Anterior Futurisms: Haunted Hegemonies and the Ghostly Chants of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution

Nostalgia is not simply a latent sentiment inspired by childhood remembrances and memorative objects: indeed, nostalgia is a powerful political tool that occupies cities, landscapes, and revolutions. Nostalgia, by that measure, can be examined as a sociological phenomenon that exposes what Avery Gordon coins as a “haunting,"[1] The emotive state of nostalgia exposes an indication of the ghosts of the Nasserite era and their uncanny presence in the Egyptian imaginary forty years later. Abdel-Nasser and the Free Officers’ project entered a political scene already laden with the language for a postcolonial imaginary and profited from a foundational “pre-revolutionary energy” that took a multivalent approach to its hegemonic pursuits.[2] Indeed, the anti-colonial and national mega-projects of the Nasserite era were inadvertently hegemonic in nature. Gramsci’s views on the ‘integral state’ as being the convergence of political and civil society alludes to the notion that hegemony can be maintained “if the subaltern social groups are also socially and politically integrated” in the greater hegemonic project.[3] It is important, by that measure, to situate Abdel-Nasser’s regime within the postcolonial trends of the epoch: the galvanizing rhetoric of liberation was located within the greater transnational futurisms and domestic nationalization projects, which would rely on the nation-state as “the preordained telos of [the] struggle."[4] Despite this ethos of egalitarian liberation, however, the benefactors of the Nasserite project “belonged to the ruling class, who liberally employed both consent and coercion to garner support and crush resistance."[5] It is by this measure that the regime has haunted qualities: the all-encompassing nature of its mega-projects casts a shadow over the various issuances of coercion at the state level, and creates ghosts of the regime’s failures. The obfuscation of Nasserism as a moment of futurity halted by coercive political practice thus acts as a haunting, a temporality that highlights the tension between an idealized past and an unsatisfactory present.

The calls for equity at the apex of the 2011 Revolution do not exist in an ahistorical vacuum. Indeed, the hegemonic ambitions of the Nasserite era haunt the Egyptian imaginary, the ghosts of an unfulfilled postcolonial futurism reverberate in the contemporary demands for equity and national pride. Haunting and nostalgia thus act as coalescing temporalities that articulate an “ambiguous relation to the past and present,” a nebulous time orientation whereby unresolved tensions animate active political grievances.[6] For while the emotive state of nostalgia may not inhabit the chants of the 2011 Revolution, it is the liminal temporality of both past and present in the invocation of anti-colonial icon Sayyid Darwish and the demand for "bread, freedom and social justice" that exposes the specter of Nasserism still inscribed into the Egyptian imaginary today. By that measure, I seek to frame the haunted presence of Nasserism as a tool in dialectical relation to the 2011 moment: a cyclical temporality that betrays the unfinished promises of the postcolonial epoch. In particular, I address two of the central chants of the 2011 Revolution as a site whereby an anterior futurism is articulated. Firstly, I will identify the multivalent languages of liberation popularized during the postcolonial era, namely the anthropomorphization of Egypt as the Mother of the World [Umm El-Donia], in an attempt to situate the imagery of a moral nation that re-emerged in the 2011 moment. Secondly, I will extricate the double-bind between the coercive and consensual nature of Nasserism by locating the attempts at formal feminist and Communist organization as an indication of the paradoxical nature of the regime, which gives it the capacity to haunt. I will then examine the chant “raise your head up high, you’re an Egyptian,” an excerpt of the famed national ballad by Sayyid Darwish, Qoum Ya Maṣri, which exposes a particularly rich affective history as it relates to the hauntings of the postcolonial era. Though the apex of Darwish’s career predates that of Abdel-Nasser, the invocation of his lyrics in Tahrir Square imparts a longing for the futurity affiliated with the “moral clarity” of decolonization.[7] Indeed, Sayyid Darwish’s legacy as a revolutionary artist summons a haunted imagery whereby the consolidated efforts against British occupation would be reframed in the 2011 context as another iteration of a moral struggle. The invocation of Sayyid Darwish within the larger field of ‘revolutionary music’ pursued within the physical site of Tahrir Square imparts layered meanings as it relates to the reconstruction of the anti-colonial epoch as being synonymous to that of the 2011 moment. I will then examine the ubiquitous chant for “bread, freedom, and social justice,” a mainstay of the revolutionary moment. I argue that bread, an object rife with socioeconomic and affective value, is summoned into the 2011 context due to its deeply politicized meaning. Bread, once a subsidized food item under Abdel-Nasser’s expansively hegemonic socialist rule, remains to be a contentious metric whereby Egyptians measure the success of the state. In essence, this work seeks to ask what animated the chants of the 2011 Revolution, in that engaging with the two primary slogans reveals a temporal tension between Nasserite futurism and that of the Arab Spring. Indeed, I examine what Sara Salem labels as the ‘afterlife’ of Nasserism, and further extricate the two slogans of the Arab Spring as it encapsulates a particular temporal chasm, the ghostly presence of Nasserism embedded into the fabric of the Egyptian imaginary as an articulation of both its failed promises and modern reconstruction as a ‘Golden Era’. If “ghosts produce material effects,” then, indeed it is the uncanny presence of Nasserism that has latched onto its correlated material objects, haunting them as an affective site to articulate an anterior futurism: a tension between present and past, hope and failure.[8] By this measure, the aforementioned chants articulate the “past conditional temporality of ‘what could have been,’” a reckoning with the failed futurisms of the past as a way to articulate the haunted grievances of the present.[9]

Haunted Politics: Framing the Failures and Promises of Nasserism

The Nation is a Woman: Situating the Language of Liberation

As articulated by Benedict Anderson, nationhood is “the most universally legitimate value in the political life of our time,” particularly at the onset of anti-colonial and Third World activism.[10] The liberationist trends of Third Worldism would often conflate the creation of the nation-state with sovereignty and triumph over the subordination of colonialism. The Nasserist project thus must be situated within its larger historical moment, in order to accurately extricate its ability to maintain hegemonic status. As with many decolonizing nations, the creation of the postcolonial nation-state merged with a “liberationist ethos,” thereby narrativizing a history of struggle, foregrounding “the glorious moment at which the state is recognized and seated at the table of nations."[11] The very conceptions of nationhood and, by extension, the makings of its liberation, contributes to our understanding of Nasserism as a hegemonic project enacted by and upon its citizens. Indeed, the construction of the nation as a ‘human protagonist’ functioned to create leaders of national projects, often demanding a continued ‘struggle’ against the threat of colonial subordination. Upon employing a populism wherein the “revolutionary underdog” was now “embodied in the statesman,” Nasserism consolidated the pre-existing colonial structures of gender, belonging, and liberation while reframing it within the revolutionary narrative.[12] The hegemony pursued by Abdel-Nasser’s regime, by this measure, would enjoy a “high level of coercion” that would be legitimized by the all-encompassing ethos of national pride that followed the trends of the postcolonial moment.[13] Indeed, it was the “celebration of armed struggle” as the purveyor of national liberation that would allow for the “‘legitimate use of force’’ enshrined in the new state’s coercive apparatus.[14] The prioritization of anti-colonial nationalism as the primary locus of emancipation would inoculate itself into the various mega-projects of the regime, “from feminists to workers, from communists to liberals,” ultimately foregrounding the nation as the ultimate site of struggle in a decolonizing Egypt.[15] The haunted qualities of Nasserism thus begin at its very premise, whereby the construction of the emancipated nation-state would be tethered to the unequivocally hegemonic nature of the Nasserite project, its messaging embedded into every facet of Egypt’s reconstruction as a postcolonial nation.

The nation-state, by this measure, sought to identify itself by its “symbols and icons;” the emergence of Egypt as a new nation-state now “accompanied by a flurry of symbolic activity, which reproduced the heroic story of the nation’s birth."[16]” In particular, gender imagery would feature in Egypt’s statist rhetoric, wherein the human protagonist would be male “protectors of the nation’s honor."[17] Conversely, the anthropomorphization of the nation as female, would be “imagined as a fertile female body that can be subjected to rape by invaders and occupiers."[18] Thus, the semiotics of Umm El-Donia as an anthropomorphized nation venerates her metaphorical children in their pursuit of her vindication as ‘heroes of the nation’.

Indeed, though Sara Ahmed’s work centers itself around the post-9/11 conceptions of nationhood as it relates to affect, her work can also be extended into the postcolonial moment, for “the circulation of signs of affect shapes the materialization of collective bodies, for example, the ‘body of the nation.’"[19] Here, the "body of the nation" can be further examined in conversation with the imagery of Umm El-Donia. The construction of the Egyptian nation as a female, human protagonist imparts particular affective qualities that would maintain its status in the Egyptian zeitgeist well after the 1960s. Ahmed explains that “there is a perceived injury [which] is felt as the violence of negation against both the body of the individual and the body of the nation."[20] Thus, the imagery of Umm El-Donia would latently live within the Egyptian imaginary as the embodiment of the moral nation. It is the potent affective qualities of Umm El-Donia that would allow it to re-emerge as a trans-temporal call to action. By this measure, the semiotics of the Mother of the World has the propensity to call its citizens into action, to use the language of national pride coded with gendered notions of civility, honor, and justice. Umm El-Donia’s symbolism would therefore become the embodiment of national liberationist discourse, in that it would become a “tool of citizen-making pedagogy;” its so-called children responsible for guarding the honor of the motherland.[21]

Haunted Hegemonies: On the Double-Bind of Coercion and Consent

Despite the lofty goals of Nasserism at the apex of his regime, it was the departure from these egalitarian aspirations that would inevitably institutionalize a contradictory paradigm wherein the various groups of Egypt would enjoy partial freedoms. The “figure of Nasser himself” thus is convoluted, as he continues to “linger in the Egyptian public imagination.[22] Herein lies the paradox of Nasserism; its citizens were successfully integrated into the expansive megaprojects of the regime — be it within the realms of industrialization, gender equity, or the notorious Arab Socialism under which Abdel-Nasser oriented his tenure — all while simultaneously prohibiting independent political organization. I draw on two primary examples of the double-bind between a coercive and “consensual political practice” to illustrate the haunted nature of Abdel-Nasser’s ethos of hegemony.[23]

Firstly, despite Abdel-Nasser’s galvanizing gender discourse, a conditional term of admission into the national discourse would prohibit women from participating in postcolonial state-building, ultimately deepening Egypt's socioeconomic divides. This discourse allowed its agents to engage with the greater wave of Third World feminism, as seen in the Afro-Asian Women’s Conference hosted in 1961, and were thus dialed into a feminism that posited nationalization as the precursor to gendered liberation. Despite this, the regime would actively silence feminist movements and leaders, notably jailing figures such as Doriya Shafik and banning the Egyptian Feminist Union in 1956. Nasserism, however, did not simply enact a coercive silence: for indeed the interlocutors of Egyptian feminism would consolidate the preexisting socioeconomic hierarchies, in that “a feminism that favored Westernization and secularization, with a heavy upper-middle-class emphasis, became dominant."[24]

To have been served by the forward-moving policies of Nasserism would betray a particular socioeconomic positionality, for “women [in urban centers] were coming to make up an increasing percentage of professional and office workers, [though] overall female labor participation remained strikingly low."[25] The goals of feminism thus sought to engage the woman’s positionality as a national subject insofar as her contribution to the modern Egyptian state. In essence, the symbol of El-Mar’a El-‘Amela (The Working Woman), painted in Arab Socialist overtones, would echo “a larger trend whereby postcolonial states used women’s bodies and statuses to construct themselves as modern."[26] By that measure, the half-freedoms given to the feminist movement must be seen as a covalent expression of haunting. The powerful promise of gendered liberation denotes an unfinished revolution, a missed opportunity wherein all feminisms may be heard.

In a similar fashion, the Nasserite regime would create salient economic disparities among the Egyptian people, the realities of which stood in opposition to its greater Arab Socialist goals. Abdel-Nasser’s tenure saw a fraught relationship between communist and leftist political organizations and state violence. What started with brute crackdowns and the imprisonment of Communist Party members ultimately ended with the dissolution of the party by 1964.[27] For instance, the Agrarian Reform Law of 1952 would redistribute land to the fallaḥeen (peasants) within five years — most of whom suffered extensively under the land-owning elite. The law also made it possible for them to join unions, ultimately ensuring that one of Abdel-Nasser’s enumerated goals, the “elimination of feudalism,” would be implemented.[28] Despite this, workers would be discouraged from political organization, with the ever-looming threat of “intimidation, imprisonment, torture, or forced closure” of any unionizing or communist activity.[29] In the same way, the building of the notorious Aswan Dam can be extrapolated as another component to the double-bind of consent and coercion found at the apex of the Nasserite era. Despite the geological destruction of indigenous Nubian land and the staggering deaths and injuries at the site of the Dam, the workers believed in its purpose as it would serve the greater landscape of Egyptian modernity.

Indeed, as Sara Salem articulates, the various paradoxes of the Nasserite regime cannot be read as failures or weaknesses of the subaltern in response to an entirely coercive regime, for they were not “brainwashed […] nor fully coerced;” their ultimate aspirations were identifiable under the larger rhetoric of nationalization attained by Abdel-Nasser.[30] To return to the symbol of Umm El-Donia, the imagery of a ‘perceived injury’ succeeded at foregrounding an ethos of nationalism that would place the retribution of national economies as an iteration of national pride. Nasserism was thus a political project rife with nationalist imagery that would posit the nation-state as the locus of liberation, which allowed for its interlocutors to orient themselves within the greater demand for nationalization while the state simultaneously pursued its violent silences. Ultimately, Nasserism would create ghosts in the metaphysical sense, in that the various occurrences of state violence would quite literally create an aura of haunting. The haunting, however, must also be extended as an expression of the uncanny divergence from promise to reality that would inscribe itself into the Egyptian imaginary in the years following the regime. The hedging of the tools and spaces to build an autonomous civil society would thus uncover a glaring shortcoming of Abdel-Nasser’s tenure overall, one that would be imagined as a half-lived hope in the subsequent years. In doing so, Egypt faced a partial liberation, in that the various subaltern groups were able to situate themselves within the hegemonic project while still experiencing the valences of a coercive state. By this measure, one must examine the fault lines of hegemony that still echo across Egyptian society today as a haunting. The unfinished nature of its citizens’ grievances renders the Nasserite regime as an irreconcilable memory: a “split between [two] realities: a promise and a failure."[31]

Expanding the Case Study: Extricating the Ghostly Chants of the Arab Uprisings

Summoning Sayyid Darwish: Recurring Revolutionary Music

I have thus explained the various failures of Nasserism that haunt its subsequent years, in that the construction of the moral nation situates its citizens towards what is envisioned as an injury to the ‘body of the nation’. The events of 25 January 2011, were triggered by the brutal torture and murder of Khaled Saïd by the police. By 28 January, tens of thousands of Egyptians were mobilized by means of social media, and indeed, inspired a laundry list of grievances that were oriented towards the failings of Hosni Mubarak’s 30-year autocracy. The chants of the 2011 Revolution exposes the way in which nostalgia exists as “an action rather than an attitude,” as they articulate a literal call to action, one that is imbued with a layered political meaning.[32] Sayyid Darwish, a symbol of the 1919 Revolution and early anti-colonial efforts, would frequently invoke the anthropomorphized Umm El-Donia in his revolutionary songs, often singing them among the throngs of protesters. Indeed, Amina Elhalawani asks “what the new revival of Darwish’s legacy mean[s],” as a symbol of resistance that holds a trans-temporal meaning in the Egyptian imaginary. It is, by this measure, critical to extricate the ontology of the 2011 revolutionary chants as a site of memory: an oneiric call for a mother that failed its children.

The politics of nostalgia acts as a mediation that generates a desire for a bygone era whereby the “moral clarity” for anti-colonial struggle is imagined as a site for utopianism.[33] The imagery of Egypt fighting for its emancipation from the formidable evils of colonialism is thus reabsorbed into the 2011 context as another iteration of an immoral violence against the ‘body of the nation’. Indeed, Sayyid Darwish’s invocation at the critical moment of the 2011 Revolution indicates a “revival [of] a whole repertoire of images etched in people’s memories in association with revolt or uprisings."[34] By this measure, the 2011 chant ‘raise your head up high, you’re an Egyptian!’ extracted from Sayyid Darwish’s song Qoum Ya Maṣri (Rise, O Egyptian), encapsulates the affective symbolism of his legacy as it relates to the Arab Spring. The roots of Darwish's Qoum Ya Maṣri can be examined through the song Old Port Saïd, initially written by Fouad Haddad and composed by the epochal Baligh Hamdi in the aftermath of the Bahr el Baqar air strike enacted by Israeli forces in 1967. The song, written in memoriam of the thirty schoolchildren killed in the attack, asks its citizens to "raise your head up, as we (re)build our nation." One can examine, by this measure, the recurring image of ‘raising one’s head up’ acting as an affective call to action in dialectal relation to the ‘injuries’ enacted upon the Egyptian nation. It should also be noted that a similar call is reiterated by Nasser’s epochal chant to “raise your head up, [for] the era of slavery is over."[35] Abdel-Nasser’s rearticulation of the pre-revolutionary language of liberation instilled by Darwish thus attests to his position as a memorative symbol of a moral Egyptian revolution. Furthermore, the practice whereby musicians would perform in Tahrir Square, the hub of the revolutionary moment, would conjure the imagery of Sayyid Darwish both in the chants and in the very act of singing within the site of protest. Singers such as Ramy Essam and Cairokee notably would become cultural producers of what would be known as ‘revolutionary music,’ the latter creating an album in 2014 entitled Yalmidan (O, the Square).[36] Indeed, the very existence of musical performances at the 2011 protests ascertains an additional layer to the analogy between anti-colonial and anti-dictatorship imagery.

The anthropomorphization of the Egyptian nation imparts particular affective qualities that appeared at the onset of the anti-colonial protests of the 20th century, and ebbed back to the surface in the 2011 Revolution. Darwish, famed for his anticolonial national ballads, invokes this imagery as he sings forlornly to “Egypt, the home [mother] of wonders."[37] In the post-2011 moment, Ramy Gamal would sing from the position of the martyrs of the revolution where he implores his fellow Egyptians to “tell my mother not to be upset! Don’t cry for me, tell her I am sorry. I'll die, I'll die, but our country will live! Please kiss her hands for me, and send my regards to my nation."[38] Within the same album, Gamal’s song Agmal Om Maṣreya [The Most Beautiful Egyptian Mother] opens with the lyrics ”O, cherished Egyptian mother [...] I only hope to honor you,” followed by a chorus that describes the many sacrifices of a mother.[39] One can see, by this measure, that the mediation of Egyptian nationhood as being female continues to exist in the contemporary zeitgeist as an expression of the failings of the Egyptian state to protect its so-called children. Indeed, the anti-colonial rhetoric of the ‘injured female body’ thus lives on in Egypt’s contemporary national narratives, as is epitomized by a nation that, in Darwish’s words, anthropomorphically sings to its citizens “bring back my glory, [the one] you lost with your own hands."[40]

By this measure, the nostalgic mediation of Sayyid Darwish acts “as a retreat from the present [and] as a retrieval for the future, [which] are not mutually exclusive."[41] The heroization of Darwish as a contributor to the epitome of a ‘moral’ Egyptian revolution signals its citizens towards a merging of anti-colonial and anti-dictatorship symbols. It is the coalescing of these symbols that allows for the grievances of 2011 to be cast as demands for a moral Egyptian nation, shaded by the languages of liberation from the anti-colonial epoch. These symbols meet through the rhetoric of restorative nostalgia as it acts as a tool of solidarity in the contemporary world, “a mourning […] for the loss of an enchanted world with clear borders and values."[42] In this way, the chant asking Egyptians to ‘raise their head up’ invokes affective analogy between the two revolutionary junctures. At the height of the revolutionary zeitgeist came the ghostly presence of Sayyid Darwish as a disruptive intervention, as he “flashes up” in the charged site of Tahrir Square, because he is “very much a part of [the revolutionary] heritage."[43] The semiotics of Umm El-Donia that feature in Sayyid Darwish’s discography and render itself a memorative object in the 2011 moment must be examined as a relational function that informs the affective quality of “being within the world."[44] Indeed, the haunted nature of the postcolonial moment must be examined through the vantage point of Darwish, a hero of the fight for a moral Egyptian nation. It is, by this measure, his revolutionary contribution to Egyptian music and its re-emergence in 2011 that denotes that his “music remains very much alive."[45] The chant to "raise your head up," and the invocation of Darwish more broadly at the site of the Arab Spring thus acts as a “ghost [that] arises, carrying the signs and portents of our oppression in the past,” as it is re-articulated in the present.[46] A nostalgia for an ‘imagined community’ that is unified against a common ‘moral enemy’, be it British imperialism or a thirty-year autocracy, is ultimately intended to conjure an anterior-oriented yet forward-facing utopianism that has implicated meanings about the grandeur of the Egyptian nation.

Bread, Freedom, Social Justice: Moral Economies in an Immoral State

Egyptians who mobilized en masse in early 2011 actively “fought the security forces, attacked police stations, burned government buildings, and chanted ‘bread, freedom, justice.’”[47] The chant thus became ubiquitous in the 2011 atmosphere and still remains a poignant cultural symbol of the revolution today, easily located within the genre of what I have previously defined as ‘revolutionary music,’ as well as the greater public discourse. The etymological significance of bread in the Egyptian imaginary can be drawn from its synonymous meaning to ‘life’ in Arabic, a unique facet of the dialect. The failure to provide a staple of the Egyptian diet has been a site for economic grievances well before the Arab Spring, though its reemergence in Tahrir Square acts as a “seething presence […] that tells you a haunting is taking place."[48]

It is imperative to extricate the socioeconomic meaning of bread starting from the onset of the Nasserite era by tracing its politicized significance as it relates to Egypt’s mediation of a moral economy. The policies situated under the banner of Arab Socialism would allow Abdel-Nasser’s subsidization of bread to live on as a specter, a “legacy of Nasserism [that] became visible, [as] a project very much centered on the provision of welfare."[49] Abdel-Nasser’s subsidies would thus implement a paradigm whereby bread stood as a metric for the nation’s competency and ability to serve its people, which would undoubtedly “provide legitimacy in a political system where civil liberties and public participation were limited."[50] Indeed, bread riots have been center stage in the fight for Egyptian economic stability since the onset of Sadat’s economic liberalization (Infitah, or Open-Door) policies, which would notoriously come to a head during the Bread Riots of 1977. If the construction of the nation as a ‘human protagonist’ functioned to create leaders of national projects, then this becomes exponentially true in the case of Egypt as it experienced the sharp turn from Arab Socialism to overt capitalism, from a rhetoric of Pan-Arab nationalism to one that would favor economic collaboration with the West. What Tarek Osman coins as the bouleversements (upheavals) of Egyptian politics becomes palpably clear in the examination of bread as an affective political scale by which Egyptians measure the contemporary state to that of the postcolonial era.[51] Sadat, appeasing to IMF demands, would announce immediate price increases for subsidized ‘fino’ bread, as well as rice, tea, gasoline, and cigarettes.[52] Most Egyptians would thus experience the policies of liberalization as “an erosion of rights, at times a gradual one (as in the case of the food subsidies), at times a more radical one (as in the case of farmers’ rights)."[53] Bread, in that sense, continues to act as a specter throughout Egypt’s various regime changes. The omission of its status as a subsidized food object under Sadat’s tenure thus is a “form of coercion:” a palpable erasure of a symbol affiliated with a national project that was once predicated on its provision of welfare.[54]

By this measure, the 2011 chant for bread alongside the wider hopes for justice and freedom demonstrates Ahmed’s theory of affectivity, wherein the object of bread is “sticky, saturated with affects,” imbued with the meaning of a failing state.[55] Indeed, revolutionary artist Ramy Essam would record a song entitled Bread, Freedom, Social Justice, per the chant, and sings that “bread in Egyptian means life! It’s been [embedded] in the Egyptian civilization for years."[56] By that measure, the chant that epitomized the 2011 Revolution must be contextualized within the intergenerational grievances that were initiated by the haunted promises of Nasserism. Be it the demand for “bread as a symbol of living conditions,” or the greater failure to instil a functioning civil society, the Nasserite era lives on as a haunted paradox: the glorified national project of the past coalesces with the reasons for unmet freedoms in the present.[57] Indeed, “dignity and social justice are not possible without bread and material stability, while freedom is not available without an infrastructure based on social justice."[58] If we are to examine the “past conditional temporality of ‘what could have been,’” then indeed, Sara Salem’s work in examining Nasser’s collapsing of leftist political organization demonstrates the coercive silencing of a constituency that could have resisted the abrupt neoliberalization that would follow his death.[59] The 2011 demands, then, exist as a “vigilant returning to the past” of Abdel-Nasser’s hegemonic regime and again in Sadat’s coercive state “in order to find […] moments of resistance to oppression that might open up a better future."[60] The chant for ‘bread, freedom, and social justice,’ must be read, then, as an attempt to confront the tangible ghosts of Abdel-Nasser’s hegemony: an oneiric call to the coercions of a state built upon a paradoxical promise.

Concluding Remarks

The objective of this essay was to evaluate the two chants of the 2011 Revolution as a tool to illustrate the capacity for a hegemonic project to haunt its citizens as it continues to live within Egypt’s political landscape. The haunted qualities of Nasserism have thus been articulated as the covalent employment of coercion and consent, which is then reimagined as a series of paradoxically half-met promises. Indeed, the creation of a hegemonic state that foregrounded a particular narrative of nationalization would “seep into everything,” shading every facet of Egyptian life at the postcolonial moment and creating a national project based in its provision of welfare.[61] The promises of Nasserism, as exemplified by the abolition of feudalism versus the contentious treatment of leftist political activity, embodies the very nature of the regime’s ability to haunt. Similarly, the double bind between the galvanizing gender discourse and the silencing of feminist organization articulates another haunting whereby its status as a half-met promise acts as a failure to instil ‘freedom and social justice,’ per the 2011 chant. Indeed, Abdel-Nasser’s positioning as the ‘embodied statesman,’ per Khalili’s definition, thus convolutes his figure posthumously for he “‘read people’s dreams’, and turned them into a political project."[62]

I drew attention to the anthropomorphic nation as Umm El-Donia, which can be understood as invocation of the affective ‘body of the nation’ that predated the Nasserite regime, but resurfaces in 2011 as a memorative call to action. The invocation of the anti-colonial languages of liberation, particularly that of Umm El-Donia, in the 2011 moment exposes a synonymity between the two revolutionary junctures — one that analogizes British imperialism to a thirty-year autocracy as a transgression against the body of the moral nation. The summoning of Sayyid Darwish in the 2011 chant ‘raise your head up high, you’re an Egyptian!’ thus epitomizes Egypt’s construction of a revolutionary heritage, exemplifying a multivalent haunting whereby the immorality of imperialism and autocracy coalesce to form a futurism shaded by the failures of the past, a hope haunted by the unmet promises of the postcolonial era. I have shown that the call for ‘bread, freedom, and social justice’ exists as scale by which Egyptians measure the functionality of the state in its provision of bread, quite literally a lifeline in the eyes of Egyptians. Indeed, the paradoxical promise of a state that prioritized welfare in sweepingly socialist tones would thus be a powerful political tool that haunts a moral economy undergoing an abrupt shift towards neoliberalism in the post-Nasser years. Herein lies the sliding temporality of the 2011 uprisings: the ghosts of Nasserism’s structural failures poignantly re-emerge as the unresolved demands articulated by the two primary chants of the revolution. The chants recited at the 2011 uprisings thus expose what I have defined as an anterior futurism: the demand for the betterment of the Egyptian nation that is indeed tied into a reconstruction of its past. Indeed, the 2011 uprisings must be examined as a rupture: the specters of its unmet promises represent a reckoning, an unearthing of a nation’s ghostly figures to expose the hauntings of its unfinished revolution.

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