Presentation by Cal Margulis
Thursday, March 5, 201510:00 AM - 12:30 PM
Bunche 11377
The 1870s were a very difficult time for Egypt. The economy was tanking, its military was facing defeat in Sudan and Abyssinia, and the British were working their way towards the outright occupation which would come in 1882. Domestically, Egyptians found themselves swept by the same kinds of modern problems that beset the whole region: massive urbanization, greater sociocultural diversity, new technologies, changing gender roles, and so on. Accepting the notion that humor is an index of social tension, Cal has been closely examining the script of a comedic play written by the Egyptian writer Yaqub Sanu during the period 1870–72 for evidence of these issues. The play that Cal has selected, *Abu Rida al-Barbari*, is set in an elite Cairene household and mostly concerns the relationship between the head of the household (the widow Banbah) and her primary servant (the Nubian Abu Rida). During the mid-nineteenth century, an increasing number of Nubians found themselves in the cities of Lower Egypt, brought there voluntarily by the promise of high-paying seasonal labor as well as involuntarily by the still-thriving slave trade. These people found themselves at the margins of society in many ways: they had black skin in a society that praised whiteness; they were migrants living among settled natives, away from their own networks of power; and since their first language was not Arabic, they faced a significant linguistic barrier. As a result, it is very difficult to reconstruct even some basic facts about what kind of lives they lived, what relationships they had with Egyptian Arabs, and so on. By looking at the plays of Yaqub Sanu, the presentation hopes to create a more detailed picture of what life was like for these people, and what that says about Egyptian history in general during this period.