Social Change Between Potentiality and Actuality: Imagination in Cairo’s Alternative Cultural Spaces

Abstract

Through ethnographic fieldwork and personal work experience, I develop new understandings of the cultural sector in Egypt and its relation to social, political, and economic complexities. This research explores two spaces: the Nahda Association—a community based cultural nongovernmental organization (NGO), and the Choir Project of Cairo—a placeless informal collective for mainly nonartists that invites participants to sing their everyday hopes and frustrations. Both of these spaces explicitly define themselves as alternative and critically disengaged from the dominant cultural machinery in Egypt. In this article, I present possibilities for deconstructing or challenging the hegemonic social, political, or intellectual order of the Egyptian cultural field. The two spaces constitute different stances, structures, and affiliations that make them accessible to ordinary people, opening multiple possibilities for art beyond artists, for development to be understood differently, and for resistance to reach beyond formal politics.