Nawara

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Abstract

The focus of this article is not the 2011 political revolutionary event; rather, it is the fictional record of the trajectory of the Egyptian Revolution with particular focus on class and gender. This will be done through reading “Nawara,” a feature that was produced in 2016, as a cultural text. That is, the analysis is not concerned with filmic techniques as much as it is concerned with the inherent epistemological significance of the film itself since it delineates an obscured version of the revolutionary experience as well as the way it reflects a specific point of view that has been marginalized by the “winning” side. This article aims to analyse the complex interplay of gender and space in intercultural encounters. Therefore, gender and the spatial axis are foregrounded as the main categories of analysis. The main questions are: does this intercultural encounter generate a contact zone—as post-colonial theorists have affirmed—as a new space? If yes, does it have the potential of dismantling binaries of class? How is gender played out and nuanced through space? How can the incessant movement of Nawara reveal the complexity of space in its relation to class and boundaries crossing? While the mobility of Nawara between two cultures formulates a continuous dialectic that challenges a final stable meaning, it also instils hope that a process of negotiation is about to begin (though very liable to end in negation). Although the narrative of the film yields itself easily to a binary reading—and the Egyptian Revolution itself was directed against economic and political binaries—we should render a reading against the grain.