The Alexandria Biennale and Egypt’s Shifting Mediterranean

Abstract

On July 26 1955, President Gamal Abdel Nasser inaugurated the Alexandria Biennale for Mediterranean Countries. At first glance, an international exhibition organized around the Mediterranean basin appears reminiscent of Egypt’s ancien régime and its prerevolution intellectual and cultural politics. However, a closer look reveals how the event, shaped by Nasserism and third worldism, imagined and reinscribed the Mediterranean as a much more polyvalent space, a transnational rather than regional one. This chapter explores the role of the Mediterranean in the wider cultural politics of postindependence Egypt. It demonstrates how the biennale shaped a fluid geographical space, imbuing it with changing meanings and malleable boundaries. In tracing the links between aesthetics, artistic production, and the political economy that this event forged, this chapter maps the shifting meanings of Alexandria and the Mediterranean.

I would like to thank my research assistant Ada Petiwala for her help on this project. I am also grateful to Sherene Seikaly and Sarah Rogers for their invaluable comments. I would also like to thank the Forum Transregionale Studien for hosting me as a Europe in the Middle East (EUME) postdoctoral fellow for the academic year 2013–2014.