Otherness: Essays and Studies Volume 6 · Number 2 · December 2018 © The Author 2018. All rights reserved. Egypt in Western Popular Culture From Bram Stoker to The Jewel of the Nile Aintzane Legarreta Mentxaka Abstract In April 2011, Western eyes were fixed on Egypt. Many were astounded when Hosni Mubarack, who had presented himself as the anti-colonial hero who nationalized the Suez Canal, was ousted by a popular uprising after thirty years of authoritarian rule. The subsequent waves of political protests sweeping over the Arab world put in evidence the complexities of the historical background, and brought attention to the long shadows of a not-so-distant violent past. For Europe and North America, there was something else about Egypt. Culturally, the West had absorbed Egypt onto its collective memory as the gate to the Near East since the nineteenth century. Casablanca and Hong Kong had been pied a terres, but Cairo, in a way that not even Byzantium had ever managed, was home. Egypt has been embedded in Western consciousness for the last two centuries, and its ancient, pharaonic past has reinvigorated the store of myth of Europe and North America to an immeasurable extent. The present essay is concerned with the discreet but powerful interventions of Western popular culture in translating Egypt for Western consumption, both building and resisting stereotypes. The essay considers Bram Stoker’s novel of 1903, The Jewel of Seven Stars, which solidified many of those stereotypes, and goes on to discuss three popular renderings of Egypt produced around a hundred years later, which rewrite those stereotypes from within: the film The Jewel of the Nile (1985), the novel The Map of Love (1999), and the documentary The Hidden History of Egypt (2002). All four works are particularly interested in ‘looking’ as a form of ‘knowing’, and the essay investigates how they all articulate what we may call an ‘active witnessing’. Keywords Egypt, popular culture, postcolonialism, orientalism, popular film, popular literature, gendered gaze, Bram Stoker, Ahdaf Soueif, Terry Jones