Demotix/Jonny von Wallström. All rights reserved.
Anti-colonial movements are theatres of nationalism and discourses of nationality. The presence of a colonial regime assists in the formulation and articulation of a discourse regarding an imagined collective community as it provides the indigenous population with an ‘other’ to juxtapose itself against. With national self-consciousness awakened, anti-colonialism is born as the colonised people become cognisant of their political and economic exploitation by a party regarded as exterior to their collective community. This was the specific trajectory of the 20th century anti-colonial movements in the colonised southern Mediterranean, specifically in Egypt.
Throughout the 20th century, the colonised peoples of the Nile Valley began to imagine themselves as a consolidated collective and attempted to forge for themselves a sovereign state within specific territorial boundaries. However, the anti-colonial struggle in the land of the Nile was not a singular endeavour, but rather a prolonged process which evolved over time to recreate the national ideology fuelling the movement and correspondingly the manner in which the sovereign Egypt would relate to the Arab world.
