UC Riverside

This dissertation argues that, in the 1820s-1940s period, Eurocentric colonial discourses pushed Egypt’s (post)colonial Francophone literati and nationalists into taking up French taste as a measure of progress. European taste was more than a social marker and a tool for achieving mobility, it became an ethnographic and civilizatonal sign. Francophone Egypt had a complicated relationship with France however, and clang to native Muslim family values and structures while it strove to affirm its competence in matters of French distinction. Simultaneously, it had grasped its exotic place in France’s economy of desire, which nationalists, like Mustapha Kamil and Ya’qub Sanu’, later rhetorically deployed in winning French allies against colonial Britain. However, King Faruk Fuad’s ascension to Egypt’s throne in the early 1930s marked an increase in hegemony and the dominance of European gender and family values in the illustrated press. Through photographs, the latter presented the king’s Westernized and French-speaking female relatives as national ideals of feminine morality and domesticity, thus normalizing European gender and family practices and relegating Muslim social culture to the margins.