Life after the Squares: Reflections on the consequences of the Occupy movements

Social Movement Studies  Volume 16, 2017 – Issue 1: Special Issue: Resisting Austerity: Collective Action in Europe in the Wake of the Global Financial Crisis Editors: Cristina Flesher Fominaya & Graeme Hayes This section: Edited by Amador Fernández-Savater, Cristina Flesher Fominaya, With contributions by Luhuna Carvalho, Çiğdem, Hoda Elsadda, Wiam El-Tamami, Patricia Horrillo, Silvia Nanclares & Stavros Stavrides Pages 119-151  Abstract This is a roundtable with reflections on Tahrir Square, Egypt;

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A Wish Not to Betray: Some Thoughts on Writing and Translating Revolution

Wiam El-Tamami For a long time I was afraid and unwilling to write about the revolution, struggling with the impossibility of translating the immensity, intensity, and sometimes absurdity of the upheaval — within us and without — into words that make sense, that can convey something of the experience without reducing its unfathomability. What does it mean to write without

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To Willingly Enter the Circles, the Square

by Wiam El-Tamami Jadaliyya, 30 July 2013 We were on the edge of Tahrir Square on Wednesday 3 July when the army made its announcement. The square burst into jubilation. A member of our team checked his smartphone. He shouted over the din of drumbeats and squealing vuvuzelas: “Morsi’s gone. They’ve appointed the head of the constitutional court in his place

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Gothic Night

Mansoura Ez Eldin & Wiam El-Tamami   Granta, 28 September 2011   Last night Wiam El-Tamami was announced as the winner of Harvill Secker’s second annual Young Translators’ Prize in association with Foyles. We are delighted to support this venture by publishing the winning story, below, with an interview with Wiam by Online Editor Ted Hodgkinson. The judges this year were author

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Revolution Revived: Egyptian Diary, Part Two

Wiam El-Tamami Granta, 7 December 2011 The second and last installment of Wiam El-Tamami’s diary of the ongoing turmoil in Egypt. Read the first part here. Monday 21 November On the metro home, a man (one of State Security’s many informants?) was swearing that he’d just been at the midan and that there was nothing going on, that it was all lies. The

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Cairo: September 2014

WIAM EL-TAMAMI 28 JANUARY 2015 I left Cairo on 19 April 2014. I was so glad to have left, so relieved and slightly disbelieving that I had finally loosened myself from the grip of Al-Qaahira – in Arabic the name, quite fittingly, means ‘The Oppressor’, ‘The Crusher’, ‘The Vanquisheress’. I knew that I could not be there then, but that I was

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