13 In other words, while we can perhaps trace many of the similarities between national communities to a model that is represented as Western or European, the way these communities “orient” them- selves vis-à-vis these new structures might be likened to an ongoing process of improvisation necessarily creating a unique or “alternative” version of what the modern means in each location. Shannon clarifies further:
This is not simply a matter of “theme and variation,” with Europe setting the theme and other nations providing colorful local variations; such an approach would merely reiterate in musical terms the idea that European modernity is a standard upon which other, alternative modernities are based. European modernity is not the main theme upon which other nations improvise in their quest for alterna- tive modernities. Rather, the improvisation metaphor suggests that all varieties and experiences of modernity, including Europe’s, are improvisations on a related set of principles, representational practices, and political economic processes. Europe’s differential power historically has meant that the texture and pitch of the European variation are echoed though never wholly reproduced in those of other nations. The reverse is certainly true, and we can hear elements of other nations’ modern experi- ences in European improvisations: Orientalism in European literature, for example, is one result of this echoing (Said, 1978, 1994).14
Shannon cogently argues, in what I read as a crucial addendum to Mitchell’s work, that while we may agree that there is no homogeneous, fixed Europe, and thus no notion of what has come to be recognized as a European model of modernity, the differential in power that Europe has historically enjoyed over a vast number of territories (the result of colonial conquests and the continued extraction of resources through the early twentieth century) is largely why the European “variation” of modernity predominates in site after site outside of Europe (i.e., the cities of Shanghai, Saigon, St. Petersburg, Algiers, Casablanca, and Beirut are suggestive examples).
Wust al-Balad, while historically a space of contest, may also be read as a site through which Egyptians negotiated their own forms of improvised modernities. For instance, the Egyptian effendiyya15 class might have initially been thought of as mimicking or aping European dress, habits, and beliefs in the European proj- ect of modernity, but it was this class that would eventually become the most ardent proponents of the anticolonial nationalist movement, thus using their modern education and knowledge of the colonial administration to critique and eventually bring about its demise. Similarly the popular coffee shops and hashish cafés of the intellectual scene downtown during the 1950s and 1960s became spaces through which the modern was debated, mocked, and selectively drawn upon (Chapter 3 discusses this point in more detail). The underclasses, as is evident specifically in the work of Khayri Shalabi and Idris ‘Ali, reflect and
participate in modern life, but in ways that are often unexpected and unique. In short, while the downtown was the most important visual symbol for this staged replication of a European modernity, in practice, modernity, as it was produced and contested on the ground, was much more an act of improvisation between different classes, Egyptian nationals, and European expatriates.
So why is there a resurgence of interest in this former city center in contem- porary Egyptian literature? Why this area in particular? As I alluded to earlier, it is my contention that in the act of staging and requiring the performance of modernity in the space of the spectacularly rendered French design of the “downtown,” the area became a contested space. The battle over the ownership and function of this space was, in effect, a debate over what it meant be modern. Nowhere is this contestation more apparent than in the mass riots and fires in 1952 that left many Western establishments burned and looted. The permanent destruction of these buildings may be read as a way of responding to the ques- tion, whose modernity was it? Clearly the modernity of a foreign Western elite was no longer acceptable to the masses, who were largely excluded from the spectacle of upper-class consumption habits anyway. Rather, it would be the regime of Gamal Abdel Nasser that would define the trajectory of the project of modernity in Egypt from that point forward.