Chihab El Khachab, Constructing the Achievement State: Cultural Administration in Postrevolutionary Egypt (Cambridge University Press, 2026).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Chihab El Khachab (CEK): There is a mixture of theoretical, historical, and personal motivations behind this book. Theoretically, I was interested in understanding what this thing called “the state” means to the people who work within it, and how a certain idea of the state stabilized in the aftermath of anti-colonial struggle in Egypt. I was initially inspired to conduct this study by anthropologists of bureaucracy and the state in South Asia, including Matthew S. Hull and Nayanika Mathur.
Historically, the experience of the 2011 revolution made me want to understand the “deep state” about which scholars and journalists were writing, and which I managed to trace back to the immediate aftermath of the 1952 revolution—what Egyptians colloquially call “the July state” (dawlat yulyu). Egypt is an unusual land in having been governed, in part or whole, by different state formations over millennia, so there is an ongoing historiographical question around how such “states” change (or not) over time. The Ministry of Culture and National Guidance has been a major player, I argue, in redefining what the state was after 1952.
On a more personal level, I come from a family with various ties to the official cultural apparatus in Egypt, so I was interested in investigating the institutions they were enmeshed in to different degrees. In a roundabout way, the book could be read as an exercise in institutional self-analysis.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
CEK: Constructing the Achievement State is about how bureaucrats working at the Ministry of Culture and National Guidance shaped the idea of “the state” after the 1952 revolution. The book extends a constructivist understanding of the state—as classically articulated by Timothy Mitchell or Yael Navaro, among others—to the postrevolutionary period in Egypt, while centering bureaucrats as active agents in shaping state ideology—as opposed to the usual focus, at least in Egypt, on “intellectuals” (muthaqqafin) and their big ideas. The main argument, in short, is that these bureaucrats saw the state as a big achievement machine, making things happen in the name of the People in a rapid, cumulative, scalable, and self-referential way. The book also touches on adjacent issues, such as how the 1952 revolution has been narrated by bureaucrats, how images have been mobilized in governmental publications to bolster the state’s work, how administrators sought to bring “culture” to the countryside, and how state institutions have tried to acculturate the population in the name of “building the Egyptian human being.” Overall, the book sits between the anthropology of the state and bureaucracy, histories of the Nasser era, and comparative studies of cultural administration in the socialist and anti-colonial world.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
CEK: This book extends my earlier interest in Egyptian cultural production, specifically commercial film production, with a more marked emphasis on official institutions. I spent a good portion of my doctoral fieldwork hanging out in spaces associated with the Ministry of Culture, whether to converse with filmmakers or to attend one-off screenings and film festivals. This book centers the Ministry of Culture itself—who works there, what they do, why it remains so central to the life of cultural production in Cairo, in spite of years of underfunding and neglect. The major departure, I would say, involves a move beyond ethnography into a deeper history of cultural work in Egypt. My doctoral monograph was mainly based on a contemporary study of social relations in the Egyptian film industry between 2013 and 2015. All historical components were derivative, acting as “background” to the ethnography. My new book uses primary sources from press archives, private papers, and the second-hand book market to narrate how the Ministry of Culture and National Guidance developed from 1952 to this day. I am not sure whether I am more of an anthropologist or a historian anymore, but the book does dwell longer on the past than the present.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
CEK: I can see three kinds of readers enjoying this book. First, I think it will interest historians of Egypt and the Arab world, not only because of the specific narrative I am building on the Nasser era, but also because of my focus on cultural institutions which have been (and remain) central in Egyptian and Arab intellectual life. Second, I think this book will appeal to social scientists with an interest in the ideological production of “the state.” What the book tries to do, in part, is to give social and material substance to a historical transformation in bureaucratic thinking around the Egyptian state and what it does. Roughly speaking, I am describing a transition away from a lean extractive colonial apparatus to a sprawling postcolonial achievement machine. While remaining firmly grounded in Egypt, the book speaks to this sort of transition more globally.
Lastly, this book will appeal to a wider public of Egyptian and Arab non-specialists who are personally and politically invested in revisiting the Nasser era. This public is, in part, sustained by the sorts of cultural institutions I examine in the book. To give a simple example, the publications of the General Egyptian Book Organization, the General Organization for Cultural Palaces, and the Supreme Council of Culture—all organs of the Egyptian Ministry of Culture—are still widely read and referenced in this dynamic intellectual milieu, but very little is written about the inner constitution of these very institutions. I am currently working on an Arabic translation of the book, which will hopefully make it more easily accessible to this readership.
On impact, it is always hard to anticipate what a book might do once it is published, but minimally, I hope it can push more readers to examine the actors, institutions, and source material I have unearthed in greater depth. I think the memory politics surrounding the Nasser era, or in fact Nasser himself, still prevents a direct confrontation with the period’s material legacies, including what its institutions have left behind. I also think that, in parallel, prominent individual personalities have been emphasized over and above rank-and-file state employees, who I think should be re-centered in the period’s historiography. So, I hope this book will convince its readers that we still do not, in fact, have an exhaustive sense of what the Nasser era looked and felt like, and what it has left us with, even when it comes to something as apparently widely discussed as the inner workings of the “July state.”
J: Why is visual analysis central to your book?
CEK: There is something of a glaring gap between the effervescence of visual media production in the mid-twentieth century—whether in commercial films, newsreels, documentaries, adverts, photographs, visual arts, etc.—and the limited scholarship on Egyptian visual culture during the same period. If I had to guess why the gap exists, it would be for two reasons. One is generational: as Walter Armbrust has noted, the 1960s are just starting to feel “historical” enough to become a worthy object of art-historical or media-historical investigation. Another reason is methodological: while conventional historians sometimes use images as rhetorical devices, to illustrate strong moments in their narrative for instance, they seldom analyze visual sources in detail. As such, their arguments remain driven by written sources or by a “narrativization” of audiovisual material.
My book, most visibly in Chapter 2, not only suggests that images act as important representations of the Nasser era, but also that they had a direct material effect on producing the postrevolutionary state as an achievement machine. The overwhelming accumulation of images of the state’s accomplishments was meant to show, beyond any doubt, that the Revolution was doing things for the People. Images, in short, bear a symbolic and an indexical relationship to the state, and they play an active role in shaping how bureaucrats imagine the state in which they work. In the book, I mainly focus on images printed in governmental publications, but one could have made a similar analysis of photojournalism or newsreels. There remains an immense terrain of visual sources to uncover in the Nasser era, a task which I think has begun among the newer generation of scholars, but it is something to which I hope every historian of the period can become more attuned in coming years.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
CEK: I am now working on two long-term projects. One is a history of Afghan cinema, which combines my earlier interest in film production with a comparative lens on official cultural administration (since Afghan cinema was largely a state-led affair until the 2000s). The second project reimagines the relationship between ethnography and history based on a reading of medieval Arabic sources, building on my Malinowski Memorial Lecture last year.
Excerpt from the book (from Chapter 4: Great projects, pages 206 to 211)
In My Wife Is a Director General, the main character played by the superstar singer and actress Shadia becomes a Director General in an unnamed state institution simply called ‘the Department’ (al-maslaḥa). After the initial shock of discovering that their new boss is a woman – most shocked of all being her husband on screen and in real life, Salah Zulfiqar – Shadia’s second-in-command introduces her to the directors of each section (ru’asā’ al-aqsām). She shakes hands with the four directors, including her own husband who is Head of Projects (mudīr al-mashru‘āt). When the camera shifts to a close-up on Shadia, she delivers a didactic message to the bureaucrats assembled in her office on the great importance of governmental work, by way of a short dialogue with the duplicitous human resources director, played by Tawfiq al-Deqen:
[Director General]: Hopefully we can cooperate to present great works [a‘māl kabīra] and come out with honourable results.
[HR director]: I swear, Madam Director, I am very optimistic about your appointment in our Department. Just a little while ago, I was talking to my colleagues about your great qualities (...) Would you please allow me to say a brief word on this happy occasion? (...) [He takes out a crumpled piece of paper from his jacket pocket] Oh Honourable Director General, the lights have fallen upon us and risen...
[Director General, interrupting him]: Enough! I don’t think there’s any need for speeches, we have no time to waste on talk (...) The important thing is that I want you to feel like we are all one family, and no one differs except through their work (...) There is no point in talking about the past. I want each one of you to present a report on the extent of each section’s activity. I want these reports to reach me tomorrow!
As a whole, My Wife Is a Director General is a commentary on the contradictions of state feminism under Nasser, mainly the contradiction between the active incorporation of women into the public workforce and the persisting patriarchal expectations about their reproductive work at home. However, what reverberates throughout Shadia’s speech in this scene is an address to the nation about the great responsibility lying on the state’s shoulders to create a new society. In contrast with the human resources director’s empty talk, Shadia presents a model of bureaucratic work based on cooperation and high performance in line with the achievement books discussed in Chapters 1 and 2. Shadia’s form of address – emphasised in the film by medium-close shots in which she stands, alone, talking to her fellow actors while addressing the audience through the fourth wall – is reminiscent of Salah Jahin’s songs and other Nasser-era cultural products. Setting aside the strong Arab socialist emphasis on cooperation and work, Shadia’s speech exalts the importance of ‘great works’ as the ultimate goal of each state institution – and, by extension, the Nasser regime. The speech’s primary audience, moreover, is not those who watch the film, but the very bureaucrats about whose mission and responsibility I wrote in Chapter 3 – standing still, in a row, to listen attentively to Shadia’s directives (setting aside the corrupt elements in the bureaucracy, comically illustrated by Tawfiq al-Deqen). Shadia is, therefore, a model Director General actively remoulding the emerging bureaucratic corps.
The narrative structure in Shadia’s speech parallels a widespread one about so-called ‘great projects’ in governmental media. The sections devoted to great projects like the High Dam, the Tahrir Province, or the Wadi al-Natrun project are reminiscent of Shadia’s demand to ‘present a report on the extent of each section’s activity’, in a level of detail unlike other achievements documented by these publications. The great project’s monumentality is highlighted in both material and utopian terms. Materially speaking, achievement books dwell on the enormous scale of these projects in visual and numerical form. A cursory look through the vast governmental literature on the High Dam, for instance, reveals the now familiar image of a wide landscape in which imposing machines build an imposing structure, dwarfing all humans – if any – within the frame. The insistence on documenting every cubic ton of concrete, every meter of wiring cable, every additional kilowatt of electricity generated by the Dam creates a cumulative impression of the greatness of the task ahead. The sheer amount of labour, resources, and governmental will mustered to achieve the Dam is presented in a monumental manner. An achievement booklet from Iraq, about a smaller dam project completed in Darbandikhan in 1961, serves to emphasise how ‘great projects’ are not just great by virtue of their monumentality, but by virtue of what they say about the revolutionary command. ‘The completion of this gigantic project’, the booklet argues, ‘has many a meaning of far reaching and utmost importance, in that it represents, in its essence, the sincerity of the National Government in matters of economic and social development.’
A more utopian side is equally visible in how achievement books narrate these projects by promising the completion of major exerting works leading onto a qualitative leap in the national collective and the labouring subject once works are completed. The collective ‘we’ in Shadia’s speech, just as in achievement books, encompasses both the People (‘we can cooperate to present great works’, as she says) and the bureaucrats tasked with completing these projects (‘we are all one family, and no one differs except through their work’). The indistinction between the People and the bureaucrats executing the state’s work is a key ideological effect in governmental media under Nasser, because the practical differences between the two – in terms of salary, employment stability, social status – are systematically erased by the fiction that all Egyptians are equal parties to the revolution (with a small ‘r’). The contradictions between the practical and the utopian aspects of bureaucratic work are not surprising in themselves, insofar as bureaucracies in general carry utopian promises on which they rarely if ever deliver. What is noteworthy, however, is the extent to which the practical construction of a postrevolutionary state project is premised on making the utopian topical, as it were; on grounding the unsitable in the realm of the imaginable.
This rhetorical move is what makes great projects qualitatively different from small or ordinary ones: it is not just a matter of scale and material resources, but a matter of imagining the unimaginable; of bringing into the realm of concrete representation what was otherwise said to be impossible. This qualitative difference is well staged in a scene of My Wife Is a Director General. Shadia and her second-in-command, a seasoned bureaucrat by the name of Abdel Qawi (played by Shafiq Nour el-Din), are stopped by a mother and her three children in a corridor. The mother, a widow, beseeches Shadia to sign off on her late husband’s pension, who worked as a runner (sā‘i) at the Department. For two months, she has been coming to the Department every day, yet the bureaucrats keep telling her to come the next day. Shadia turns around authoritatively to Abdel Qawi to ask about this story, and Abdel Qawi launches into a long-winded explanation about how the late husband was only employed by deputation in the Department, so legally his mother administration should pay his widow’s pension, but the other administration is unwilling to pay, yet he insists on following the Department’s regulations (al-layḥa). Shadia impatiently interrupts Abdel Qawi to tell him off. ‘No decree says that this lady and her children should stay two months without a pension!’, she yells after asking Abdel Qawi to get her the papers ready to be signed by the next day.
This scene epitomises an ideal Director General, responsive to common sense and using her power to overturn useless bureaucratic routine in service of higher values. The sober argumentation of Abdel Qawi, which would likely have prevailed in actual bureaucratic practice, is overturned by executive fiat in favour of the People. The whole film is filled with such scenes, staging a conflict between bureaucratic utopia and practice, which is resolved by Shadia’s prowess at the service of the revolution’s will – for instance, when she orders her bureaucrats to work overtime to finish their great construction project within the delays, against all odds. My Wife Is a Director General has a happy ending, because the great construction project finishes on time, but many actual ‘great projects’ never reached their potential. Yet a similar emphasis on utopian ideals prevails in great projects promoted by the state, no matter whether they are achieved or not. The Tahrir Province and Wadi al-Natrun projects, for instance, ended up covering only a fraction of their territorial ambitions to green the desert. The project’s realisation is immaterial, however, because what matters is their extraordinary nature as narrated and illustrated in governmental media. This extraordinary achievement requires both material efforts on the bureaucracy’s part – which can fail – and a leap outside the bureaucracy’s routinised bounds – which is well staged by Shadia’s reprimand against Abdel Qawi’s invocation of the internal regulations.