforward contestation of political claims in a revolutionary situation. But contestation is not a zero-sum game: this side wins; the other side loses, and power remains the same. A revolutionary situation is unpredictable. New formulations of political claims may emerge in a protracted moment of 'liminal crisis'-a kind of political ritual with no master of ceremonies capable of ending it. Indeed, the …
Media Review
THE EGYPTIAN DRAMATIC TELEVISION SERIAL al-Da‘iyya (“The Preacher”; al-‘Adl 2013), broadcast during Ramadan in 2013 (beginning on July 8, ending on August 7), was a minor footnote to dramatic events. The thirty-episode serial began five days after Muhammad Morsy, the only elected civilian president in Egypt's postcolonial history, had been deposed by the military to widespread though far from universal public approval. It ended seven days before …
History (24 works) · Sociology (21 works) · Art (19 works) · Islamic Studies and History (16 works) · Political science (16 works) · Law (15 works) · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies (14 works) · Media studies (13 works) · History (12 works) · Law (11 works)