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Paper Short Abstract:

This paper looks at waiting, being stuck, leaving and moving on, from the existential perspective of revolutionary Egyptians in a counterrevolutionary Egypt by weaving field notes with oral history interviews conducted with Egyptian revolutionaries to navigate these emotions and affective states.

Paper Abstract:

Looking at the counterrevolutionary context in Egypt, the present moment can be seen as a form of "existential stuckness," which does not necessarily coincide with a lack of social mobility, but which emerges from living within counterrevolutionary realities after experiencing a euphoric moment of hope. This paper examines waiting, hibernation, and leaving as ways of coping and recovering. Understanding the counterrevolutionary moment as a moment of waiting, this paper will look at the emotions and politics of waiting. What makes revolutionaries wait, and what do they wait for? And how are their lives affected in the meantime?

Thinking about waiting through the lens of existential mobility and of migration as temporary waiting, I will examine the act of leaving as an affective state; not only as moving away, but also as "checking out" of the revolutionary moment and attempting to move on with life outside of it. I'll look at leaving as a constant state of struggle to create a new individual and collective self, but also as a state of guilt for leaving behind an unfulfilled self.

There is no moment when one emotion ends and the other begins, but moving, waiting, and feeling stuck alternate. By exploring the intersectionality and interchangeability of these affective states, as one of my interlocutors put it: "in hoping you wait, you hibernate, you dream; life moves on and it doesn't all at once. We are stuck in the future, the present and the past"; this paper hopes to add to the already growing literature on the aftermath of the Egyptian revolution beyond the lens of political analysis.