The Arab Nahda as Popular Entertainment: Mass Culture and Modernity in the Middle East
March 24, 2025
Meet VCU Authors: Hala Auji
Start time: 12:00 p.m.
End time: 1:00 p.m.
Location: Online via Zoom
Join us for a Meet VCU Authors talk with Hala Auji, Raphael Cormack, and Alaaeldin Mahmoud, co-editors of The Arab Nahda as Popular Entertainment: Mass Culture and Modernity in the Middle East.
Description
What was popular entertainment like for everyday Arab societies in Middle Eastern cities during the long nineteenth century? In what ways did café culture, theatre, illustrated periodicals, cinema, cabarets, and festivals serve as key forms of popular entertainment for Arabic-speaking audiences, many of whom were uneducated and striving to contend with modernity's anxiety-inducing realities? Studies on the 19th to mid-20th century's transformative cultural movement known as the Arab nahda (renaissance), have largely focussed on concerns with nationalism, secularism, and language, often told from the perspective of privileged groups. Highlighting overlooked aspects of this movement, this book shifts the focus away from elite circles to quotidian audiences. Its ten contributions range in scope, from music and visual media to theatre and popular fiction. Paying special attention to networks of movement and exchange across Arab societies in Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Iraq, and Morocco, this book heeds the call for 'translocal/transnational' cultural histories, while contributing to timely global studies on gender, sexuality, and morality. Focusing on the often-marginalized frequenters of cafés, artist studios, cinemas, nightclubs, and the streets, it expands the remit of who participated in the nahda and how they did.
About the Speakers
Hala Auji, Ph.D is an Associate Professor of art history and the Hamad bin Khalifa Endowed Chair of Islamic Art at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her research focuses on transcultural modernity, print culture, and photography in Eastern Mediterranean communities during the long nineteenth century. With a background in graphic design, art criticism, and art history, Auji examines intersections between art, design history, and comparative literature, particularly in relation to Islamic and Middle Eastern art. She is the author of Printing Arab Modernity: Book Culture and the American Press in Nineteenth-Century Beirut (Brill, 2016) and co-editor of The Arab Nahda as Popular Entertainment: Mass Culture and Modernity in the Middle East (Bloomsbury, 2023) and Islamic Art History and the Global Turn: Theory, Method, Practice, part of the Biennial Hamad bin Khalifa Symposium on Islamic Art Series (Yale, forthcoming). Her current book project investigates printed portraiture in Ottoman provincial cities. Auji also co-chairs the Biennial Hamad bin Khalifa Symposium on Islamic Art.
Raphael Cormack is Assistant Professor of Arabic at the University of Durham, UK. He has published two monographs on 20th century Arabic cultural history: Midnight in Cairo (W.W. Norton: 2021) and Holy Men of the Electromagnetic Age (W.W. Norton: 2025). He also has also edited two collections of short stories translated from Arabic, The Book of Khartoum (Comma Press: 2016) and The Book of Cairo (Comma Press: 2019). He is the co-editor of The Arab Nahda as Popular Entertainment: Mass Culture and Modernity in the Middle East with Hala Auji and Alaaeldin Mahmoud.
Alaaeldin Mahmoud is an Assistant Professor of English in the Liberal Arts Department at the American University of the Middle East in Kuwait. He is a former Fulbright visiting Scholar at The Ohio State University. He is an established translator who translated books of travel writing, fiction, and literary studies. His research explores areas such as modern Arabic literature and cultural history, Arab pop culture and entertainment, and multilingual practices in Arab culture. His edited books are Nusus ‘Abd Allah al-Nadim (The Texts of ‘Abd Allah al-Nadim) in two volumes: al-Diwan al-Shi‘ri (The Complete Collected Poems), and al-Athar al-Nathriya al-Kamila (Complete Works in Prose) (Cairo: El Maraya, 2020), and The Arab Nahda as Popular Entertainment: Mass Culture and Modernity in the Middle East (co- edited with Hala Auji and Raphael Cormack) (IB Tauris Bloomsbury, 2023).