CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2022
| Author | Ahmed Elgezy |
|---|---|
| Title | Al-Arabi Played to Resist and Cheers to Remember: Football and Politics of Identities, Memories and Space in Post-Colonial Port Said |
| Summary | Based on ethnographic and archival research, this thesis examines the significance of the Al-Masry club in understanding the politics of identities, memories, and space in (post) colonial Port Said, Egypt. My research studied Port Said from the moment the city was built as a strategic port on the Mediterranean Sea and Suez Canal and then navigated through the city's turbulent history until 2011. To approach my question, first, I situated the case of Al-Masry among football politics literature and showed how the club catalyzed the Egyptian nationalism among Port-Saidians to resist their colonial subjectivity and challenge the status of being segregated in their divided city and isolated from the rest of Egypt. By moving to the post-colonial time, I show how the club contributed to the development of Port-Saidians distinct group identity among other Egyptians and how Al-Masry stadium became a site of belonging to Port Said. I display how the stadium's (lived) space was reproduced in response to the historical context of the 1956 war and turned into a stage for official war commemorations. Then, by examining Al-Masry fans' memories of the stadium and reading 1956's pride memories both during Nasser's era and afterwards, I showed how Port Said stadium was a space where the memories are recalled as tensions between the lieu and milieu. Namely, memory and space are reciprocally constructed and reproduced. First, collective memories of the war commemorations reproduced the stadium's social space. Second, the stadium's space was also a medium for constructing new memories between a father and his son or when the newer generation actively remembered the anti-colonial memories and organized commemoration ceremonies by themselves in the absence of state institutions. |
| Supervisor | Sopranzetti, Claudio; Kowalski, Alexandra |
| Department | Sociology MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2022/el-gezy_ahmed.pdf |
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