Mossallam, Alia

'Ya aziz 'aini ana bidi arawah baladi...' Voyages of an Egyptian Tune

From Estrangement at Home to Longing on the Fronts of WWI

This article is published in Cultural Entanglement in the Pre-Independence Arab World: Arts, Thought and Literature, edited by Anthony Gorman and Sarah Irving (I.B. Tauris, 2020).

This book examines the ways in which non-Arabic cultural influences interacted with the rich, complex and sometimes conflictual environment of the Arab world in the pre-independence era. The book demonstrates how the interaction between Arabic and non-Arabic cultural and intellectual production as well as influences from imperial Europe and the Islamic East, have in various times and spaces inspired creative tensions which challenge binary views of East-West relations and the standard imperialist-colonial frameworks. In this sense the volume seeks to offer a critique of both established modernising conceptions of cultural development and nationalist, nativist frameworks based on the values of a specific political project.

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