Dissensus and power : the aesthetics of politics in Egypt's 2011 uprising

Much of the scholarship on Egypt's 2011 uprising that removed Hosni Mubarak from power has concentrated either on so-called 'high politics' - constitutional changes, elite decision making etc. - or on the social movement dynamics that led to the uprising. Questions of art and culture have generally been relegated to the margins in the study of political change, despite the flourishing of creativity witnessed during the uprising. When art and cultural production have been studied, they are often treated in isolation from politics, as well as from Egypt's wider historical context. The thesis seeks to explore the relationship between aesthetics and politics in Egypt through the following questions: How did aesthetics feature in the 2011 uprising? How did the aesthetics of the uprising relate to a longer history of aesthetics in Egyptian art and culture? What were the political implications of these aesthetics? This thesis seeks to centre art and cultural productions in its study of Egypt's 2011 uprising as an important element of post-2011 political change. Towards this end, the thesis draws on the theoretical work of Jacques Rancière, which argues that politics contains within it an inherently aesthetic dimension. Specifically, his notion of the partage du sensible, or the distribution of the sensible, points to the role of power (what he calls 'the police') in determining what can be seen, heard or spoken and how, in turn, these perceptions create and naturalize hierarchies of social life. Politics, then, involves breaking with this overarching distribution of the sensible. With some exceptions - for instance work by Charles Tripp - few scholars have utilised Rancière's political philosophy to look at politics and aesthetics in the Middle East context. The degree to which Egyptian art and cultural production in the 2011 uprising managed to disrupt the distribution of the sensible and to create new perceptions is central to the thesis. The thesis analyses various cultural production, namely street art, music production and film, both new and re-emergent, that circulated during the events of 2011 and their aftermath. The thesis employs methods from the fields of art history and visual culture, namely semiology and iconography, to 'read' aesthetics in relation to the overarching distribution of the sensible. The thesis focuses in particular on the aesthetics of cultural representations of national identity, gender, class and urban space in terms of the degree to which they reshape perceptions and challenge the existing distribution of the sensible.