Dams, displacement and development in narratives of the Nubian Awakening

Entitled ‘Dams, Displacement and Development in Narratives of the Nubian Awakening’, this thesis is explicitly interdisciplinary and straddles the fields of literary, postcolonial, and critical development studies. It demonstrates how a literary approach to the study of Development-Induced Displacement and Resettlement (DIDR) can enhance our understanding of the long-term impact of forced displacement and resettlement on communities like the Nubian people of Egypt, whose historical homeland was flooded to make way for the Aswan High Dam in 1964. It examines how contemporary Egyptian Nubian fiction written between 1968 and the present day, particularly that associated with the revivalist movement known as the ‘Nubian Awakening’, has responded to, and represented, the legacy of dam-building on the Nile over the course of the twentieth century on Nubian culture and society. Speaking through the silences within hegemonic development discourses that celebrate large dams as symbols of economic, scientific and social progress while glossing over their local costs, I argue that the fiction of Muhammad Khalil Qasim, Yahya Mukhtar, Haggag Hassan Oddoul and Idris ‘Ali rewrites the postcolonial history of the Aswan High Dam from a subaltern perspective and constitutes a form of transnational cultural advocacy for Nubian rights. Moreover, by highlighting Egypt’s African identity, Nubian literature challenges hegemonic understandings of Egyptian national culture as Arab, thereby creating a more democratic space in which marginalised minority groups can claim a place for their subjectivities, political aspirations and cultural practices within the national imaginary.