Recuperating cosmopolitan Alexandria: Circulation of narratives and narratives of circulation Deborah A. Starr * Department of Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University, 409 White Hall, Ithaca NY 14853, USA Available online 23 May 2005 In the mid-20th century, the foreign-minority communities that had played a significant role in shaping the culture, institutions, and built environment of modern Alexandria were compelled to leave Egypt. In the intervening years, as AlexandriaÕs status was transformed from cosmop- olis to regional capital, the foreign minorities, if recalled at all, were cast as compradors to colonial interests. Since the 1990s, there has been a revival of interest in Alexandria’s modern cosmopolitan past, as evidenced both in urban renovation projects and in Egyptian literature. This article aims to interpret these separate but parallel trends. The connection this article makes between these two distinct forms of narrative hinges on the trope of circulation. The renovation projects, including improvements to the circulation of traffic, reflect a marketing strategy that circulates nostalgic images or narratives of the city’s cosmopolitan past. The novel discussed in this article, Ambergris Birds by Ibrahim Abdel Meguid, is likewise a narra- tive of circulation concerned with recuperating AlexandriaÕs cosmopolitanism. In reading the two narratives against each other, this article attempts to unpack the ideological underpin- nings of their recuperative gestures. Ó 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Literature, Egypt, nostalgia, cosmopolitanism Introduction From its foundational narratives to contemporary nostalgia literature, Alexandria has been imagined as a cosmopolis, an urban space where peoples and cultures come into contact. In the middle of the 20th century, the European and Europeanized for- eign-minority communities that had contributed to AlexandriaÕs cosmopolitan character dispersed. Their departure from Egypt was precipitated by a changing political and economic climate that was signaled by a series of policies, beginning with the 1937 repeal of legal privileges granted to foreign citizens, and culminating in the sequestrations of pri- vate property in the 1960s. These events have alter- nately been valorized as heroically anti-colonial and derided as parochially nationalist. Literature has played an important role in creat- ing and disseminating AlexandriaÕs image as a cos- mopolis. But most cosmopolitan literary narratives in the second half of the 20th century are character- ized by nostalgia for a lost era of privilege, unmo- ored from the physical spaces of Alexandria. In Lawrence DurrellÕs Alexandria Quartet, 1 for exam- ple, Alexandria is described as ‘‘the capital of mem- ory’’ (1957, p. 188), a much cited phrase that sums up the tendentious relationship between most post-1956 cosmopolitan literature and the materiality of the city. In the same period, the development of Alexan- driaÕs built environment was likewise unmoored from history and cultural memory. Since the 1950s and 1960s, cosmopolitanism has been linked in Egypt to the colonial system that fostered it. From the renaming of streets to the removal of statues of discredited former rulers, AlexandriaÕs public face was made to conform to the ideologies of the state. * Tel.: +1 607 254 6594; fax: +1 607 255 6450; e-mail: das86@ cornell.edu. 1 DurrellÕs Alexandria Quartet is comprised of the novels Justine (1957), Balthazar (1958), Mountolive (1958), Clea (1960). Cities, Vol. 22, No. 3, p. 217–228, 2005 Ó 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Printed in Great Britain 0264-2751/$ - see front matter www.elsevier.com/locate/cities doi:10.1016/j.cities.2005.03.009 217