In this talk, I will present my upcoming book project on the role of literary practices in recreating spaces of sociability and solidarity in post-revolutionary Cairo. Over the past two decades, Egypt’s literary worlds have been reconfigured by two major phenomena. First, the digital disruption of publishing since the mid-2000s has expanded access to literary authorship, allowing many new writers to enter the market. Second, the Egyptian revolution and its aftermath encouraged more people to write in search of individualized fictional worlds, as the collective one promised by January 25 had failed. As a result, many new writers entered Cairo’s associative literary scene, bringing not only their literary talents and aspirations but also the divisions inherited from the revolutionary past.

Based on a long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Cairo’s literary clubs, I will show how the code of karam – or hospitality – enabled people to mend their revolutionary divides and create spaces of exchange and support through literature, its rituals and objects. Ritualized and deliberately kept free of politics, these literary bubbles are sustained by an economy of reciprocal favors and financed by writers themselves to keep them as spaces of possibilities in their lives.

This presentation invites us to think of literature not merely as the production of texts, but as a set of practices that can be harnessed to recreate spaces of community and exchange after major disruptions. Literary spaces, then, are not solely about literature; they are about creating environments which, by being designated as “cultural”, are expected to provide “safe” and “respectable” setting for the circulation of other kinds of resources.