Charles Taylor Book Award Winner 2022: Mona El-Ghobashy, for Bread and Freedom: Egypt’s Revolutionary Situation

Winner: Mona El-Ghobashy (New York University) for Bread and Freedom: Egypt’s Revolutionary Situation (Stanford University Press)

Bread and Freedom is a remarkable book. It brings alive the profound uncertainty and myriad aspirations that people living through times of radical political upheaval experience, and the ways such lived contingency becomes forgotten as unruly realities tamed through narratives of fait accompli. El-Ghobashy’s empirical site is Egypt, during and after the 2011 uprising that overthrew the longstanding authoritarian regime of Hosni Mubarak, amidst a spate of regime transitions (the “Arab Spring”) throughout the Middle East and North Africa. Prevailing scholarship vacillates on how to categorize this event—a failed revolution, an authoritarian breakdown, a political upheaval. Bread and Freedom not only provides a trenchant critique of the impulses guiding such academic disagreements—as El-Ghobashy writes: "[w]hat the Arab uprisings brought together, the social sciences have increasingly segregated, studying revolutions, uprisings, and democratic transitions with different literatures, each with its own specialized vocabulary” (33-34)—but also offers a compelling alternative. Building on the work of Charles Tilly, El-Ghobashy develops a creative conception of a “revolutionary situation,” which underscores the processual nature of change (rather than the intentionality and outcomes through which revolutions are oft categorized). Drawing on an impressive documentary archive, El-Ghobashy captures vividly the actions and stories of everyday people in ways that convey how multiple aspirations and alternative possibilities for change were always alive, even amidst the most trying of political moments. Firmly anchored in the tumultuous recent political history of Egypt, Bread and Freedom speaks beautifully to broader issues concerning the indeterminacy of political change, the fragility of power and its vexed institutional expressions.

Selection Committee:

Diana S. Kim (Georgetown University)

Jinee Lokaneeta (Drew University)

Robert Nichols (University of Minnesota)