Between Class and Nation: International Education and the Dilemmas of Elite Belonging in Contemporary Egypt

This dissertation explores how internationally educated youth in contemporary Egypt negotiate issues of national identity, postcoloniality and belonging while participating in globalizing class practices. Based on fourteen months of ethnographic research in and around for-profit international schools in Cairo, it focuses on how this privileged youth group constructed, experienced and enacted belonging at the intersection between class and nation. I argue that internationally educated Egyptians were caught in a cultural bind between competing constructions of class and national belonging. On the one hand, globally-oriented socialization practices and international education reproduced a historically-specific and colonially-inspired configuration of social distinction that linked elite belonging to a cosmopolitan-inflected distance from local culture. On the other hand, these markers of elite belonging excluded internationally educated youth from a materially embodied conception of Egyptianness that tied national belonging to essentialist constructions of local culture and identity. I suggest that the tension between class and national belonging expressed a single dialectical process that was rooted in colonial binary conceptualizations of culture and difference, which split ‘elite’ and ‘local’ into mutually exclusive cultural and symbolic repertoires. My analysis challenges dominant theoretical approaches that conflate the reproduction of class and nation by exposing the educational, gendered and linguistic gaps between class and national culture in contemporary Egypt. I present a bottom-up approach to understanding national attachment that highlights the embodied and moral labor that goes into the production of local selfhood in a transnational postcolonial setting. This approach also shows the differential gendered dynamics of class and national reproduction. The burden of maintaining cosmopolitan-inflected class boundaries falls squarely on the girls while boys are expected to embody the nationally-inflected skills and dispositions necessary for personal and professional trajectories that transcend class boundaries. In telling this story, I expose the sociohistorical dynamic by which colonial/postcolonial categories are reconfigured through globally-oriented class practices and highlight the unexpected ways that neoliberal globalism can become the incubator for intensely and irreducibly local gender and cultural norms.

2021

dissertation

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