A Conference in Cairo

Yasmin El-Rifae June 12th, 2015, Muftah I walked through downtown Cairo on a quiet Friday morning in March 2015, late to a conference I had helped organize and a little bit anxious. The conference was about the political importance of translation – of language and concepts – in connecting protest movements to one another and allowing them to be narrated

» Read more

Globalizing dissent, Egyptian civil society, and the limits of translation

By Ahmed Refaat Mada Masr, 15 March 2015 I first heard Mona Baker two months ago in a workshop organized by the Imaginary School Program at Beirut, the art space not the city. It was called: “Prefigurative politics and creative subtitling.” During the three-hour event, Baker briefly summed up what she discusses more elaborately in her research project, “Translating the Egyptian

» Read more

Unauthorized memory

Sunday, January 25, 2015 Yasmin El-Rifae   Yesterday they shot and killed a woman on Talaat Harb Street. She was walking, along with other members of the Socialist Alliance Party, through downtown to commemorate those killed since all of this started four years ago. Many of them were carrying flowers, wreaths to lay in Tahrir. Photos of Shaimaa Sabbagh in

» Read more

The Air Was Hot with Hysterical Nationalism

  August 14, 2014 A year after the Raba’a massacre in Cairo, one writer struggles to redraw her relationship to the city By Yasmin El-Rifae A year ago I woke up in Cairo to the news of a massacre, the second of the summer. I was subletting a friend’s apartment downtown, a beautiful place that gave me solitude above the

» Read more