Documenting a contested memory: Symbols in the changing city space of Cairo

Abstract

This article looks at how symbols in the urban environment are intentionally produced and modified to regulate a community's collective memory. Our urban environment is filled with symbols in the form of images, text, and structures that embody certain narratives about the past. Once those symbols are introduced into the city space they take a life span of their own in a continuous process of reproduction and reconstruction by different social actors. In the context of the city space of Cairo in the five years following the 2011 Egyptian revolution, I will look on the one side at efforts of activists to preserve the memory of the revolution through graffiti murals and the utilization of public space, and from the other, the authority's efforts to replace those initiatives with its own official narrative. Building on the concept of collective memory, as well as Bartlett's studies of serial reproductions and theorization of reconstructive remembering, I will follow the reproduction of different symbols in the city and how they were perceived and remembered by pedestrians.

Critical Security History: (De)securitisation, ontological security, and insecure memories

“…As such, they often, "become a powerful tool for authorities as well as other social groups to preserve certain memories and conceal others". 123 Our aim in this article has been to develop a CSH approach that can question masternarratives. We can see from the example of the Bosnian conflict that there is no automaticity in how security stories are told or remembered.…”

Introducing the Street Art of Resistance

“…The physical locality of those images, the surface they occupy (legal/illegal graffiti walls, government building, under the bridge, gentrified and touristic areas), and the tools used to produce them (paint, stencil, spray, print posters) are all informative of the social life of the image. In a gray sandy city as Cairo, colors easily strike recognition on the wall: a large yellow smiley face on a barricade wall in the middle of clashes between protestors and security forces creates a symbol for recognition; placing a stencil spray documenting the killing of a protestor in the same spot they were killed create an experience of remembrance in its situated immediacy; and the change of revolutionary graffiti from big murals to sprayed stencils in response to security risks and threat of arrest illustrates adapted resistance strategies in a changing political landscape (Awad, 2017;Awad et al, 2017). Or outside of Egypt: the placement of the graffiti of a relaxed nude body, which far from the aesthetic ideals of the society, by the natural topography of the beach in Chile helps to defy patriarchal notions of feminine beauty right where they are contested (see Lattore, this volume); and the strategic placement of markings on colonized space is a physical symbolic act of reclaiming lost land (see Smith, this volume).…”

Repeated reproduction: Back to Bartlett. A French replication of narrative and an extension to proverbs

“…After his experimentations, Bartlett found that the story was shortened, its style and its rhythm were very rarely faithfully reproduced, its details were quickly stereotyped and that the sentences and the events were modified in such a way that they appear more familiar to the social group to which the subject belongs. His work has influenced many studies including studies on rumor (Allport & Postman, 1947) and more recently on the reconstruction of popular symbols in the modern Egyptian society (Awad, 2016; see Wagoner, 2017a). More broadly, Bartlett has been studied from the angle of “narrative approach” (Bruner, 2015), the “socio-cultural approach”, the theory of social representations (Moscovici, 2012, 2013; Saito, 2003), and with the “anthropological psychology” (Rosa, 1996).…”