Mahragan as a border space

Aesthetic colonialities, cultural emancipation and social classification in Cairo

Abstract

This article offers an alternative approach to analyze social, political and cultural experiences located in historically constructed asymmetric power structures such as Mahragan, beyond the epistemologically dominant dichotomies that contrast between Islam and modernity. I therefore propose, based on ethnographic experiences with youth groups in the city of Cairo since 1999, an anthropological-historical essay that will allow us to understand, in addition to the marginalization of the Shabi cultural universe, the power relations established in the Egyptian social structure. These starting points make the Mahragan appear as a historical encounter, a response of young Egyptian  who have roots in past musical traditions, to transcend what we identify as colonial modernity, within Islamic contexts. Through the analysis of Mahragan music, we will analyze the dynamics of the colonization-decolonization dialectic to deepen the understanding of the symbolic spaces of the border as those created in the Cairot peripheries.

^{*"Este articulo es resultado del proyecto TRANSGANG: Pandillas transnacionales como agentes de mediación: Experiencias de resolución de conflictos en organizaciones juveniles callejeras en el sur de Europa, el norte de África y las Américas (TRANSGANG). Unión Europea: HORIZONTE-2020, Consejo Europeo de Investigación - Subvención avanzada [H2020-ERC-AdG-742705]".}