Aswan city grew rapidly in the 1950s and 1960s due to the building of the High Dam nearby. The "promising future" of the city involved an array of projects to reconstruct the built environment and modify socio-spatial practices of exclusion that had formed in the colonial period. This article examines several new building projects of the 1960s, such as housing settlements, new riverfront thoroughfares, and transportation systems, as well as imaginaries of city living, expressed in fictional and journalistic writing and film, to excavate a history of the city. The emphasis on debris and cleanliness in these narratives demonstrates that small-scale and local ruin-making practices of residents modified the easy language of promise employed by the postcolonial state. This history reveals the insufficiency of the binary of coercion and consent most often used to explain relations of power and affect in postcolonial states. Provincial cities remain marginalized in Middle Eastern urban studies, and yet the intimate scale of heterogeneity of provincial cities can reveal stark urban geographies of difference.

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Studies of public space focus disproportionately on cities. Complex and densely populated urban built environments—with their streets, plazas, institutional buildings, housing projects, markets—make concrete and visible attempts to manage difference. They also structure the ways that less powerful residents challenge and sometimes remake elites’ spatial visions of the social order. The robust literature in Middle East studies on Islamic cities, colonial cities, dual cities, quarters and ethnicities, port cities, and so forth is no exception to this urban focus.

The specific ways that cloth-"foreign silks," "durable Egyptian cottons," and "artificial silks"emerged as a potent and visible symbol through which to contest the relations of colonialism and establish national community in Egypt varied with the changing realities of Egypt's political economy. The country's early importation of textiles despite its cultivation of raw cotton, the growth of its state-protected local mechanized industry working long-and medium-staple cotton for a largely lower-class market, and that industry's diversification into artificial silk technologies all helped structure a shift from "foreign silks" to "the nylon woman" as tropes in popular and political discourse defining the limits of the national community and the behaviors suitable for it. Although artificial fibers considerably lowered the cost of hosiery and other goods, thereby expanding consumption, the use of synthetics like nylon rather than cotton subverted the goal of national economic unity between agriculture and industry.Egypt had a long history of artisanal textile spinning, weaving, and dyeing, and the sector remained strong into the early 20th century by furnishing part of the ever-growing population's local market demand. Nevertheless, the dynamics of the cotton economy contributed to the country's political and economic subordination to Britain. 1 Often called the "cotton paradox," Egypt's status as a cotton grower dependent on imports of coarse raw cotton and cotton textiles resulted from the high value of its own long-staple raw cotton on the export market. 2 At the time Egypt achieved formal independence in the early 1920s, Britain bought nearly 45 percent of Egypt's exports of raw cotton and supplied almost 90 percent of the 201 million square meters of cotton textiles imported annually into the country. 3 Much of this imported fabric was cheap cloth, mass produced with coarse cotton yarns and destined for peasant consumption, although Great Britain also exported a range of sturdier and more elegant fabrics for sale to the smaller middle and upper classes. Most Egyptian textile artisans and local factories worked short-and medium-staple raw cotton and thread, mainly imported from India and the United States, until an Egyptian law in 1916 prohibited the importation of raw cotton to prevent the spread of cotton pests. 4 Nancy Y. Reynolds is an Assistant Professor in the

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