Alexandrian Cosmopolitanism

Hala Halim's Alexandrian Cosmopolitanism: An Archive conducts a meticulous critique of the Eurocentric and colonial discourse formation of Alexandrian cosmopolitanism. This formation, as Halim maintains, confines cosmopolites in Alexandria only to Europeans, mainly French, English, and Greek living in the city, while occluding Egyptian Arabs' existence. Throughout the book, Halim elaborates this idea through “comparative study of literary representation in different genres that also relate them to other genres” (3). In her radical and subversive scrutiny she reappraises the so-called modern canonical Alexandrian triumvirate of European writers, Constantine Cavafy, E. M. Forster, and Lawrence Durrell, while challenging the views of major Western critics such as Robert Liddell, Edmund Keeley, Jane Lagoudis Pinchin, Philip Mansel, and Michael Haag. What is most noteworthy in the book is her introduction to the hitherto unnoticed—or less known—non-European Alexandrian artists such as Bernard de Zogheb, Ayoub Sinano, Edwar al-Kharrat, Ibrahim Abdel Meguid, Tarique Imam, Yousry Nasrallah, and Ibrahim El Batout. Halim opens up a new research trajectory in the field of Alexandrian and Middle East cosmopolitanism.Halim commences her epic journey of postcolonial reconsideration of Alexandrian cosmopolitanism with a critical revision of the last two decades' redefinition of cosmopolitanism across the Western academic disciplines of humanities and the social sciences. She confidently claims that despite all efforts to reevaluate cosmopolitanism in the changing international political milieu of decolonization, scholars still support the “Eurocentric genealogy of cosmopolitanism,” which means that they are not free from Stoic and/or Kantian philosophy (5, 6). Pointing out limitations in the positions of Martha Nussbaum, Scott Malcomson, and the 2000 special issue of Public Culture, Halim proposes a radical reconsideration of the cosmopolitan on an “ecumenical and anti-Eurocentric” basis which, she believes, could be done by revisiting the Western discourse of Alexandrian cosmopolitanism (7). Halim upholds that exactly this Eurocentric discourse has contributed to christening Alexandria as the most cosmopolitan city in the Middle East. She exposes the Eurocentric view for labeling anything European and Hellenistic as an indication of civilization while demonizing anything Egyptian/Arabic as a sign of barbarism.The chapter on Cavafy offers a new angle to his major poems and prose by focusing on the poet's relationship with Egyptian Arabs in Alexandria and generally in the Middle East. Halim establishes her critical ground by distancing her reading from Cavafian scholars' stamping of the poet as the figurehead of Alexandrian Hellenism. Her examination is cautiously performed in order not to simplify the complexities and subtleties of Cavafy's responses to the Egyptian Arabic voices and the European imperial power. She draws examples from the poet's previously overlooked essay “On the Intellectual Affinity of Egypt and the West” (1928), which demonstrates his interest in forging and improving relations between Western and Egyptian writers (115). Locating Cavafy's works between “Egyptian Arabophone literary production” and the European art, Halim interprets Cavafy's oeuvre as one that carries “transcultural and hybridized Greek textuality” and as one of “the Greek diaspora in Egypt” (116–17). Even though Halim's criticism of the previous critics' colonial readings of Cavafy is one of the many merits of the present book, she does not consider the two recent books on the Alexandrian poet's uncomfortable relationship with the European (particularly British) colonial powers: Peter Jeffreys's Eastern Questions: Hellenism and Orientalism in the Writings of E. M. Forster and C. P. Cavafy (Greensboro, NC: ELT Press, 2008) and Martin McKinsey's Hellenism and the Postcolonial Imagination: Yeats, Cavafy, Walcott (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2010). While Jeffreys's book offers a political reading of Hellenism and Orientalism in Cavafy's relationship with Forster, Martin's monograph applies postcolonial studies in reevaluating Hellenism in Cavafy's poems.The following chapter expounds Forster's dual “positionality” (177). This idea has also been explored by Forsterian scholars (see Peter Morey's “Postcolonial Forster” in The Cambridge Companion to E. M. Forster, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). She cogently maintains that the English novelist's “Eurocentric, quasi-colonial historiography” Alexandria: A History and a Guide (1922) demonstrates his pro-imperialist stance while his 1920 essay “Notes on Egypt,” which was written later but published earlier than the two guide books, displays his strong criticism of British injustice imposed on the Egyptian Alexandrians (121). Halim aptly directs critical attention to the fact that Forster did not revise his two guidebooks according to his changed opinion about British/Western imperialism and that this epitomizes Forster's limitation stemming from his British identity. Halim rightly underlines Forster's failure to understand Cavafy, who is able to recognize “the work of transculturation between Greek and Egyptian textualities” (166). It should be noted that Cavafy realized the insurmountable discrepancies in their political positions. This is clearly marked in the poet's lukewarm response to Forster's overenthusiastic endeavor to publish his friend's poems in the Western world (see Peter Jeffreys, The Forster-Cavafy Letters: Friends at a Slight Angle, Cairo: American University Press, 2009).The following chapter explores Durrell's inheritance of Forster's colonialist discourse by reading The Alexandria Quartet (1957–1960) against the backdrop of the postindependence period of Egypt. Halim debunks the Western critics' endorsement of Durrell's novel as “post-colonial text” which, according to them, offers “cosmopolitan affiliations that seek to overcome chauvinistic exclusions” (180, 212). She claims that the Quartet represents the mournful reflection of the demise of the empire from a British masculine standpoint, including a hidden desire to perpetuate the decolonized nation's dependency. In revealing “a neocolonial subtext to the Quartet,” Halim dexterously employs ideas from Freud's notion of the “uncanny” to Homi Bhabha's “mimicry,” leading her argument to the most drastic revision of the previous studies on these novels.The final chapter introduces Bernard de Zogheb, an Alexandrian artist and librettist of Syro-Lebanese origin whose works complexly intertwine his Alexandrian Levantine elitism with his queer orientation. Exploring the way in which his Levantinism is in dialogue with the cosmopolitanism of Cavafy, Forster, Durrell, and Liddell, Halim argues that de Zogheb's works expand on these European authors' legacies in forming an Alexandrian canon; his librettos proffer “the mutual investments of cosmopolitanism and queerness in antiessentialism [which] came together in his libretti in the form of Alexandrian Levantine camp” (239). Halim does not forget to guide the reader to the conclusion that de Zogheb's similarity with these other authors hinges on the queer aesthetics of “the hybridity of the Levantines [that] falls short of wholly embracing other ethnicities and less privileged classes” (227).Halim's book ends with a brief, yet informative, discussion of Egyptian Alexandrian novelists, Edwar al-Kharrat and Abdel Meguid, and two films, Yousry Nasrallah's al-Madina (The City, 1999) and Ibrahim El Batout's Ithaki (2005). The two novelists' works shed light on those places in Alexandria which are ignored in works by the canonical literary triumvirate and the Alexandrian elite émigré examined in the preceding chapters. Imam's Al-Haya al-Thaniya li-Qustantin Kafafis (The Second Life of Constantine Cavafy, 2012) is chosen by Halim as an exemplary case of subverting “Alexandrianism and the textual dominance it has accorded Cavafy along several axes” (292). The novel “probes the limits of Cavafy as an authority over Alexandria, and sees to situate him and Forster in the sociopolitical context of the Egypt they knew” (292). As Halim lucidly argues, these are truly postcolonial texts in the sense that they destabilize colonial discourse formation of Alexandrian cosmopolitanism and retrieve the contemporary Egyptian voice.Halim's postcolonial revisit to the scene of Eurocentric conceptualization of Alexandrian cosmopolitanism takes us to a new level of critical research—not only with regard to Alexandrian writers but also in relation to postcolonial readings of Cavafy's, Forster's, and Durrell's views of the Egyptian city. Halim's persistent emphasis of the importance of sociopolitical interpretations of Alexandrian texts on the city may overlook aesthetic aspects of the literary texts discussed in the book. Yet her research challenges us to question Alexandrian cosmopolitanism as a Western construct by constantly illuminating and contrasting shifting and surprising perspectives, playing with voices circumscribed not only in the margin, but in kind of marginal center. Her final comments strongly encourage us to “undertake at greater length in a future study, bringing out this radically different cosmopolitan orientation, as well as various Egyptian artists and writers who have contributed to it” (311). Alexandrian Cosmopolitanism is a treasure trove of information and original, groundbreaking critical insights not only on four important authors of world literature, but also on a city which is as versatile and inspiring as Venice, for instance, with its uniqueness, literary aspect, and history

Cosmopolitanism · Genealogy · Political science · Sociology · History · Islamic Studies and History · Law

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