This essay discusses the contemporary circulation of digitized historical photographs in the Egyptian online world. On countless Facebook pages and blogs, vintage photographs of multiple genres—including “orientalist” photographs sold in late 19th century to western tourists, early 20th century postcards of the colonial metropolis, advertising shots published in mid-20th century Egyptian magazines, and private family photographs—are being unearthed, reactivated, and assigned with new meanings that are acutely contemporary. “Freed” from the confines of old dusty archives that once constrained their circulation, such “old” (or “vintage”) photographs become iconic en masse: they no longer stand simply for the thing, person or event depicted, but instead signify larger social values and relationships to the past. Their indexicality and iconicity goes hand in hand: it is precisely because they are photographs—images widely believed to have been created as mechanical, and thus objective, imprints of things that once undoubtedly “were there”—that they can perform the cultural work currently demanded of them as proofs of past truths. This ongoing re-deployment and re-signification of digitized old photographs (facilitated by digital technologies and social media) has two recent genealogies. First is the neoliberal rereading of modern Egyptian history in which colonialism becomes recast as a period of once-had-and-then-lost modernity; second is the difficult and confusing post-revolutionary present in which such “liberated,” but also inherently unstable icons serve to prove at once the necessity of a revolution as well as the reason why it has apparently failed.

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The battle of Muhammad Mahmoud Street in November 2011, pitching protestors against security forces in a five-day long stand-off, represented a crucial episode of Egypt's 25 January Revolution. Part riot and part carnival, this event opens up a number of questions for historians. This article examines the battle on three distinct scales, paying particular attention to time and temporality. The first scale is the battle's position within the temporality of the Egyptian revolution. The article argues that revolutionary situations are best understood through concepts of liminal time, and that the winter of 2011, rather than the initial stage of the Tahrir Square sit-in in January–February, represented the crucial phase of the revolutionary process in Egypt. A second scale zooms in on street action, focusing on the nexus of class, masculinity and urban violence. Here, raw experiences on the ground inform subjective meanings of ‘violence', ‘politics' and ‘revolution' from the perspective of those who were most directly involved in their making. These experiences also reveal different temporal horizons experienced by diverse participants, which, however, did not remain unchanged as events unfolded. The third scale is historically comparative, delving into spontaneously enacted riotous and carnivalesque urban violence as reflected in classic literature on riots and carnivals in different contexts. The battle of November 2011 allow us to see the generic affinity between these liminal events and the persistence of the riotous and carnivalesque within modern revolutionary situations, as it may help us understand the resurgence of riots within the contemporary world.

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