From the square to the screen: New subjectivity in post-Arab Spring Egyptian cinema

This chapter elaborates on the cultural and identitarian negotiations and transformations in postcolonial/post-Arab Spring cinema where the borderline between the real and the fictional almost blurs through the “Tahrir Cinema” experience. It also investigates the expansion of visual and performing arts into the public sphere and thus the multiplication of sites of knowledge production; real, fictional, and artistic. Focusing on Egyptian film industry during and after the Egyptian Jan 25 Revolution, the chapter builds on interviews with Egyptian filmmakers and actors about the role of new Egyptian cinema in displacing stereotypical representations about the East, transcending East/West binarism, and engaging in a self-conscious process of identity negotiation. For this purpose, we study the ways Egyptian films, like 18 Days (2011), Before the Spring (2013), and Nawara (2015), reflect not only the overlapping of the political and the artistic but also, the negotiation of a new Arab subjectivity that transcends Orientalist binarism and cultural stereotyping.