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Writing revolution: new inspirations, new questions

This volume is the fruit of a long conversation, which the two editors undertook with the other contributors at the International Symposium on Comparative Literatures about Creativity and Revolution, held at Cairo University in November 2012. At the time of writing this afterword, the Egyptian and the global community of the 2011 Revolution is mourning one of its most loved and respected voices, the blogger and political analyst Bassem Sabry, whose voice and compassion transcended categories of division. This tragic loss occurs at a moment of growing polarization of the political debate, and a mounting spiral of violence, including explosions at Cairo University, continuing episodes of sexual harassment spreading even to the university, and waves of arrest of journalists, students and academics accused of participating in ‘non-authorized’ demonstrations. The ‘revolutionary shock wave’ that was experienced in 2012 seems now to be challenged by a sense of ever-threatening present volatility. As outlined by Margot Badran, May Telmissany and myself, in the above pages of this special issue, 2011 and 2012 were years of high mobilization and public debate in Egypt. The Symposium on Creativity and Revolution happened in the middle of this. The lecture halls hosting the conference were packed with academics, public intellectuals, artists and students, various generations of women and men, who were trying to make sense of the past and of ongoing events, framing them into theoretical and empirical studies or, in the case of poets, in verse. They were often bringing to the debate their own first-hand experience of history, introducing their presentations, their questions or reactions to the papers with the phrases, ‘I was there’ or ‘I remember’. We were privileged to take part in these discussions, and it was immediately clear to us that the Egyptian and other Arab revolutions speak of a new centring, new departures, and new paradigms for thinking Revolution. The articles in this special issue share a common focus on revolution as the emergence of new subjectivities and the opening of new public spaces, where new conceptualizations of being a community are produced. In this volume there is an emphasis on the interdependencies and interconnectedness of political and social changes across the world, which finds sounding correspondences in world history. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, the values of the eighteenth-century revolutions are being questioned and their legacies need to be reshaped. Comparative approaches, both diachronic and synchronic, can shed light on the alternation of continuity and change between the two ‘Ages of Revolution’, producing a renewed and historically aware political agency. Postcolonial Studies, 2014, Vol. 17, No. 1, 104–108