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A study of Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid, widely recognized as the creator of Egyptian nationalism, and his impact on Egyptian culture and history.

Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid (1872–1963) stands among the most creative, impactful intellectuals of modern Egypt and the Middle East. While best known as the architect of Egyptian nationalism, his nationalist endeavor was in fact part of his broader project to bring enlightenment to Egypt under the yoke of British colonialism. Through his articles, editorials, and mentoring, his newspaper al-Jarida became a key forum for the lively debates of the time, ranging from the role of Islam in society to women's inclusion, all toward shaping a unique colonial modernity for his country.

The most comprehensive study of Lutfi, his writing, and his impact, Enlightenment in Colonial Egypt deconstructs the view that he was a covert apologist for empire out of admiration for the liberal aspects of European enlightenment. Lutfi faced this duality head on: He believed it essential to embrace parts of the West’s enlightenment values and to decolonize and Egyptianize them in order to establish an authentic, indigenous, Egyptian civilization, appropriate for modernity. Israel Gershoni and Molly Bernstein argue that Lutfi successfully engaged with these most difficult challenges, shaping a detailed plan to implement enlightenment in the Egyptian national context.

Through dozens of interviews, intensive reporting, and deep research and analysis, Sebastiaan Faber sets out to understand what remains of Francisco Franco's legacy in Spain today. Faber's work is grounded in heavy scholarship, but the book is an engaging, accessible introduction to a national conversation about fascism. Spurred by the disinterment of the dictator in 2019, Faber finds that Spain is still deeply affected—and divided—by the dictatorial legacies of Francoism.

This new edition, with additional interviews and a new introduction, illuminates the dangers of the rise of right-wing nationalist revisionism by using Spain as a case study for how nations face, or don't face, difficult questions about their past.

 

After Francisco Franco's victory in the Spanish Civil War, a great many of the country's intellectuals went into exile in Mexico. During the three and a half decades of Francoist dictatorship, these exiles held that the Republic, not Francoism, represented the authentic culture of Spain. In this environment, as Sebastiaan Faber argues in Exile and Cultural Hegemony, the Spaniards' conception of their role as intellectuals changed markedly over time.

The first study of its kind to place the exiles' ideological evolution in a broad historical context, Exile and Cultural Hegemony takes into account developments in both Spanish and Mexican politics from the early 1930s through the 1970s. Faber pays particular attention to the intellectuals' persistent nationalism and misplaced illusions of pan-Hispanist grandeur, which included awkward and ironic overlaps with the rhetoric employed by their enemies on the Francoist right. This embrace of nationalism, together with the intellectuals' dependence on the increasingly authoritarian Mexican regime and the international climate of the Cold War, eventually caused them to abandon the Gramscian ideal of the intellectual as political activist in favor of a more liberal, apolitical stance preferred by, among others, the Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset.

With its comprehensive approach to topics integral to Spanish culture, both students of and those with a general interest in twentieth-century Spanish literature, history, or culture will find Exile and Cultural Hegemony a fascinating and groundbreaking work.