Paper short abstract:

This paper sets out to explore how political active Cairenes are navigating suspicious places, spaces, bodies and non-living things in the cityscape of Cairo. It examines the ambiguity of familiar materialities in Cairo in the post-Mubarak era, in relation to agential acts.

Paper long abstract:

This paper sets out to explore how political active Cairenes are navigating suspicious places, spaces, bodies and non-living things in the cityscape of Cairo. It examines the ambiguity of familiar materialities, for example phones, bodies, cameras, recorders, public rooms, social media, and Internet, in Cairo in the post-Mubarak era, in relation to agential acts. Taking its starting point in how the ambiguity of familiar materialities fundamentally alters human relations and actions, this paper produces novel perspectives on the complex interaction between materiality, affective politics, and suspicion. Through the selected theoretical lens—an approach that blends theories of affect and materiality into an axis of analysis—not only well-known concepts such as (state and citizens) power, uncertainty and agency may be re-analyzed, but also the internal dynamics of oppression as well as how such regimes maintain its penetration of the (inter-)national air—in every breath of its citizens, the state is literally present. Interaction with things and other aspects of the physical environment's places and spaces is an important arena of social, political, and cultural articulation that accommodates experiences and sentiments that are otherwise too ambiguous and fleeting to be captured. Once manifested in the material world, I assert that otherwise vaporous sentiments of suspicion become graspable, at the level of everyday life as well as academic inquiry.