Reading the modernist event from the margins of history: The Denshawai incident, the trial of Djamila Bouhired and the question of Egyptian modernity

This dissertation approaches the question of modernity in two ways. The first treats the dynamics of exchange between history and literature with reference to the question of representation as it intersects with modernity, the emergence of literary modernism, and Third World nationalism. The second investigates aspects of modernity outside of Europe. I employ the intersection between literature and history in representing historical events as a way to examine the appearance of particular literary and visual forms in Egypt informed by the emergence and development of modern nationalism, using as examples two events from the Arab world: the Denshawai event that took place in Egypt in 1906, in which a hunting party of British Officers started a fire that led to the death of a British officer, with the subsequent punitive executions of Egyptian peasants; and Chahine's film Gamila of 1958, an Egyptian production which tells the story of an Algerian freedom fighter. In the analysis of a wide range of readings and writings of these events, the dissertation aims to extend the work of thinkers like Benedict Anderson (in Imagined Communities) and Stephen Kern (in The Culture of Time and Space), exploring the nexus between history, fiction and mimetic representation in the modern era by demonstrating the need to reflect on the production of the so-called modernist event, its transformation into a "textual event.";The irruption of historical thought into modernity has made us aware of the narrative structure of the histories in which we are caught up and of the constructed character of the events which confront us. This awareness prompts us to extend the logic of the modernist event outside its European contours. 1f the text that claims to "say" this event is nothing but an "impression" of it (a Derridean term), then this "impression" is itself a sign of history. In fact, it becomes a fundamental way of providing new insights into the primary object of a given historical narrative, in our case the modernist event, by reinvestigating it through a reading less interested in its content than in the machinery that produces it.