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Abstract
The Arab Spring prompted members of the Egyptian diaspora around the globe to re-think their relationship to homeland and the potential role played by individuals and solidarity groups in the unfolding revolution. Within the large and diverse Arab diasporic communities, a plethora of bi-national and trans-national intellectuals, writers and artists were – physically or virtually – involved in the fight for freedom in their homeland, helping to create awareness and to mobilize diasporic communities. This article acknowledges this geopolitical and cultural sense of belonging, and the variety of actions taken by the diasporic intellectuals through territorial and cyber activism and the arts, as a transformative moment in the history of Egyptian and Arab diasporic communities. A new understanding of citizenship is unfolding right before our eyes: it is nomadic, ethical, and responsible. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s conceptualization of “nomadology” as a war machine, on Edward Said’s reflections on the exilic condition of the intellectual, and on Rosi Braidotti’s exploration of the politics of ethical sustainability, this article is a testimony on nomadism as an expression of cultural transformation and resistance. The focus on Egypt (with actions spreading from Canada to Western Europe and Australia) is meant to highlight the ongoing efforts deployed by nomadic citizens to act upon and transform the conventional understanding of belonging in both revolutionary and global contexts.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 We Are All Khalid Said, “Note about Who We Are” (22 July 2010): http://www.facebook.com/notes/we-are-all-khaled-said/frequently-asked-questions/144594612219584 (accessed 22 September 2019).
2 6th of April Youth Movement is a political organization founded in 2008 calling for freedom and justice https://www.facebook.com/shabab6april/ (accessed 10 January 2020).
3 See Valassopoulos and Moustafa (Citation2014) on protest singers forced into exile such as Ramy Essam; Telmissany (2016) on the role played by diasporic women film-makers such as Iskander (Citation2012) and Noujaim (Citation2013); Underhill (Citation2016) on Egyptian-British activists and how they used translation to narrate the revolution.
4 Following the Muslim Brothers president Mohamad Morsi’s ousting on 30 June 2013, the Rabaa sit-in and mass-killing took place on 14 August of the same year killing over 800 Muslim Brothers protesters according to Human Rights Watch. https://www.hrw.org/report/2014/08/12/all-according-plan/raba-massacre-and-mass-killings-protesters-egypt (accessed 22 September 2019).
5 See a detailed discussion of blocked websites in Egypt and the repressive measures adopted by the Egyptian government to censor news and monitor Internet usage https://madamasr.com/en/2018/07/02/news/u/report-internet-censorship-has-become-more-pervasive-in-past-year-62-of-blocked-websites-are-media-outlets/ (accessed 22 September 2019).
6 Several long trips to Egypt in 2011 (May to September), 2012 (January to June), 2014 (May to August), 2016 (January to June) in addition to countless short trips in between allowed me to invest my energy in mobilization activities in Egypt and in Canada, on and off-line.
7 “The becoming-square of the revolution, I claim, produces a heterotopian site for liberation, ‘simultaneously represented, contested and inverted’, to use Michel Foucault’s words, because ‘[the] heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible’. Like the movie theater or the Persian garden, Tahrir Square exerted a heterotopian function: it was home for the protesters, but also an idealistic space for unremitting rebellion, for debate and dialogue, for movement and settlement, for spectacle, emotions and catharsis, a space to rest and to rise.” Telmissany (2014), The Utopian and Dystopian Functions of Tahrir Square. Post Colonial Studies, 17.1, 44.
8 See discussions of affirmative nomadology in the context of political philosophy in Eugene Holland (2011) Nomad Citizenship: Free-Market Communism and the Slow-Motion General Strike. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
9 See Michel Foucault, «Les intellectutels et le pouvoir », Entretien de Michel Foucault
avec Gilles Deleuze [1972]. Dits et écrits II, Paris: Gallimard, 1994.
10 See Edward Said’s autobiography Out of Place. New York: Vintage Books, 1999.
11 See the media coverage of the incident: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-12101748 (accessed 5 July 2017). Note that the Church’s official website lists 23 martyrs by name and photo: http://elkedeseen.org/church/martyrs/ (accessed 5 July 2017).
12 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose_al-Y%C5%ABsuf (accessed 22 September 2019)
13 The Arabic expression dawla madaneya refers to the modern civil State with the notion of almaneya (secularism) as one of its pillars. Madaneya was used by intellectuals, artists, revolutionary groups and political parties against both the military rule and far-right Islamist movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists.
14 Movements calling for secularization were concomitant to movements of modernization in the twentieth century Egypt. Endorsed by the State, secularism meant essentially the separation of political and religious powers. Hence, the concept was under constant attack by scholars and politicians of Islamist background. In the wake of the Egyptian revolution, the Arabic word madanyea meant precisely civic, bringing to the fore the values and principles of the modern State: citizenship rights and responsibilities, the state of law, democracy and secularism. See media coverage of the First Egyptian Congress organized by secularist movements and held on 7 May 2011 in Cairo (attended by over 4000 guests, and the author of this article).
https://www.copts-united.com/friendlyPrint.php?A=36147
https://www.masress.com/shorouk/442388
Also see Al-Sayed Nasr-eddine Al-Sayed (2012), Thakafat al-Dawla al-Madanyea (The Culture of the Civic State). Cairo: Al-Ain.
15 The petition Nahwa Dawla Madaneya (Towards a Civil State) was largely publicized in newspapers and in social media outlets between February and April 2011. See TV interviews with the author of this article on the Egyptian channel ON TV (May 2011): https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xr7hwy; Al Tahrir News TV (March 2012): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhjCUuvlLx0; and TV5 Monde (April 2014): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v = gkfvEgcX3Co&list = PL7FB9093684366721&index=21
16 Short videos included interviews with activists such as Georges Ishak and Ahmad Fawzi, writer Sonallah Ibrahim and filmmaker Yousry Nasrallay. See the website promotional video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v = eyNQCt1dbl4 and the video produced by the Egyptian Social Democratic Party discussing Madaneya using the logo created by the author https://www.youtube.com/watch?v = fTmfxNq-w2Q
17 Deleuze, G. (Citation1988). Spinoza, Practical Philosophy. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 37–43.
18 http://jaumeplensa.com/index.php/works-and-projects/projects-in-public-space/item/252-nomade-2010 (accessed 22 September 2019).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
May Telmissany
May Telmissany is Associate Professor of Cinema and Arabic Studies at the University of Ottawa, Canada. She is the Director and founding member of the Arab Canadian Studies Research Group (ACANS), a pan-Canadian initiative aiming at fostering research in the emerging field of Arab Canadian studies. Her PhD La Hara dans le Cinéma Egyptien. Quartier populaire et identité nationale was published in French in 2010 and in Arabic in 2014. Telmissany is the co-editor of Counterpoints. Edward Said’s Legacy (2010) and the co-author of The Last Hammams of Cairo (2011). Her scholarly articles published in France, the USA, Canada, Egypt and India discuss the emergence of Minor cinemas in Europe and the Middle East and the representations of the Egyptian revolution in cinema, literature, pop arts and music. Telmissany is also an established novelist and a columnist in the Montreal newspaper, Le Devoir. As a creative writer, she published novels and short stories collections including Dunyazad (1997), Heliopolis (Citation2000), The Gates of Paradise (2009), Acapella (2012) and A Magic Eye (2016). Her novels and short stories are translated into several languages.