My paper explores Egypt’s January 25th Revolution through the figure of ‘Adil Imam, a famous Egyptian actor who, in 2011 when the revolution began, was openly sympathetic to the Mubarak regime. From the mid-1960s to 2020 Imam was a star in theatre, film and television, media which make his persona and works lend themselves easily to visualisation. Widely circulated recordings of Imam’s works became an archive, readily at hand to be used in political discourse, and uniquely suited to both comprehension and disputation by publics steeped in Imam’s substantial oeuvre. My premise is that at a time when so much that was familiar had been thrown into question, manifestations of ‘Adil Imam—in political graffiti, memes, Imam’s own revolution-era productions, or simply quotations from one of his works at an opportune moment—connected revolutionary experiences rhizomatically. Imam popped up in one’s peripheral vision, yet he or his works served to express an underlying spread of vital political contestation. In the public sphere and in public space Imam’s works were used to trace relations between places, persons, objects and events in revolutionary time. As an accessible political idiom, Imam’s films, plays and television serials (and sometimes Imam himself) instantiated experiences of revolution that are translatable to the terms of such “arborescent” categories of analysis as economy, protest and political mobilisation, yet also strikingly nuanced in contrast to conventional ways of understanding revolution.
Pitt Rivers Museum Research Seminar in Visual, Material and Museum Anthropology, Michaelmas Term 2024
Fridays, 12pm-1.30pm (Weeks 1-8)
In person at the Pitt Rivers Museum Lecture Theatre, except for Week 3, which will be in 64 Banbury Road.
Convened by Chihab El Khachab and Charlotte Linton
