WHEN: tHURSDAY, aPRIL 11, 2024 | 5:30PM

wHERE: Hurst lounge

Since their discovery in July 1881, Egyptian mummies have journeyed through multiple media forms. In this lecture, Karim Elhaies traces the mummies’ movement through Egypt’s press, film, television, and social media in a never-ending civilizing and legitimizing mission of state-building, national progress, and decolonization. This lecture contextualizes the press coverage of the 1881 discovery in relation to European colonialism, nascent Egyptian nationalism, and modern state-building. Events around the real discovery, as well as press reactions, allegorized and justified colonial modernity and its ideological underpinning— i.e. Egypt’s need to “catch up” with the modern world through either nationalism and cultural nahda, or western colonialism. Elhaies will discuss Shadi Abd al-Salam’s 1969 film The Mummy which reenacts the story of the discovery at a later time coinciding with Egypt’s 1954 independence. In juxtaposition, the lecture will look at the 2021 televised “Pharaohs’ Golden Parade,” a live-broadcast of the mummies’ relocation to The National Museum of Egyptian Civilization, as a spectacle aimed at legitimizing the state after the July 2013 military coup.

Lecturer’s Bio

Karim Elhaies is an Egyptian-American multilingual researcher in Middle Eastern Studies, History, and Cinema. He is currently a PhD candidate in Cinema Studies at New York University. His manuscript offers a treatment of Egyptian cinema (from silent films to neo-realist and commercial productions) as a medium of historiography, identity-making, and Third Worldist cartography. In addition to his scholarly pursuits, Elhaies is co-founder of Algarabia Language Co-op which provides Arabic and Spanish courses designed for the social-justice classroom. He holds an MA in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies from Columbia University. When not at work on his book project, Elhaies co-runs Tasketat, a Middle-Eastern film/DJ collective.