Cairo in 2015 and in 2023: Two Dystopias of Anticipation? The Dreadful Fates of the Egyptian Capital in Tower of Dreams and Utopia
Type de matériel :
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Immense, luxurious glass towers dominating endless miserable suburbs, inextricable traffic jams, pollution, terrorist attacks succeeding earthquakes. In a world where all the gaps have become gulfs, the West no longer gives any credit to Egypt, whose capital of 35 million inhabitants is shaken by strong social and shocks: an overview of Cairo in 2015 in the scenario of J. Nasir's novel, Tower of Dreams (1999). Ten years later, the portrait of Cairo in 2023, painted by A. Towfiq, in Utopia, is almost more daunting. There the Egyptian territory is split into two spaces at war ; the rich westernized Egyptians live entrenched in closed, gated residential communities whereas the rest of the territory is reduced to an immense shanty town where miserable populations are rotting away. In the light of the current contexts, and of the period when these two novels were written, the parallel representations of Cairo are analysed as foretellings of the future made by these dystopian narratives of anticipation.
Réseaux sociaux