On Togo Mizrahi and Layla Murad: A Conversation with Deborah Starr and Hanan Hammad
Layla Murad and Togo Mizrahi on the set of Layla the Village Girl. Image courtesy of Jacques Mizart. Graphic design and colorization by Hamada Elrasam.
Olga Verlato, PhD Candidate in History and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University, and Middle East editor at Borderlines, sat down with Professor Deborah Starr, author of Togo Mizrahi and the Making of Modern Egyptian Cinema (September 2020), and Professor Hanan Hammad, author of Unknown Past: Layla Murad, the Jewish-Muslim Star of Egypt (May 2022). We spoke about the history of Egyptian cinema, nationalism, institutional transformations, and the question of gender (PART I). The conversation also led us to new insights into the history of communal relations, methodology and the new sources available today, and intellectual exchange and collaboration (PART II).
Part I: On the Egyptian Cinematic Industry, Gender, and Nationalism
Olga Verlato (OV): Your books are published less than two years apart, and they share an interest in the history of Egyptian cinema and the film industry, and evolving communal relations throughout the 20th century. How did you first come to the idea for your manuscript?
Deborah Starr (DS): Following my first book, Remembering Cosmopolitan Egypt, a study of cosmopolitan nostalgia in the late 20th century, I wanted to understand the history of cultural production in the interwar period. How did communities get along? What was it about this period for which later writers and filmmakers were nostalgic? As I started delving into this question, I looked at the literary field and at cinema, and I found that cinema was a much better space for trying to understand how communities worked together to produce Egyptian culture. I initially envisioned this book to be a comparative project that would look at the cinematic collaborations between Naguib el-Rihani and Badi’ Khairi alongside Togo Mizrahi. But as I continued researching, I became increasingly engaged with the figure of Togo Mizrahi. There was just such an interesting story to tell about him. He became a sort of focal point through which I could talk about forms of intercultural interaction in the interwar period.
Hanan Hammad (HH): For me, it was because I love Layla Murad! She was a big part of my life growing up. I was also irritated by the way people talked about her, especially in the 1990s, raising questions about her Jewish origin, conversion to Islam, Israel. When I was a Masters student, my advisors recommended that I turn my irritation into a MESA presentation. I then worked on an article on how Egyptians had been discussing the figure of Layla Murad, but it didn’t get published. Still, all these years, I have continued collecting material on her, and after I finished my first book, Industrial Sexuality, I thought I would transform this research into an academic project. And so it became a book.
OV: What are some of the ways in which the figures at the center of your studies, Togo Mizrahi and Layla Murad, related to the state? In what way do you think that these experiences can illuminate broader transformations in the experience of certain groups or society at large?
HH: The state is not a single thing, but rather an ensemble of institutions and individuals that are always in transformation over time. One thing that energized me into turning my MESA presentation into an article, and then the article into a book manuscript, was precisely the continuing transformation of the state and its institutions in the ways they dealt with Layla Murad. When she began her career during the monarchy period, the national radio and musical cinema had started to develop as state institutions, making Layla Murad and her generation of talented artists into national icons. From 1952, with the strengthening of the republic and the Nasserist regime until the end of her life—and even today—the state was present in Layla’s personal and public life. For example, it was the Free Officers who cleared her name against allegations of her collusion with Israel. On the personal level, the state was a part of her spousal relationship, as was the case for all marriage contracts since the early 20th century. This state involvement has particular implications with respect to the question of gender. To this day, state institutions in Egypt do not allow mothers to register their children without the consent of their fathers. This affected not only Layla Murad’s life, but also the lives of many Egyptian women.
What was particular, then, about Layla Murad’s experience as a famous performer? Her interaction and relation with state institutions depended on the specific networks that existed between individuals and institutions over time. When the cinema industry came under the control of the state, most of those in charge of it were against Layla Murad because of the client-patron relationships that had brought them to these positions, and because of their artistic vision. They wanted to marginalize the older generation and introduce new artists. At the same time, since radio and television broadcasting were under state control, and the regimes that controlled them always endorsed Layla Murad, she continued to be a star even during the worst periods of her career, for example when she was not able to come back to make movies through state institutions. Her movies were broadcasted on state television, her songs were on all radio stations, and she was a celebrated star in the Egyptian press.
DS: When talking about Togo Mizrahi’s vision and his role in the cinema industry, nationalism is a more relevant term of analysis than the state. Togo Mizrahi was a pluralist nationalist, influenced by the discourse of the 1919 Revolution. We see this in a number of different ways. When he established his film company in 1929, he named it The Egyptian Films Company, with a green crest logo featuring the white crescent and stars of the Egyptian flag, to which he later added film spooling around the crest. As we can see from the company’s name and logo, the nation and cinema were intertwined in Togo Mizrahi’s mind. Throughout his career, he was an advocate for the Egyptian film industry in nationalist terms, seeking to protect the industry from competition with Hollywood and European films. In 1936, upon the signing of the Anglo-Egyptian Accords, Mizrahi threw a party to celebrate Egyptian independence. Of course, in hindsight, we don't see this moment as necessarily one of Egyptian independence, but at the time there was real excitement about the move toward independence and pluralist nationalism. Togo Mizrahi was not a radical, not in his movies, nor in anything we know about his life. But he positioned himself, his films, his role in the film industry, and his production company as nationalist organs.
The letterhead of the Egyptian Films Company, courtesy of Jacques Mizart.
When it comes to the state, Togo Mizrahi’s experience is both typical of the Egyptian Jewish experience and unique, by virtue of his high profile and his contributions to Egyptian popular culture. He came from a position of wealth, enabling him to establish a film company and produce films. Still, elements of his story are quite common among Jews from Egypt. Like a large percentage of Jews in Egypt, he never held Egyptian citizenship. Because of the aftereffects of the capitulations, members of minority communities, even those who had a longstanding presence in Egypt like Togo Mizrahi (whose family had lived in Alexandria for five or six generations) held other citizenships. Like Layla Murad, Mizrahi was accused of Zionist collaboration; in 1946 he was essentially blacklisted and not able to produce any more films. Unlike Layla Murad, Togo Mizrahi left Egypt. In 1946, he established a residence in Italy, but he traveled back and forth until 1952. These are the complicated relations that characterized the experience of Jews in Egypt vis-à-vis the state. In this respect, Togo Mizrahi’s experience aligns with the broader narrative of the Egyptian Jewish experience at large.
OV: The question of gender is central to your study, Hanan, and it also emerges with respect to the work of Togo Mizrahi. As you were looking at these two figures, was there a moment or episode in which gender became particularly revealing of something that otherwise would have remained muted, or to which we would have not necessarily paid attention?
DS: I think I'll pick the trope of the shared bed. In my book, I talk about the queer Levantine idiom of Mizrahi’s films, in which we see a lot of comedy about cross-dressing and passing. In these films, I observe the queering of gender and national identity through scenes of same-sex pairs in bed together. For example, Mistreated by Affluence from 1937 starts off with the Jewish character Chalom and the Muslim ‘Abdu in bed together. We are not supposed to understand that there's any sort of sexual relationship between them; they are poor, so they live in very cramped quarters with only one bed. Yet, later in the film, there's an onscreen kiss between the two men. I think that there is something going on here between, on the one hand, the narrative of coexistence between Chalom and ‘Abdu and the ways in which the image of them in bed together is meant to be read as coexistence; and, on the other hand, this sort of queering of gender that runs throughout the film. For me, these two aspects are intertwined in a way that encapsulates some of the discussions of gender. At the same time, these moments also work as forms of subversion of the effendi masculinity, and of poking fun at the middle class through these poor characters and their antics. I observe this performative quality in 1930s comedies, as well as in musical melodramas from later in Togo Mizrahi’s career. For example, I see evidence of it in the 1945 film Sallama, starring Umm Kulthum as a singing slave girl (qayna). In this film, the queer Levantine performance is a way to diffuse possible sexual tension between the character of Sallama and the men who enslave her.
HH: This is intriguing, I want to hear more about your analysis of the queerness of the scene of the two men in the bed. From a Western perspective and, to a certain extent, from a middle-class Egyptian one, the scene might have hinted at queerness. But I don’t know if this sensitivity could be found in Egyptian culture at the time. Before homophobic discourses became prevalent, people wouldn't notice or know whether someone was gay. Until recently, seeing two men in bed wouldn’t have raised any flags. Middle class sensibilities and homophobia have steadily transformed towards a Western understanding, including what it means for two people of the same sex to be in bed together. I think that, until today, working class Egyptians in the diaspora would share sleeping spaces without the implication that there was anything sexual going on.
DS: I totally agree with you. I don't think that we are supposed to read the scene of the bed together as indicating a romantic relationship. Even their kiss is played for humor. The whole movie is about class instability. They are poor and then, all of a sudden, they have a windfall of money, and have to perform as members of the upper classes, at which they fail. After they have earned a lot of money, they hire prostitutes, but they are uncertain about their ability to perform, and so they practice kissing, which leads to the comedic moment. So, the class instability and the inaccessibility of effendi masculinity is aligned with these unstable performances of gender and sexuality.
I've gotten a similar response to my reading of Doctor Farhat, a film from the 1930s, which in my book I read against Mistreated by Affluence, as having intimations of lesbian desire. There is a moment when Tahiya Carioca lustfully scans Amina Muhammad’s body as they are getting changed together in a beach cabana. At the end of the film, Tahiya Carioca’s character isn’t matched up with a man. When taken together, I see these as expressions of unsettled sexuality. Finally, and I know you're aware of this, Hanan, there is the time when, on the opening night of one of Layla Murad's films with Togo Mizrahi, as she was recuperating from surgery, Mizrahi created a media circus insinuating that this film would be the last opportunity to see Murad perform as a woman. So, I think that there is intentional gender play and unstable sexualities in Mizrahi’s films, although I completely agree that we're not supposed to read these characters as gay. I agree with you that in the historical and cultural context such a reading would not make sense.
HH: The question of gender is central to how I approach the story of Layla Murad. I’ll start where Deborah ended, with the production of the star. Layla Murad started her career at a time in which the cinema industry was male dominant when it came to producers, directors, and scriptwriters. Women stars, in turn, were circulating and, in many cases, reproducing these men’s patriarchal perspectives. In her movies, Layla Murad represented the image of “the good woman,”one at the service of her husband and family at home who sacrificed her talents and ambitions, warning against uncanny women's sexuality.
But in her own personal life, Layla Murad was an active agent, even if not necessarily the prevailing party, in her relationships. She was a breadwinner and a strong party in her family when it came to her relationship with her brothers and her father. She was also an active agent in that she chose whom she wanted to marry: Anwar Wagdi, a Muslim colleague from outside her faith community. As I mentioned, the marriage contract made the state a party in their relationship. The contract was particularly tailored for interfaith marriage which, according to Egyptian law ( in turn based on Sharia law) only allows marriages in which the husband is Muslim, as Muslim women cannot marry outside their faith community. Contracts were fixed, pre-prepared forms in which the state put its conditions. Layla Murad and Anwar Wagdi’s marriage contract expressed the most conservative patriarchal understanding of the Sharia law, including conditions that are not usually mentioned in regular marriage forms for Muslim couples. These conditions underlined the wife's inferiority not only as a woman, but also as a minority woman, a Jewish woman. And yet, in her own personal life, Layla Murad would embrace her agency, notably in dealing with disagreements with her Muslim husband. Layla Murad and Anwar Wagdi used the media as a tool, similarly to Togo Mizrahi, in order to sell tickets and raise public interest in their films. Additionally, they used media during their disagreements to gain public sympathy, hinging on patriarchal views of the Egyptian public. For example, Wagdi would say that Layla Murad didn't want to get pregnant because she didn't want to sacrifice her work, and she would say that she had to work more because she had less money than the other women in Wagdi’s life, hinting at alleged extra-marital relationships, accusations that did not necessarily make sense, even though Wagdi himself would also play the image of the womanizer.
The question of gender is again relevant to understanding the events in Layla’s life after 1952, when she became even more vulnerable from rumors targeting her Jewish background and her marriage story. At this time, she converted to Islam, in part so that she wouldn’t have to continue to be inferior as a Jewish minority woman. I cannot say whether she found God in Islam, I can't investigate intention. Still, I can examine the way she covered and publicized her conversion. Layla’s story became even more complicated when she got into an informal marriage with Wagih Abaza, a powerful man in the Free Officers regime, and got pregnant. Abaza denied the relationship and his responsibility as the father of the child. It was the law that gave him this power to deny responsibility. As a famous woman, Layla Murad had always preserved her image as “all Egyptian families’ daughter,”: sexually pure, beautiful, and obedient. Even though she was incredibly attractive, a fact that contributed to her success in her career, she offered a different image than someone like the singer and actress Asmahan, whose public image was highly sexualized. For this reason, Layla Murad couldn’t simply go public as a pregnant woman or later as a mother with an extra-marital child, even more so with someone as powerful as Abaza. She tried her best to get his consent to register the child. Yet eventually, she paid a heavy price for that relationship.
From this perspective, we can see Layla Murad in two ways. On the one hand, she was a star with significant financial resources and connections. On the other hand, her fame was also a source of her vulnerability because of the reputation she had built as “all Egyptians’ daughter.” She tried her best to handle the situation in secret and quietly, without resorting to the court. One of her attempts to protect her public image as a single mother, rushing into another marriage, was relatively successful.This is the complex situation in which Layla Murad found herself: she was vulnerable as a woman and a mother, and also as someone of Jewish origins, despite their conversion. This was even more so the case after 1956, when the state was systematically pushing Jews out of Egyptian society. Layla Murad paid a heavy price not only in terms of her career, having to deal with the state bureaucrats who controlled the cinema industry and her cinematic work, but also emotionally and in terms of her mental health.
Part II: On Communal Relations, New Sources and Methodologies, and Collaboration
OV: In your previous answers, you mentioned the theme of diversity and the history of minorities. Professor Starr, you use the term Levantine to try to overcome some of the elitism that is associated with the notion of cosmopolitanism. What are some of the problematics or benefits that emerged in your work when it came to understanding and characterizing social relations in this context?
DS: Prior to this book, I worked through understanding the notion of the cosmopolitan and its relationship to empire. Both theoretically and historically, cosmopolitanism was an interesting tool for examining nostalgia literature, for looking at narratives of coexistence through the experience of colonialism in the works of different writers, filmmakers, and artists. The word cosmopolitan is also colloquially used to describe the urban diversity of Alexandria and, to a certain extent, Cairo. However, thinking about the Egyptian cinema industry, the cosmopolitan didn’t seem like a terribly relevant term of analysis, given that the industry was presenting itself in nationalist terms.
The term Levantine, which I have adopted from the writings of Egyptian Jewish essayist and novelist Jacqueline Kahanoff, is also a term that has its own problematics. But I found it powerful for the ways in which it can undermine ethno-nationalism. In the 1920s literature in the United States, for example, the term referred to a kind of shady figure, somewhat Mediterranean, shapeshifting, and suspicious. From this perspective, the term had a lot of the elements that I was looking for to describe what I saw going on in cinema, not only with respect to Togo Mizrahi, but also to other 1930s filmmakers. On the one hand, we had the emergence of the effendiyya and effendi masculinity. On the other hand, there was the rise of various kinds of ethno-national discourses, both within Egypt and across the Mediterranean. Levantinism is a way to poke at these various identities. The characteristics of what I call the Levantine cinematic idiom are, first, an ethics of coexistence, exemplified by the friendship between Jews and Muslims in Mistreated by Affluence. The second feature of the Levantine cinematic idiom is a pluralist aesthetic: the way in which the camera captures a kind of shared experience. Finally, there is the performativity of identity that I've already spoken about: narratives of mistaken identity, shapeshifting, or passing.
OV: You both engaged with different methodologies other than those from your main field and training, cultural and cinema studies on the one hand, and history on the other. Moreover, you focused on a single figure and their life trajectory. How was the research and writing process from a methodological perspective and in relation to the genre of biographical historical writing? What are some of the practical takeaways or unexpected things you encountered?
HH: Layla Murad deserved a biography on her own merit as a massive figure. At the same time, I wanted to use her life to tell a broader story about Egypt and its history in the modern period where the emphasis would be on gender and interfaith relationships. I also wanted to speak more about daily life. This came with some challenges because I used the popular press as my main source, which can be problematic in itself in terms of locating and examining publications. In turn, I was looking at a figure that was not, in many ways, an everyday person, but rather a star with a special place in society. Still, I had the ambition of showing, through Layla Murad, the challenges that many women faced in their lives.
Methodologically, the main challenge was finding sources, because celebrity gossip publications are not valued in our archives, be they academic archives or national libraries, so I had to turn to private collections. Because I myself was a journalist, I don’t always have faith with what is published and I struggled with how to use this material as a source of information. In turn, I struggled with how to use this material as a source of information (since I myself was a journalist and I don’t always have faith with what is published). For the most part, I used this material as a source of discourse, arguing that since it was disseminated among a large audience, it interplayed with existing patriarchal norms, solidifying or reinforcing them. In Egypt, there existed a blurred line between what we consider to be popular press or rags publications and intellectual publications, like in the case of the celebrity magazine al-Kawākib. A blurred line was also found between what was the religious and the, so to speak, “secular” press. Celebrity publications like al-Fan or al-Kawākib would celebrate religious holidays by featuring stars, and stars would in turn use these publications to underline their religiosity and promote a certain discourse about religion and religious life.
Ultimately, I tried to bring everything together in a story that could be broader than Layla Murad and, at the same time, pay respects to her as a central figure in my work, as she deserves. I think I was relatively lucky in that respect because Layla Murad’s figure was particularly conducive to speaking about daily life in Egypt. She was representative of the story of many other ordinary women, particularly when it came to interfaith marriages and how much agency women have versus the powerful parties in these relations, who are largely men and the state.
DS: My answer is quite similar, although it's worth noting the difference between how the press represents stars and filmmakers. Even though directors in the early years of the film industry were more known than today, they would still receive less press coverage than movie stars. That said, I had a similar experience when it came to accessing journals and cobbling together the pieces of the narratives that journals were covering. I also relied on interviews with family members and personal archives.
Like Hanan, I too was interested in telling a broader story about Egyptian cinema, the narrative of coexistence, and the place of minorities and foreigners in the early years of the film industry through the lens of Togo Mizrahi and his personal narrative inasmuch as it was reflected in his filmmaking. The press was useful because it documented Togo Mizrahi’s comings and goings to Europe, so I was able to document his trips back and forth, or whether he was returning with certain kinds of new recording equipment. Moreover, as Hanan said, the press was useful for discourse analysis, to see how film critics and Mizrahi’s peers in the industry view him. There was a lot of praise of Mizrahi’s films in the 1930s. Then, as the field got more crowded in the 1940s and because of World War Two, the material and access to film stock became rarer, leading to him being characterized as somebody hoarding resources. These are examples of how the press can be useful to document how the industry viewed him. At the same time, we need to take this information with a grain of salt because sometimes it was the media that wanted to generate hype. Finally, there is another thing which I’m sure, Hanan, you also had experience with: YouTube as an archive. YouTube has facilitated access to old Egyptian movies, which shows the continued popularity of old movies, but that is also an informal archive in which movies come up and go down.
HH: Speaking of precarious archives, I’d like to add that, while they are convenient, they also come with their own set of challenges. For example, I came across Layla Murad's own autobiography on eBay. I don’t mean the book itself, but rather its title as it was featured on the cover of a magazine. That’s how I started to go after this source, which no one had ever talked about or mentioned. YouTube as well as Facebook groups, including seller groups can be very useful because, even if you don't get the materials from there, they can be the starting point to find out about the existence of new sources.
DS I had a similar experience. We don’t have a lot of what Togo Mizrahi wrote, but he did publish a few essays in the press in the 1940s. I came across one of them for the first time in a Facebook group, where somebody had taken a picture of some clippings. This was very exciting for me, and it sent me down the track of trying to find out what publication it had come from, and if Togo Mizrahi had published more. These spaces, which are constantly shifting and are not permanent archives, have interesting implications for the kind of work that we're doing.
OV: I’d like to return to the question of identity and social relations with respect to, specifically, the notion of cosmopolitanism. Some Egyptian TV shows that came out over the last few years have been set during the first half of the 20th century, representing a kind of “cosmopolitan” environment. What do you think about what may seem as a growing interest in a narrative centered on cosmopolitanism? And how do you situate your own work in a genealogy of talking about identity in Egyptian society?
DS: I'm certainly interested in the resurgence of an interest in this “cosmopolitan” past. This has been an interest of mine academically. In Remembering Cosmopolitan Egypt, I focused on works produced in the 1990s. Representations in Egypt of the “cosmopolitan” past have continued to expand. In terms of situating my work within a kind of genealogy, I'm trying to offer a reading of film with a degree of nuance to understand what Egyptian cinema was to the industry professionals involved at the time. A later generation of film critics looked down on the films produced in the 1930s and 40s, in part because of the involvement of minorities and foreigners in the industry. I have been pushing back against instances of nationalist exclusion of minority narratives. But at the same time, I have pushed back against an uncritical nostalgia for cosmopolitanism which you see in many celebrations of minority roles in the Egyptian film industry and in Egyptian society. I think that we need to approach both of these extremes critically. I am trying to carve a path that looks at the material, rather than getting mired in either the nationalist narrative or the cosmopolitan narrative.
HH: It’s really difficult for me to separate myself as a scholar who sees representations of cosmopolitanism as an interesting phenomenon, analyzes them with dispassion and, you may say, even makes a living out of it; and, on the other hand, as an Egyptian who cares a lot about Egyptian society at all levels. I'm irritated by some nationalist revivals of a cosmopolitan discourse as a way to characterise Egyptians as tolerant. This narrative misses the point that cosmopolitanism was actually unfair to the people of Egypt themselves. It was created and imposed on Egyptians out of completely unfair historical circumstances. When the Italians, French, or British lived safely in peace and harmony in Cairo as if it were Paris, Egyptians were actually eating dirt, suffering disease and, I'm sorry to say, throwing up blood. This situation of poverty and malnutrition came out of the same forces that brought parties and fashion from Paris and gave a chance to European subjects to live with all their privileges in Egypt. This framework overlooks the fact that cosmopolitanism was not a choice of the population, and it was not beneficial to the people of Egypt. It was an imperialist design that subjected the Egyptian people and resources to serve European capitalism.
In addition to neglecting the suffering of Egyptians at the time, this overt celebration of cosmopolitanism also fails to attend to the limits of tolerance as experienced in daily life. For example, some may highlight how a context of tolerance allowed a Jewish woman like Layla Murad to become such an icon. That's true. But she also suffered and experienced some level of antisemitism. For example, when criticizing her for not buying new scripts (which she and her father did to capitalize on performing her old repertoire, a very common practice at the time, and because they couldn't afford to buy new material) some critics drew on the anti-Semitic trope that Jews are stingy. Cosmopolitanism also misses out the distinction between Egyptian Jews and foreigners. The Jews who lived in Egypt were not monolithic. Talking about Egyptian Jews and European subjects living in Egypt in the same way ends up othering Egyptian Jews, rather than acknowledging that they were part of the Egyptian fabric of the time. In turn, some Jews lived in Egypt not because they were local Jews, but as any other European subject did, seeking a chance for lucrative investment under the capitulations, extraterritorial security and privilege. In this case, talking about them as Jews rather than foreigners continues “othering” actual Egyptian Jews as foreigners, and at the same time misses the foreignness of some Jews who lived in Egypt. This discourse of tolerance and cosmopolitanism, which was politicized in the context of Nasserism to criticize the monarchy period, continues to be a politicized act under the current regime as well. Today, it is a way of distinguishing between the “good people” and the “bad people” of Egypt, meaning the Muslim Brotherhood. In this narrative, all crimes (including antisemitism, the persecution of Jews, or the creation of an environment that was unlivable for them) become only the crime of the Muslim Brotherhood.
OV: Thank you for sharing your thoughts and such illuminating insights into your work, research, and approaches. To conclude, I was curious to hear about the writing process in terms of collaboration and exchange. You mentioned elsewhere that you had a chance to read each other's work during the writing process. How was the experience of working on these books that speak so much to each other and are coming to life around the same time?
HH: I was really lucky to find this kind of support. While I could have run into Deborah’s published work anyways, I mostly benefited from the fact that she read my drafts, and from reading hers before the book was published. I learned a lot about the difference between my training as a historian, a “traditional” social historian, and scholars of cultural studies and film analysis. By looking at these other approaches I saw the benefits of, for example, reading the press as a cultural scholar.
All our interactions were tremendously productive, for example when sharing material or asking one another about our sources. Our collaboration even extended to a formal review of my work, as I had gotten peer review reports from Beth Baron as well as Deborah herself. Their reviews showed so much compassion, empathy, and care. They told me about some sources I had missed or issues I had overlooked, and helped me sort out the tension between writing a history of Egypt and a biography of Layla Murad. I consider myself lucky, and I wish for all my colleagues to get a chance to benefit from this kind of collaborative relationship.
DS: I also feel very lucky. We met and learned about our shared interests at a conference that Hanan co-organized in 2015, when I was just launching the project. In that forum I was able to present my work and get Hannan's feedback as well as that of other colleagues. This collaborative relationship is also an intellectual partnership, in a sense. Turning to the question of discipline, as I'm coming from a cultural studies and film analysis approach, our conversations and sharing our work helped me to think like a historian and to write to an audience of historians as well as to cultural studies folks. Our collaboration enabled me to ask, for example, how I’m positioning myself vis-a-vis my sources? Am I being critical enough of my sources? Hanan, I think of you not just as a social historian, but also as a historian of gender and some of your work has been incredibly influential for me. I was in the middle of writing my chapter “Courtesans and Concubines,” trying to understand the historical context in which the 1942 film Layla (which was the remake of Dumas’ novel and play La dame aux camélias) was released in terms of the legal system and prostitution, when an article by Hanan came out precisely on the legal history of prostitution in Egypt. It was great for me to be able to look at this article from an amazing colleague who's doing this parallel work. So yes, there have been so many benefits for me as well.
Hanan Hammad is a sociocultural historian of modern Middle East whose research focuses on gender, sexuality, working classes, and popular culture. Her first book, Industrial Sexuality: Gender, Urbanization, and Social Transformation in Egypt, received awards from the National Women’s Studies Association, the Middle East Political Economy Project, and the Association for Middle East Women’s Studies, among others. Her scholarly articles have appeared in the International Journal of Middle East Studies, Journal of Social History, Radical History Review, Journal of Middle East Women Studies, and International Review of Social History, among many others. Currently, she is a professor of history and director of the Middle East Studies at Texas Christian University.
Deborah Starr is a professor of Near Eastern Studies and director of the Jewish Studies Program at Cornell University. She writes and teaches about issues of identity and inter-communal exchange in Middle Eastern literature and film, with a focus on the Jews of Egypt. She is the author of Togo Mizrahi and The Making of Egyptian Cinema (University of California Press, 2020) and Remembering Cosmopolitan Egypt: Literature, Culture, and Empire (Routledge 2009). She is the co-editor, with Sasson Somekh, of Mongrels or Marvels: The Levantine Writings of Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff. Starr has also published articles in a variety of journals on cosmopolitanism and levantinism in modern Arabic and Hebrew literatures and in Egyptian cinema.
-Prepared with the editorial assistance of Mary Ingram