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Conferences & lectures

Ways of telling: Historicizing Egypt's Aswan High Dam (1960-1970) as a story within a story within a story


Date & time
Monday, March 22, 2021
1 p.m. – 3 p.m.

Registration is closed

Speaker(s)

Alia Mossallam

Cost

This event is free

Organization

Department of Sociology and Anthropology

Where

Online

In this talk, Alia Mossallam reflects on the challenges of telling the story of the building of a dam, without reconstructing the dam itself; a narrative of narratives, a hegemonic ideology presiding over all alternatives; a concrete structure that inundated indigenous knowledges in the presence of its hydro-electric sciences.

Instead, Mossallam attempts to tell the stor(ies) of the Aswan High Dam as refracted through the politics, hopes and losses of those who sacrificed their lives to build it, and those communities who were sacrificed and displaced for it to be built. What does popular historiography offer us in understanding the shifts in ways of knowing, and ways of telling – and how can we draw upon the architectures of these fluid narratives?

A story that is an intersection between various historical tracks; from the third world liberation movements to a nationalist high-modernist project, to the possibilities of social mobility and the catastrophes of displacement. One story cannot be told without the other; instead, we have a story within a story within a story.

"Images, December 1959" | Courtesy of Rime Naguib

About the speaker

Alia Mossallam is interested in songs that tell stories and stories that tell of popular struggles behind the better-known events that shape world history. She is currently a EUME fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Berlin, writing a book on the visual and musical archiving practices of the builders of the Aswan High Dam and the Nubian communities displaced by it.

As a visiting scholar at the Lautarchiv of Humboldt University, she has also started a new project tracing the experiences of Egyptian and North African workers on the various fronts of World War I through the songs and memories that recount their struggles. Some of her writings can be found in The Journal of Water History, The History Workshop Journal, the LSE Middle East Paper Series, Jadaliyya, Ma’azif, Bidayat and Mada Masr.

She has tried her hand at playwriting with David Grieg, Hassan El-Geretly, Laila Soliman and written her first short-story “Rawi” with 60 pages. An experimentative pedagogue, she founded the site-specific public history project “Ihky ya Tarikh,” as well as having taught at the American University in Cairo, CILAS, and the Freie Universität in Berlin.

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