Unstable Icons, Contested Histories
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9368352 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Lucie Ryzova (University of Birmingham, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2015 |
| Volume | 8 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 37-68 |
| Publication date | 2015-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1873-9857 • E-ISSN: 1873-9865 |
| Publisher | Brill (PUBLISHER • NL) |
| DOI | 10.1163/18739865-00801004 |
| OpenAlex | W2313941037 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 12 |
This essay discusses the contemporary circulation of digitized historical photographs in the Egyptian online world. On countless Facebook pages and blogs, vintage photographs of multiple genres—including “orientalist” photographs sold in late 19th century to western tourists, early 20th century postcards of the colonial metropolis, advertising shots published in mid-20th century Egyptian magazines, and private family photographs—are being unearthed, reactivated, and assigned with new meanings that are acutely contemporary. “Freed” from the confines of old dusty archives that once constrained their circulation, such “old” (or “vintage”) photographs become iconic en masse: they no longer stand simply for the thing, person or event depicted, but instead signify larger social values and relationships to the past. Their indexicality and iconicity goes hand in hand: it is precisely because they are photographs—images widely believed to have been created as mechanical, and thus objective, imprints of things that once undoubtedly “were there”—that they can perform the cultural work currently demanded of them as proofs of past truths. This ongoing re-deployment and re-signification of digitized old photographs (facilitated by digital technologies and social media) has two recent genealogies. First is the neoliberal rereading of modern Egyptian history in which colonialism becomes recast as a period of once-had-and-then-lost modernity; second is the difficult and confusing post-revolutionary present in which such “liberated,” but also inherently unstable icons serve to prove at once the necessity of a revolution as well as the reason why it has apparently failed
Aesthetics · Appropriation · Archaeology · Art · Cityscape · Colonialism · Indexicality · Literature · Modernity · Orientalism · Period (music · Sociology · Visual arts · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · Law · Middle East and Rwanda Conflicts · Philosophy
An Ontology of Semiotic Activity and Epistemic Figuration of Heritage, Memory and Identity Practices on Social Network Sites
Clickbait orientalism and vintage Iranian snapshots
The City of al-Zaman al-Gamîl
Challenging the Narrative of “Arab Decline”
Remembering Defeat in Counter-Revolutionary Egypt
Politics of Culture and Cosmopolitan Nostalgia during Islamists’ Rule in Egypt
When the Silent Past Gets a Troubling Voice
The National is Personal
Difficult heritage on social network sites
Mourning the Archive
Light Leak as Method
National Robin Hoods and Local Avengers
| Unique citing works | 12 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2014 - 2025 (12) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 12 |