“Media of the Masses” investigates the social life of an everyday technology—the cassette tape—to offer a multisensory history of modern Egypt. Over the 1970s and 1980s, cassettes became a ubiquitous presence in Egyptian homes and stores. Audiocassette technology gave an opening to ordinary individuals, from singers to smugglers, to challenge state-controlled Egyptian media. Enabling an unprecedented number of people to participate in the creation of culture and circulation of content, cassette players and tapes soon informed broader cultural, political, and economic developments and defined “modern” Egyptian households.
Drawing on a wide array of audio, visual, and textual sources that exist outside the Egyptian National Archives, Andrew Simon provides a new entry point into understanding everyday life and culture. Cassettes and cassette players, he demonstrates, did not simply join other twentieth century mass media, like records and radio; they were the media of the masses. Comprised of little more than magnetic reels in plastic cases, cassettes empowered cultural consumers to become cultural producers long before the advent of the Internet. Positioned at the productive crossroads of social history, cultural anthropology, and media and sound studies, “Media of the Masses” ultimately shows how the most ordinary things may yield the most surprising insights.
- Andrew Simon received his Ph.D. in the field of Near Eastern studies from Cornell’s Graduate School in 2017
. He is Lecturer and Research Associate in Middle Eastern Studies at Dartmouth College.
- Publisher : Stanford University Press; 1st edition (April 19, 2022)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 304 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1503629430
- ISBN-13 : 978-1503629431
Street Sounds: Listening to Everyday Life in Modern Egypt / Ziad Fahmy [Ziad A. Fahmy . Faculty : CAS – Near Eastern Studies CORNELL * Winner of the 2021 Best Book in Non-North American Urban History Award, sponsored by the Urban History Association.]
As the twentieth century roared on, transformative technologies—from trains, trams, and automobiles to radios and loudspeakers—fundamentally changed the sounds of the Egyptian streets. The cacophony of everyday life grew louder, and the Egyptian press featured editorials calling for the regulation of not only mechanized and amplified sounds, but also the voices of street vendors, the music of wedding processions, and even the traditional funerary wails. Ziad Fahmy offers the first historical examination of the changing soundscapes of urban Egypt, highlighting the mundane sounds of street life, while “listening” to the voices of ordinary people as they struggle with state authorities for ownership of the streets.
Interweaving infrastructural, cultural, and social history, Fahmy analyzes the sounds of modernity, using sounded sources as an analytical tool for examining the past. Street Sounds also reveals a political dimension of noise by demonstrating how the growing middle classes used sound to distinguish themselves from the Egyptian masses. This book contextualizes sound, layering historical analysis with a sensory dimension, bringing us closer to the Egyptian streets as lived and embodied by everyday people.
About the author
Ziad Fahmy is Associate Professor of Modern Middle East History at Cornell University. He is the author of Ordinary Egyptians: Creating the Modern National through Popular Culture (Stanford, 2011).
The Curator’s Blog about the collections, updates, and comments on issues of interest / A. Houissa
