closed, imaginary space of the modern nation-state is produced through forms of mapping, boundary making, border control, and the management of cultural forms and economic flows that create what Thongchai Winichakul calls the “geo- body” of the nation. Like the medical body, the geo-body appears as a physical object that preexists its social constitution, rather than as the effect of a process of difference.11
In other words, as Benedict Anderson has also shown, the use of certain mod- ern tools for representation (namely, cartography, the census, land surveying, and urban planning) effectively produces the geo-body of the nation as an a priori spatial object. This brings us back to the central aim of Mitchell’s work and why it is so crucial to what I hope to argue here vis-à-vis Cairo as the site for the contest over the modern subject. What Mitchell has done is to show how the project of modernity was a spatial project. Not only did colonization occur, first and foremost, spatially, but it was effective, at least in the case of Egypt, because colonial authority became synonymous with a particular type of modern space: the staging of a miniature Paris in Wust al-Balad. The juxtaposition of this mod- ern district—as staged exhibit of a European modernity—to the older quarters in Cairo to the east, and the dual consciousness that emerged as a result, is where we might begin to understand the experience of modernity in Cairo.
Yet the notion that there existed alternative forms of modernity in space, or that there was an active and creative reconciling of these two worlds (rep- resented as exhibits of the modern and the premodern) is also central to our understanding of downtown Cairo. The work of Dilip Gaonkar, Leo Ou-fan Lee, and Dilip Chakrabarty has shown us the way in which certain so-called modern spaces were conceived, used, and integrated by non-Europeans.12 These essays suggest the extent to which modernity was not merely performance but also a process, or, as Jonathan Shannon put it, “co-produced.” In rethinking the ideas of Timothy Mitchell alongside theorists who espouse the notion of alternative modernities (Gaonkar, Chakrabarty, etc.), Shannon, in his work as an ethnomusicologist (Among the Jasmine Trees: Music and Modernity in Syria, 2006), offers the metaphor of improvisation as a compelling framework for reconsidering the coproduction of modernity in its various forms in both European and non-European locations: “modernity is an act of composition (of selves, of nations, of economies and polities) in specific historical moments and specific spaces. Each ‘alternative’ that we identify—South Asian, Arab, Melanesian, North American—refers back to a basic set of struggles, contradic- tions and indeterminacies. National communities compose modern subjectivi- ties through the selection of common, standard traits infused with culturally specific sets of meanings . . . Each can be thought of as an improvisation—a composition in the historical moment—that has recognizable relations to other
performances as well as unique traits