This groundbreaking work presents original research on cultural politics and battles in Egypt at the turn of the twenty-first century.

Introduction. Prologue: Take Them Out of the Ball Game: Egyptian Cultural Players in Crisis Part 1: Inside the Literary Establishment: Power Struggles and Dreams of Autonomy 1. Dr. Ramzi and Mr. Sharaf: Sonallah Ibrahim and the Duplicity of the Literary Field 2. Children of Our Alley: The AUC Naguib Mahfouz Award and the Egyptian Cultural Field 3. The Big One: The Intellectual and the Political in Modern Egyptian Literature 4. The Value of Freedom: The Writer vs. the Literary Establishment Part 2: Remaking Culture: Emerging Institutions, Discourses, Icons and Metaphors 5. Lost in Globalization: Education and the Stranded Egyptian Élite 6. Translating Gender between the Local and the Global 7. Where Have All the Families Gone: Egyptian Literary Texts of the Nineties 8. From the hara to the imara: Emerging Urban Metaphors in Contemporary Texts on Cairo Part 3: The Bounds of Change: State, Street, and Self Censorship 9. Taking the Soap out of the Opera: The Case of Hagg Mitwalli's Family 10. The New Kid on the Block: Bahibb issima (I love cinema) and the Emergence of the Coptic Community in the Egyptian Public Sphere 11. Found in Cairo: The Limits of Representation in the Visual Field 12. Literature and Literalism: Al-Khubz Al-Hafi Crisis Reconsidered