Sara Salem

Third World Historical articulates a research agenda for a project suggestively housed as a special section in the pages of CSSAAME (42.2).The editor’s community webpage on Borderlines features experimental writings that enact the project’s attention to questions of form. Here, the intention is to engage in a collaborative project that is its own form of archive building, a portal that speaks to the wider themes of the Third World Historical. The essays in Borderlines highlight the visceral and the relational as distinct from abstract concepts of revolution as complete breaks. The words in these pieces are never failure, or defeat but stories of complicity, compromise, and fragmentation. By emphasizing relationality, movement, and complicity we aim to think concretely about moving between a world overwhelmed by structural forces that preclude action and an imagined world filled with boundless agents detached from history, an equally self-defeating proposition.

There is a viscerality to anticolonial revolution that we sometimes catch glimpses of in photographs, letters, memoirs, or stories that are passed down. Anticolonialism was as much about feeling and emotion as it was about the economic shifts, political transformations, and social changes we are more familiar with. As Neetu Khanna writes, “Thinking with the visceral poses a particular challenge to our theories of empire and decolonization, which have largely focused on the discursive and ideological contours of colonial violence and power.” In writing about anticolonial Egypt in the mid-twentieth century and the project that emerged around Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Free Officers, I became increasingly interested in how certain feelings attach to certain spaces, and what it might mean to narrate revolution through these attachments.

Here I want to think specifically about infrastructure and the weight of feeling carried by the promise of national development. As scholars have noted, infrastructure was central to developmentalist states—particularly infrastructure that produced electricity, water, or other forms of energy needed to power factories and industry. The particular project I focus on is the Aswan Dam, which predated the anticolonial moment itself. The archival object at the start of this piece is dated to 1900, showing the middle stages of the building of the dam (1899–1902).[1] As the caption notes, the building of the dam was meant to harness and regulate the water supply of the Nile for agricultural production and to generate hydro-electric power for industrial development. This initial structure was unable to do this, leading to the eventual construction of the “High Dam” in the 1960s, under Abdel Nasser.

The second part of this archival object is an image from the building of the High Dam in 1964. The symbolism carried by this single infrastructural project shifted tremendously in the aftermath of decolonization. This structure came to embody the promise and hope of industrialization and development in the aftermath of anticolonial revolution. Indeed, one of the pivotal moments of Third Worldist revolution—the nationalization of the Suez Canal—was carried out precisely in order to finance the building of the High Dam. This project combined notions of independent economic development, nationalism, and labor to symbolize a new Egypt.

What struck me is the inability of each photograph to capture more than a tiny snapshot of a single part of the dam, gesturing towards just how momentous this project was. These photographs helped reorient me away from understanding the dam as either a political or economic dimension of national development, and towards viewing the dam as a lifeworld in and of itself, and a world that had multiple stories to tell. In the rest of this piece, I explore three stories that are part of this lifeworld, stories that gesture towards the visceral, stories of loss and dispossession, of hope, and of mastery—stories that come up against each other in contradictory ways.

The building of the dam necessitated the hiring of at least 30,000 workers, most of whom were farmers from Upper Egypt or the Delta. This is one story. Alia Mossallam’s work highlights the complexities underpinning the building of the dam by tracing the lifeworld it created through the experiences of those who built the dam. Mossallam notes that they did not necessarily understand themselves to be workers but rather soldiers and builders of both the nation and the future.[2] The workers had a consciousness as to why it was necessary for them to sacrifice either themselves, their labor, or their homeland in order to build this dam. This consciousness erases any simplistic understanding of their sacrifices as having been the result of pure coercion, and instead points us to the power of anticolonial hegemony in producing a coherent national narrative of an independent future. Mossallam speaks of the workers “experiencing the Dam as a war that they waged against nature and a class-based society,” and how rhetoric such as “‘oppressing the mountain’ and the ‘taming of the Nile’” indicated that the struggle was a physical one against nature. The visceral crops up here in the pressure of nature and time, the rhythm of the labor itself, and the experience of the dam as a war.

When we shift our focus from the people to the land itself, we come across another story. Despite the radical imaginary that propelled this project forward, it is crucial we also attend to the complex ways in which Nubians who were dispossessed related to the dam. Indeed, this dispossession is the underside of such postcolonial infrastructural projects—a ghost that haunts them and asks us to also remember the sacrifices made. Displacing over 50,000 Nubians, the dam “claimed Nubians and their land as victims.” Menna Agha notes that Nubians suffered both affective and material disenfranchisement during and after this displacement, refusing to call the place they were resettled to by the Egyptian state “New Nubia” and referring to it instead as “tahgeer,” or place of displacement. When we focus on land in both images, attuned to this particular story, our gaze might focus on what is absent. The absence of Nubians in both images, despite their presence throughout the ancestral land they were displaced from, becomes visible when we regard these images as representing a lifeworld that includes both what is present and what is absent, and the violence that marks the process of becoming absent. The haunting nature of absence and loss is part of a visceral set of memories that gather themselves around the land the dam was built on.

A third (and final) story might emerge when we shift our focus from the land to both the scale of the dam and the rhythms and movements represented in the construction work itself. Forms of mastery were central to many of the techniques of rule we find during the formation of the postcolonial nation-state, including ideas of controlling and mastering nature deployed in the building of infrastructural projects. In The Great Social Laboratory, Omnia El Shakry writes about these techniques during colonial rule and their continuation post-independence. These images of the dam center not people but concrete, cement, and land. Particular materials became embedded within the anticolonial project. Take steel, for instance, which was a central element of Nasserist industrialization. Companies such as the Egyptian Iron and Steel Company (EISCO) were seen as symbols of Egyptian nationalism and independence. Indeed, upon the founding of this particular company Nasser is claimed to have said “Egypt’s dream [has] come true.” For the dam, the rock itself needed to yield to the workers’ tools and machinery. Videos and images of workers steadily chipping away at masses of solid rock reveal this in action, another gesture towards the visceral experiences of bodies central to constructing infrastructure.

These photographs and the many stories of what the dam was become a way for me to grapple with Egypt’s anticolonial inheritance away from questions of political economy and development and towards memory, emotions, and how revolutions are experienced. While these stories do not fit neatly together, they are a visceral reminder of just how complex and contradictory decolonization was, and of what it might mean to center feelings—of hope, ownership, loss, dispossession, and the labor of decolonization itself.

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[1] Beyond the scope of this piece but of crucial importance is the question of who took these photographs, and how this too is part of the story of colonial domination. The project as we see it through these images is still one envisioned by the colonial power itself.

[2] See Alia Mossallam’s 2012 Doctoral Dissertation, “Hikāyāt sha‛b—Stories of Peoplehood: Nasserism, Popular Politics and Songs in Egypt, 1956–1973”at the London School of Economics and Political Science

Sara Salem is associate professor at the London School of Economics. Her first book, entitled Anticolonial Afterlives in Egypt: The Politics of Hegemony, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2020.