Egypt's culture wars : politics and practice / Samia Mehrez.

"First published in 2008"--T.p. verso.

Includes bibliographical references (pages [314]-324) and index.

Prologue: take them out of the ball game - Egypt's cultural players in crisis -- Dr Ramzi and Mr Sharaf: Sonallah Ibrahim and the duplicity of the literary field -- Children of our alley: the AUC Naguib Mahfouz award and the Egyptian literary field -- The big one: the intellectual and the political in modern Egyptian literary field -- The value of freedom: the writer against the establishment -- Lost in globalization: education and the stranded Egyptian elite -- Translating gender between the local and the global -- Where have all the families gone? Egyptian literary texts of the 1990s -- From the hara to the imara: emerging urban metaphors in the literary production on contemporary Cairo -- Taking the soap out of the opera: the case of Hagg Mitwalli's family -- The new kid on the block: Bahibb issima and the emergence of the Coptic community in the Egyptian public sphere -- Found in Cairo: the limits of representation in the visual field -- Literature and literalism: the Al-khubz al-hafi crisis reconsidered.

This ground-breaking work presents original research on cultural politics and battles in Egypt at the turn of the twenty first century. It deconstructs the boundaries between {u2018}high{u2019} and {u2018}low{u2019} culture drawing on conceptual tools in cultural studies, translation studies and gender studies to analyze debates in the fields of literature, cinema, mass media and the plastic arts. Anchored in the Egyptian historical and social contexts and inspired by the influential work of Pierre Bourdieu, it rigorously places these debates and battles within the larger framework of a set of questions about the relationship between the cultural and political fields in Egypt.