Past Read: Ordinary Egyptians: Creating the Modern Nation through Popular Culture

Fahmy, Ziad. Ordinary Egyptians: Creating the Modern Nation through Popular Culture. (Stanford UP, 2011)
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Fahmy Ziad's excellent Ordinary Egyptians: Creating the Modern Nation through Popular Culture (2011), an adaptation of his doctoral dissertation, is an excellent study of print capitalism, media, and the cultural construction of nationalism. Ziad analyzes popular culture produced in colloquial Egyptian (amiyya) during the period 1870-1908, including songs, satire, jokes, the stage, poetry, and more, to argue a more expansive vision of the creation of national culture. Rather than only being the top-down product of elites, literati, and intellectuals, national culture is in this reading a broader creation, participated in by all classes through unified cultural consumption and creation of various media.