Salem
Biographic Data
| ID | 31764 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Salem |
| FAMILY NAME | Salem |
| SIGNATURE | SALEM |
| AFFILIATIONS | London School of Economics and Political Science |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7872-5613 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 91 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 26 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Sonic Cartographies of Internationalism
How does sound chart a different story of anticolonialism? Sound could perhaps draw out another map of space in history. Mirroring the form of sound waves, this article travels across borders, following the way sound waves themselves move. This is partly what makes sound so important, and what made the radio so central to anticolonial movements: Sound waves built new relations of solidarity because they could not be confined within colonial borde…
Capitalism at Home
Histories of capitalism in Egypt and the broader postcolonial world have much to gain from theorizing the home as a space of labor and care as a form of work. In this article the authors think with two Egyptian novels—The Open Door by Latifa al-Zayyat and Dhat by Sonallah Ibrahim—that center intimacy, care, and the home in their understandings of political and economic change. Representing both a revolutionary and a counterrevolutionary moment in…
Once More with Feeling
This article introduces the special section “Feeling Revolutions, Feeling Politics.” We explore the various ways in which feelings emerge in political life and the work they do in both consolidating and resisting neoliberal and colonial power. We note that if the management of affective infrastructures is foundational to those structures of power, feelings are of equal importance to protest and insurgency. Focusing on the historical moment of dec…
Jean-Yves Frétigné. To Live Is to Resist: The Life of Antonio Gramsci
On Anti-colonial Time: Encountering Archival Traces in a Haunted Present
This article explores anticolonial memory and anticolonial archiving as entry points into broader questions of time, temporality, and the politics of the present. Thinking with Egypt's project of decolonization in the mid-twentieth century, it demonstrates the varying ways in which anticolonial pasts express themselves in the present, and what this might suggest about the future. It thinks through two forms of anticolonial memory: one fleeting an…
Exploring Anticolonialism Through Intimate Forms of Knowing
Dans les travaux universitaires sur le Moyen-Orient, on a longtemps supposé que les chercheurs de la région étaient « moins objectifs » en raison de leurs liens personnels, intimes et politiques avec les pays dont ils sont originaires. En m’appuyant sur les critiques de cette hypothèse orientaliste par les féministes de couleur et les théoriciens postcoloniaux, j’explore ma propre positionnalité par rapport à mon travail sur l’anticolonialisme en…
Radical Regionalism: Feminism, Sovereignty and the Pan-African Project
This article analyses how sovereignty in Africa’s immediate post-independence period was necessarily conceptualised as a regional pan-African and internationalist project of decolonisation, outlining lessons for the contemporary period. The capacity of newly independent states to shape their domestic policy and mobilise resources was constrained by their subordinate place in the global political and economic order, which made them dependent on fo…
Response and reflections
(Anticolonial) Revolution as a Felt Archive
Arwa Salih begins her memoir about Egypt’s anticolonial revolution by invoking haunting: “I felt profoundly disconnected from the ‘national struggle’ that haunts every sentence of this book.” Salih, a prominent Egyptian communist, evocatively named her memoir The Stillborn, referencing a project that was unfinished, that had seemingly “failed”, and yet that haunts us all. This article argues that frames such as feeling haunted or experiencing fai…
Gramsci in the Postcolony: Hegemony and Anticolonialism in Nasserist Egypt
This article traces Gramsci's concept of hegemony as it travels from Southern Italy to Egypt, arguing that the concept 'stretches', following Fanon, through an encounter with the nexus of capitalism and (post-)colonialism. I explore a reading of Gramsci's concepts in a postcolonial context, paying special attention to colonialism and anticolonialism as constitutive of the absence or presence of hegemony. Through an exploration of the Nasserist pr…
Anticolonial Afterlives in Egypt: The Politics of Hegemony
This study presents an alternative story of the 2011 Egyptian revolution by revisiting Egypt's moment of decolonisation in the mid-twentieth century. Anticolonial Afterlives in Egypt explores the country's first postcolonial project, arguing that the enduring afterlives of anticolonial politics, connected to questions of nationalism, military rule, capitalist development and violence, are central to understanding political events in Egypt today. …
Fanon in the postcolonial Mediterranean: Sovereignty and agency in neoliberal Egypt
In this essay I revisit Fanon’s theory on the emergence of a postcolonial elite in the Global South, and suggest that his argument around the dynamics of imperial transformation following the end of formal colonial rule can shed light on the postcolonial era, in particular the period of neoliberalization that began in the 1970s to which foreign capital such as European Union (EU) capital has been central. I use the concept of amnesia to highlight…
Economic Citizenship: Neoliberal Paradoxes of Empowerment
Economic Citizenship: Neoliberal Paradoxes of Empowerment focuses on a particular arena of neoliberal cultural production: the social economy. The social economy can be understood as a wide range of organizations that come together for a stated mutual or cooperative good. For Amalia Saʾar, the Israeli social economy brings together business tycoons, social-service professionals, state functionaries, grassroots activists, and women from disempower…
Sonallah Ibrahim and Miriam Naoum’s Zaat
This article explores the television adaptation of Sonallah Ibrahim’s novel Zaat, arguing that the series provides us with an interesting representation of the various ways in which national projects in Egypt are gendered. It adds to feminist debates around nationalism, capitalism, and gender. In particular, the focus on the intimate in Zaat reveals how political projects are depicted in the domestic sphere through the lens of women’s work. The a…
Empire's h(a)unting grounds: Theorising violence and resistance in Egypt and Afghanistan
This article thinks theory otherwise by searching for what is missing, silent and yet highly productive and constitutive of present realities. Looking at Afghanistan and Egypt, the authors show how imperial legacies and capitalist futurities are rendered invisible by dominant social theories, and why it matters that we think beyond an empiricist sociology in the Middle East. In Afghanistan, the authors explore the ways in which portrayals of the …
Making and Unmaking Memories: The Politics of Time in the Contemporary Middle East
Memory-making and the use of memory is always political, and more visibly so in times of crisis, conflict and transition. The current situation in the Middle East and North Africa is no exception t
Stretching’ Marxism in the Postcolonial World: Egyptian Decolonisation and the Contradictions of National Sovereignty
This article focuses on Egypt’s moment of decolonisation in order to explore some of the productive tensions between Marxism, Frantz Fanon’s work, and postcolonial contexts. Through a reading of Egypt’s attempts at independent industrialisation and decolonising ‘the international’, the article uses Frantz Fanon’s invitation to ‘stretch Marxism’ as a way of understanding the particularities of capitalism in the colonial and postcolonial world. It …
Haunted Histories: Nasserism and The Promises of the Past
This article revisits the Nasserist project through the lens of haunting. It explores the afterlives of Nasserism, in particular in relation to Egypt’s move toward a free market economy from the 1970s onwards. To do this, I explore the Nasserist project in order to excavate some of the promises that were made and to trace the legacies these created. I argue that both these promises—only partially fulfilled—and the social violence they at times co…
Reading Egypt’s Postcolonial State Through Frantz Fanon: Hegemony, Dependency and Development
This essay looks at how Fanon’s work on the postcolonial state can be used to interpret political changes in the postcolonial world, particularly his call to “stretch Marxism”. I use his notion of a dependent “native bourgeoisie” created through colonialism to look at the Egyptian capitalist class under British colonial rule, the Nasser era and the Sadat era. I argue the Nasserist ruling class did not resemble the dependent “native bourgeoisie” F…
On Transnational Feminist Solidarity: The Case of Angela Davis in Egypt
In the early 1970s, Angela Davis visited Egypt, a trip she wrote about in her book Women, Culture, and Politics. This article uses Davis’s trip as a lens through which to approach the question of transnational feminist solidarity through the eyes of multiple generations of Egyptian feminists. It argues that the particular conditions in Egypt in the 1950s through to the 1970s allowed for new international forms of solidarity focused on material co…
Historicising the Left in the Middle East: On Agency, Archives and Anti-capitalism
This article is a review of Ilham Khuri-Makdisi’s book The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Capitalism, 1860–1914 . I argue that this book is a valuable contribution to historiographies of the Left in the Middle East, a field that remains under-represented given the importance of labour to the nationalist movements as well as broader worker-activism in the region throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I review the main…
Four Women of Egypt: Memory, Geopolitics, and the Egyptian Women's Movement during the Nasser and Sadat Eras
This article addresses the Egyptian women's movement of the 1950s–1970s through a recent film entitled Four Women of Egypt , which focuses on the lives of four prominent Egyptian women active in the movement during that period. Using the concept of political memory, the article traces some of the major debates within the women's movement throughout this era. By focusing on the ways in which these women conceptualize the geopolitical, I show that …
Critical interventions in debates on the Arab revolutions: Centring class
Salem contrasts De Smet’s contribution to the debates on revolution and counter-revolution in Egypt with other important materialist readings of the uprisings. Echoing the centrality of class analysis employed in Gramsci on Tahrir , Salem challenges De Smet’s reading of the Nasserist period and situates Nasserism within a broader pattern of coeval political struggles in Africa
How far does neoliberalism go in Egypt? Gender, citizenship and the making of the ‘rural’ woman
This paper focuses on civil society in Egypt as a site in which the ‘Egyptian rural woman’ is made by looking at processes of microfinance which often ‘fail’ to realise their stated goals of ‘empowerment’, ‘poverty alleviation’ or ‘social mobility’. Using ethnographic material from a microfinance programme in the Egyptian governorate of al-Minya, such programmes are problematised beyond their stated goals. Instead, such initiatives put in place a…
Intersectionality and its discontents: Intersectionality as traveling theory
‘Intersectionality’ has now become a major feature of feminist scholarly work, despite continued debates surrounding its precise definition. Since the term was coined and the field established in the late 1980s, countless articles, volumes and conferences have grown out of it, heralding a new phase in feminist and gender studies. Over the past few years, however, the growing number of critiques leveled against intersectionality warrants us as fem…
Intersectionality and its discontents: Intersectionality as traveling theory
‘Intersectionality’ has now become a major feature of feminist scholarly work, despite continued debates surrounding its precise definition. Since the term was coined and the field established in the late 1980s, countless articles, volumes and conferences have grown out of it, heralding a new phase in feminist and gender studies. Over the past few years, however, the growing number of critiques leveled against intersectionality warrants us as fem…
Haunted Histories: Nasserism and The Promises of the Past
This article revisits the Nasserist project through the lens of haunting. It explores the afterlives of Nasserism, in particular in relation to Egypt’s move toward a free market economy from the 1970s onwards. To do this, I explore the Nasserist project in order to excavate some of the promises that were made and to trace the legacies these created. I argue that both these promises—only partially fulfilled—and the social violence they at times co…
Gramsci in the Postcolony: Hegemony and Anticolonialism in Nasserist Egypt
This article traces Gramsci's concept of hegemony as it travels from Southern Italy to Egypt, arguing that the concept 'stretches', following Fanon, through an encounter with the nexus of capitalism and (post-)colonialism. I explore a reading of Gramsci's concepts in a postcolonial context, paying special attention to colonialism and anticolonialism as constitutive of the absence or presence of hegemony. Through an exploration of the Nasserist pr…
On Transnational Feminist Solidarity: The Case of Angela Davis in Egypt
In the early 1970s, Angela Davis visited Egypt, a trip she wrote about in her book Women, Culture, and Politics. This article uses Davis’s trip as a lens through which to approach the question of transnational feminist solidarity through the eyes of multiple generations of Egyptian feminists. It argues that the particular conditions in Egypt in the 1950s through to the 1970s allowed for new international forms of solidarity focused on material co…
Critical interventions in debates on the Arab revolutions: Centring class
Salem contrasts De Smet’s contribution to the debates on revolution and counter-revolution in Egypt with other important materialist readings of the uprisings. Echoing the centrality of class analysis employed in Gramsci on Tahrir , Salem challenges De Smet’s reading of the Nasserist period and situates Nasserism within a broader pattern of coeval political struggles in Africa
Empire's h(a)unting grounds: Theorising violence and resistance in Egypt and Afghanistan
This article thinks theory otherwise by searching for what is missing, silent and yet highly productive and constitutive of present realities. Looking at Afghanistan and Egypt, the authors show how imperial legacies and capitalist futurities are rendered invisible by dominant social theories, and why it matters that we think beyond an empiricist sociology in the Middle East. In Afghanistan, the authors explore the ways in which portrayals of the …
Making and Unmaking Memories: The Politics of Time in the Contemporary Middle East
Memory-making and the use of memory is always political, and more visibly so in times of crisis, conflict and transition. The current situation in the Middle East and North Africa is no exception t
Stretching’ Marxism in the Postcolonial World: Egyptian Decolonisation and the Contradictions of National Sovereignty
This article focuses on Egypt’s moment of decolonisation in order to explore some of the productive tensions between Marxism, Frantz Fanon’s work, and postcolonial contexts. Through a reading of Egypt’s attempts at independent industrialisation and decolonising ‘the international’, the article uses Frantz Fanon’s invitation to ‘stretch Marxism’ as a way of understanding the particularities of capitalism in the colonial and postcolonial world. It …
Four Women of Egypt: Memory, Geopolitics, and the Egyptian Women's Movement during the Nasser and Sadat Eras
This article addresses the Egyptian women's movement of the 1950s–1970s through a recent film entitled Four Women of Egypt , which focuses on the lives of four prominent Egyptian women active in the movement during that period. Using the concept of political memory, the article traces some of the major debates within the women's movement throughout this era. By focusing on the ways in which these women conceptualize the geopolitical, I show that …
Feminismo islámico, interseccionalidad y decolonialidad
Tabula Rasa es una revista científica del área de las ciencias sociales con una periodicidad trimestral, dedicada principalmente a las disciplinas de la Antropología, Historia, Sociología, Trabajo Social, Geografía Humana y Estudios Culturales
On Anti-colonial Time: Encountering Archival Traces in a Haunted Present
This article explores anticolonial memory and anticolonial archiving as entry points into broader questions of time, temporality, and the politics of the present. Thinking with Egypt's project of decolonization in the mid-twentieth century, it demonstrates the varying ways in which anticolonial pasts express themselves in the present, and what this might suggest about the future. It thinks through two forms of anticolonial memory: one fleeting an…
Sonallah Ibrahim and Miriam Naoum’s Zaat
This article explores the television adaptation of Sonallah Ibrahim’s novel Zaat, arguing that the series provides us with an interesting representation of the various ways in which national projects in Egypt are gendered. It adds to feminist debates around nationalism, capitalism, and gender. In particular, the focus on the intimate in Zaat reveals how political projects are depicted in the domestic sphere through the lens of women’s work. The a…
Feminismo islámico, interseccionalidad y decolonialidad
Tabula Rasa es una revista científica del área de las ciencias sociales con una periodicidad trimestral, dedicada principalmente a las disciplinas de la Antropología, Historia, Sociología, Trabajo Social, Geografía Humana y Estudios Culturales
Intersectionality and its discontents: Intersectionality as traveling theory
‘Intersectionality’ has now become a major feature of feminist scholarly work, despite continued debates surrounding its precise definition. Since the term was coined and the field established in the late 1980s, countless articles, volumes and conferences have grown out of it, heralding a new phase in feminist and gender studies. Over the past few years, however, the growing number of critiques leveled against intersectionality warrants us as fem…
Historicising the Left in the Middle East: On Agency, Archives and Anti-capitalism
This article is a review of Ilham Khuri-Makdisi’s book The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Capitalism, 1860–1914 . I argue that this book is a valuable contribution to historiographies of the Left in the Middle East, a field that remains under-represented given the importance of labour to the nationalist movements as well as broader worker-activism in the region throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I review the main…
Four Women of Egypt: Memory, Geopolitics, and the Egyptian Women's Movement during the Nasser and Sadat Eras
This article addresses the Egyptian women's movement of the 1950s–1970s through a recent film entitled Four Women of Egypt , which focuses on the lives of four prominent Egyptian women active in the movement during that period. Using the concept of political memory, the article traces some of the major debates within the women's movement throughout this era. By focusing on the ways in which these women conceptualize the geopolitical, I show that …
Critical interventions in debates on the Arab revolutions: Centring class
Salem contrasts De Smet’s contribution to the debates on revolution and counter-revolution in Egypt with other important materialist readings of the uprisings. Echoing the centrality of class analysis employed in Gramsci on Tahrir , Salem challenges De Smet’s reading of the Nasserist period and situates Nasserism within a broader pattern of coeval political struggles in Africa
How far does neoliberalism go in Egypt? Gender, citizenship and the making of the ‘rural’ woman
This paper focuses on civil society in Egypt as a site in which the ‘Egyptian rural woman’ is made by looking at processes of microfinance which often ‘fail’ to realise their stated goals of ‘empowerment’, ‘poverty alleviation’ or ‘social mobility’. Using ethnographic material from a microfinance programme in the Egyptian governorate of al-Minya, such programmes are problematised beyond their stated goals. Instead, such initiatives put in place a…
Reading Egypt’s Postcolonial State Through Frantz Fanon: Hegemony, Dependency and Development
This essay looks at how Fanon’s work on the postcolonial state can be used to interpret political changes in the postcolonial world, particularly his call to “stretch Marxism”. I use his notion of a dependent “native bourgeoisie” created through colonialism to look at the Egyptian capitalist class under British colonial rule, the Nasser era and the Sadat era. I argue the Nasserist ruling class did not resemble the dependent “native bourgeoisie” F…
On Transnational Feminist Solidarity: The Case of Angela Davis in Egypt
In the early 1970s, Angela Davis visited Egypt, a trip she wrote about in her book Women, Culture, and Politics. This article uses Davis’s trip as a lens through which to approach the question of transnational feminist solidarity through the eyes of multiple generations of Egyptian feminists. It argues that the particular conditions in Egypt in the 1950s through to the 1970s allowed for new international forms of solidarity focused on material co…
Making and Unmaking Memories: The Politics of Time in the Contemporary Middle East
Memory-making and the use of memory is always political, and more visibly so in times of crisis, conflict and transition. The current situation in the Middle East and North Africa is no exception t
Stretching’ Marxism in the Postcolonial World: Egyptian Decolonisation and the Contradictions of National Sovereignty
This article focuses on Egypt’s moment of decolonisation in order to explore some of the productive tensions between Marxism, Frantz Fanon’s work, and postcolonial contexts. Through a reading of Egypt’s attempts at independent industrialisation and decolonising ‘the international’, the article uses Frantz Fanon’s invitation to ‘stretch Marxism’ as a way of understanding the particularities of capitalism in the colonial and postcolonial world. It …
Haunted Histories: Nasserism and The Promises of the Past
This article revisits the Nasserist project through the lens of haunting. It explores the afterlives of Nasserism, in particular in relation to Egypt’s move toward a free market economy from the 1970s onwards. To do this, I explore the Nasserist project in order to excavate some of the promises that were made and to trace the legacies these created. I argue that both these promises—only partially fulfilled—and the social violence they at times co…
Anticolonial Afterlives in Egypt: The Politics of Hegemony
This study presents an alternative story of the 2011 Egyptian revolution by revisiting Egypt's moment of decolonisation in the mid-twentieth century. Anticolonial Afterlives in Egypt explores the country's first postcolonial project, arguing that the enduring afterlives of anticolonial politics, connected to questions of nationalism, military rule, capitalist development and violence, are central to understanding political events in Egypt today. …
Fanon in the postcolonial Mediterranean: Sovereignty and agency in neoliberal Egypt
In this essay I revisit Fanon’s theory on the emergence of a postcolonial elite in the Global South, and suggest that his argument around the dynamics of imperial transformation following the end of formal colonial rule can shed light on the postcolonial era, in particular the period of neoliberalization that began in the 1970s to which foreign capital such as European Union (EU) capital has been central. I use the concept of amnesia to highlight…
Economic Citizenship: Neoliberal Paradoxes of Empowerment
Economic Citizenship: Neoliberal Paradoxes of Empowerment focuses on a particular arena of neoliberal cultural production: the social economy. The social economy can be understood as a wide range of organizations that come together for a stated mutual or cooperative good. For Amalia Saʾar, the Israeli social economy brings together business tycoons, social-service professionals, state functionaries, grassroots activists, and women from disempower…
Sonallah Ibrahim and Miriam Naoum’s Zaat
This article explores the television adaptation of Sonallah Ibrahim’s novel Zaat, arguing that the series provides us with an interesting representation of the various ways in which national projects in Egypt are gendered. It adds to feminist debates around nationalism, capitalism, and gender. In particular, the focus on the intimate in Zaat reveals how political projects are depicted in the domestic sphere through the lens of women’s work. The a…
Empire's h(a)unting grounds: Theorising violence and resistance in Egypt and Afghanistan
This article thinks theory otherwise by searching for what is missing, silent and yet highly productive and constitutive of present realities. Looking at Afghanistan and Egypt, the authors show how imperial legacies and capitalist futurities are rendered invisible by dominant social theories, and why it matters that we think beyond an empiricist sociology in the Middle East. In Afghanistan, the authors explore the ways in which portrayals of the …
Response and reflections
(Anticolonial) Revolution as a Felt Archive
Arwa Salih begins her memoir about Egypt’s anticolonial revolution by invoking haunting: “I felt profoundly disconnected from the ‘national struggle’ that haunts every sentence of this book.” Salih, a prominent Egyptian communist, evocatively named her memoir The Stillborn, referencing a project that was unfinished, that had seemingly “failed”, and yet that haunts us all. This article argues that frames such as feeling haunted or experiencing fai…
Gramsci in the Postcolony: Hegemony and Anticolonialism in Nasserist Egypt
This article traces Gramsci's concept of hegemony as it travels from Southern Italy to Egypt, arguing that the concept 'stretches', following Fanon, through an encounter with the nexus of capitalism and (post-)colonialism. I explore a reading of Gramsci's concepts in a postcolonial context, paying special attention to colonialism and anticolonialism as constitutive of the absence or presence of hegemony. Through an exploration of the Nasserist pr…
Radical Regionalism: Feminism, Sovereignty and the Pan-African Project
This article analyses how sovereignty in Africa’s immediate post-independence period was necessarily conceptualised as a regional pan-African and internationalist project of decolonisation, outlining lessons for the contemporary period. The capacity of newly independent states to shape their domestic policy and mobilise resources was constrained by their subordinate place in the global political and economic order, which made them dependent on fo…
Exploring Anticolonialism Through Intimate Forms of Knowing
Dans les travaux universitaires sur le Moyen-Orient, on a longtemps supposé que les chercheurs de la région étaient « moins objectifs » en raison de leurs liens personnels, intimes et politiques avec les pays dont ils sont originaires. En m’appuyant sur les critiques de cette hypothèse orientaliste par les féministes de couleur et les théoriciens postcoloniaux, j’explore ma propre positionnalité par rapport à mon travail sur l’anticolonialisme en…
Jean-Yves Frétigné. To Live Is to Resist: The Life of Antonio Gramsci
On Anti-colonial Time: Encountering Archival Traces in a Haunted Present
This article explores anticolonial memory and anticolonial archiving as entry points into broader questions of time, temporality, and the politics of the present. Thinking with Egypt's project of decolonization in the mid-twentieth century, it demonstrates the varying ways in which anticolonial pasts express themselves in the present, and what this might suggest about the future. It thinks through two forms of anticolonial memory: one fleeting an…
Sonic Cartographies of Internationalism
How does sound chart a different story of anticolonialism? Sound could perhaps draw out another map of space in history. Mirroring the form of sound waves, this article travels across borders, following the way sound waves themselves move. This is partly what makes sound so important, and what made the radio so central to anticolonial movements: Sound waves built new relations of solidarity because they could not be confined within colonial borde…
Capitalism at Home
Histories of capitalism in Egypt and the broader postcolonial world have much to gain from theorizing the home as a space of labor and care as a form of work. In this article the authors think with two Egyptian novels—The Open Door by Latifa al-Zayyat and Dhat by Sonallah Ibrahim—that center intimacy, care, and the home in their understandings of political and economic change. Representing both a revolutionary and a counterrevolutionary moment in…
Sociology (20 works) · Political science (18 works) · Politics (18 works) · Law (16 works) · Gender Studies (10 works) · Law (10 works) · Gender Studies (9 works) · Political economy (9 works) · Capitalism (8 works) · Colonialism (8 works)