Between 1960 and 1964, many Egyptian children’s magazines featured the building of the Aswan High Dam in all their content. Comic strips, poetry and “Ask mama Lubna” columns seemed to be directed at a general childhood to be infused with high modernist socialist ideology, as well as the children of dam-builders and of Nubian communities who were about to be displaced. To think of some of the content as science fiction is not far from the truth as many of these illustrated events, scenarios and even structures appear six years prior to their realisation. This presentation will explore the visual vocabulary in these comics for how it communicates the Arab socialist worldview through the hydro-electric industrial/revolutionary project that the Dam signified.
The comics present us with an opportunity to understand what the essential components of ideology behind the Dam were - how the Dam and the Nile feature in their centrality to that and other ‘Third World Revolutionary projects’. These published illustrations can be juxtaposed against the personal photographs that the builders and Nubian families collected throughout the project. Images flowing back and forth between signifier and signified, creating a culture of visual discourse that articulated and re-articulated the project that engulfed hundreds of thousands, though not always as they chose.
