Unstable Icons, Contested Histories

Abstract

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.

Difficult heritage on social network sites: An integrative review

“…Other studies emphasised the mediating role of tourism, viewing heritage interpretation made for visitors as a dynamic, mobile and borderless phenomenon not just closely related to dark tourism (Bowen and Bannon, 2018; Zhukova, 2020), but also to the memory industry in general. The mediating contexts of tourism shared on SNS relate to visual travel experiences, thus making photography and other forms of audiovisual content part of the purview of works (Malek, 2021; Rajagopalan, 2019; Ryzova, 2015). This included the impact of films such as Gone with the wind in the context of slavery-related plantation stories (Carter, 2016) and The Soviet story in the context of post-Soviet discourses (Kaprāns, 2016), as well as of music, perceived as ‘an important vehicle of cultural memory’ enhancing its mnemonic and negotiated functions, such as in the case of Israel (Yachin and Tirosh, 2021).…”

“…Another study discussed the 13th-century Mevlevi Sema ceremony as part of Turkish intangible heritage practice on SNS (Pietrobruno, 2014). From 17th to 19th centuries, slavery was the most contested North American topic (Carter, 2015;Cook and Potter, 2018 ;Morgan and Pallascio, 2015;Rhodes, 2019), while in the European context, works focused on colonial history and post-colonial discourses (Knudsen and Andersen, 2019;Peralta, 2019;Ryzova, 2015;van Huis, 2019). Other studies addressed the different perceptions and contemporary tensions on social media resulting from the Latin America war between Chile, Peru and Bolivia (Drinot, 2011), as well as vernacular perceptions of the 19th and 20th centuries penal history in Canada through museum visitor reviews on social media (Ferguson et al, 2015).…”

An Ontology of Semiotic Activity and Epistemic Figuration of Heritage, Memory and Identity Practices on Social Network Sites

“…symbols are particularly important for culturalist approaches as a means of assigning meaning (Gibson & Jones, 2012) to places and events, but the notion is often used in an untheorized manner. Visual symbols discussed include gestures (Damcevic & Rodik, 2018), drawn images (El-Farahaty, 2019), photographs (Farquhar, 2013; Garduño Freeman, 2010; Ryzova, 2015), or material objects appearing as visual content (Adriaansen, 2020; Kozachenko, 2019). symbols also appear in verbal communication, for example, nationalist slogans chanted during football games (Sindbæk Andersen, 2016), or anthems (Bosch, 2020), or take the form of complex symbols, such as past events functioning as political symbols (Rodríguez-Temiño & Almansa-Sánchez, 2021).…”

National Robin Hoods and Local Avengers: On Two Shifts in the Criminal Myth of Rayyā and Sakīna in Present Day Egypt

“…The rupture brings, along with anxieties, attempts to anticipate the future based on some shared past. In post-2011 Egypt, ordinary citizens appropriate different historical figures, which some propose as role models for the future and others strongly reject (Ryzova, 2015). The rewriting of history from below has not stopped after the military coup of 2013.…”