Working Out Egypt

“Working Out Egypt is an extraordinarily accomplished book. Wilson Chacko Jacob offers a highly original history of effendi masculinity based on a sophisticated interpretation of a vast, multisited archive. His analysis speaks directly to a number of concerns animating not only history but also feminist, cultural, and postcolonial studies. It encompasses colonial modernity and Egyptian specificity, masculinity and the quest for a normative social/sexual order, print culture and its collision with imperial globality, and the performative processes through which nations and their national imaginaries unfold.”—Antoinette Burton, author of Empire in Question: Reading, Writing, and Teaching British Imperialism

“This is a pioneering book that probes the relationship between colonialism, nationalism, and masculinity in fresh and exciting ways. Through a careful examination of Egyptian and British popular and political culture of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, Wilson Chacko Jacob tells a complex story of how Egyptian national subjectivity was crafted with and against colonial tropes. Working Out Egypt is essential reading for scholars and students of history, postcoloniality, sexuality, gender, subject formation, and Middle East studies.”—Saba Mahmood, author of Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject

“Working Out Egypt blends class-conscious social history with cutting edge reconceptualizations of biopolitical sovereignty and gender performativity – and it does so while avoiding the persistent Eurocentrism of many of the scholars influenced by Foucault and Agamben and shattering the frames of cultural relativism that have limited some recent queer and postcolonial scholarship. . . . Jacob’s monograph stands both as a remarkably original study of the gendering of colonial modernity and as an innovative contribution to theories of subjectivity.”

“Working Out Egypt is based on extensive archival research and a wide array of materials including British and Egyptian official documents, Olympic archives, biographies, magazine and newspaper articles, letters from readers and advice columns, novels, films, postcards, cartoons, and photographs. The book is framed by an equally impressive range of scholarly debates on empire, postcoloniality, nationalism, modernity, orientalism, liberalism, subject-formation, gender and sexuality, historiography, and representation…. This is a rich and multilayered book whose queries into the aporias of modern subjectivity have implications and relevance that extend beyond the case of modern Egypt. It will be an extremely valuable text to students as well as teachers of colonialism, postcoloniality, modernity, gender, and sexuality.”

“Wilson Chacko Jacob’s insightful and analytically rich book... draws from Foucault’s later work to explore how caring for the self played a transformative role in constituting a new political subject in modern Egypt…. The novelty and sophistication of Working Out Egypt, however, lies not only in its bringing together of subject formation, the body, and masculinity. The book’s virtues also lie in its willingness to explore an understudied and underappreciated subject matter: modern sports and physical culture. Jacob illustrates that taking sports and physical culture seriously can provide a novel approach to the discourse of masculinity and its institutionalization.”

“Through his impeccable research, meticulous footnotes, and complex theoretical interventions…, Jacob has animated and enriched studies of Middle East masculinity in an unprecedented manner.”

“Working Out Egypt stands as an innovative book on a central theme (masculinity) in postcolonial gender/sexuality studies…[A] highly successful effort that goes a long way toward diversifying scholarship on the colonial period in the Middle East and North Africa.”