Islamically marked bodies and urban space in two egyptian films

Abstract

ABSTRACTSince the 1970s Egyptian cinema has grappled with two closely related issues. First, filmmakers sought to neutralize the occurrence of Islamically marked bodies through visual conventions that either carefully excised them from the urban fabric, or alternatively, cast them as a political challenge to the state's modernist project. Secondly, filmmakers struggled to digest the material decline of urban space that had, in earlier eras, functioned as the aspirational site of modern life. Starting in the mid 1990s, as the ideology of economic liberalism gained traction in Egypt, new visual conventions for representing both piety and urban space began to emerge. In this article I examine these emerging conventions, instantiated in two films from the late Mubarak era: The Yacoubian Building (2006) and I Am Not With Them (2007). I argue that the apparent novelty of these emergent visual conventions—the depiction of Islamically marked bodies, and the displacement of location from the old urban center to the new suburbs—should be understood as cultural naturalizations of neoliberalism.