Construction of Protest Space Through Chanting in the Egyptian Revolution (2011): Musical Dimensions of a Political Subject

Abstract

In order to understand how new street politics could become a successful tool in formulating a demand for political change, this chapter looks into some key protesters’ experiences of encampment, of the distinctive sensuous space constructed in Tahrir Square in 2011. It argues that the musicality of Tahrir lies at the core of its political aesthetics and of the sense of ‘vivid present’ in the days of the revolution. The chapter views a soundscape here as a designed acoustic backdrop without a clear demarcation between sound producers and an audience. This allows us to focus instead on a new collective political subject emerging in the revolution, a subject reflected in their embodied music cognition in Tahrir. The chapter argues that an encompassing sensory experience of the participants of the Egyptian Revolution was crucial in the making of its political subject, a multitude of equal voices fighting the regime power with the ‘carnivalesque overtone in everyday life’.