Troubled memories: Performativity and commemoration of the egyptian revolution

Abstract

 This article aims to investigate and analyze the commemorative acts and performative effects of the various social forms through which the revolutionary events that took place in Egypt in 2011 have been commemorated. The article will focus on the concept of “thawra” (revolution). The French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (2004) found that memory is socially constructed and influenced by different social factors. When it comes to being commemorated and remembered, the concept of “thawra” (revolution), as well as its multiple meanings and nuances, has been recreated and inserted into mnemic practices over the last decade in Egypt (Erll 2008). In order to understand the relationship between remembrance and revolution, we propose the following twofold objective: on the one hand, to elaborate a conceptual analysis around the notion of “thawra” in modern Egyptian history; and on the other, to understand how its memorialization process has given rise to polemical narratives that must be contextualized from within the performative processes of re-enactment of the “revolution”. This “obsession with memory” (Attallah 2021) materializes in a collective attempt to give a name to events that have redefined the relationship of the individual with the collective and of the collective with its own past.