Introduction

1Anticolonialism lives with us, within us, and around us. It is present in the way we arrange time and the past, in the way we narrate the nation and its borders, and in the way we tell family histories and intimacies. If we could speak of an anticolonial archive, it would mean an archive that is expansive, slippery, invisible, and uncontainable within files, rooms, or a building. An anticolonial archive is one made up of that which we might find difficult to archive: extinguished hopes, burning desires, ghosts, spectres, and dreams that remain unfulfilled. There is a haunting quality to how revolutionary feelings are remembered too; how might exploring this sense of being haunted open different registers of history? How might we think of the affective elements of revolution – past or present – as a central part of revolution itself? And what might it mean to talk about hope, fear, exhaustion, defeat, and desire as not simply responses to political events, but as constitutive of them?

2In a piece on alternative sources of history, Omnia El Shakry draws on Joanna Sassoon’s “chasing phantoms in the archives” to highlight the difficulty of making use of archives on the one hand, and the creative possibilities that come about when scholars find themselves free to imagine alternative histories on the other (2015). Here she highlights how oral histories, family holdings, letters, and memoirs – among others – become important sources of history. To think through the questions posed above, I make use of both a memoir and an exhibition as repositories of historical events, thinking of them as affective fragments that speak to the larger idea of a revolutionary felt archive. The memoir in question is Arwa Salih’s, which she begins by invoking haunting: “I felt profoundly disconnected from the ‘national struggle’ that haunts every sentence of this book” (2017, 7). Salih, a prominent Egyptian communist, evocatively named her memoir The Stillborn, referencing a project that was unfinished, that had seemingly “failed”, and yet that haunts us all. Alongside this, I centre a Contemporary Image Collective (CIC) exhibition from 2016 entitled Chronic. I remember the haunting nature of the exhibition, particularly through its use of images and audio fragments that centred exhaustion and hopelessness. It seems to me that frames such as feeling haunted or experiencing failure open up possibilities around exploring revolutions and their afterlives as an affective landscape.

3This research note explores the contours of an archive of revolution, anticolonial and otherwise, that conveys feeling. Dian Million’s work on felt theory gestures towards a “felt archive” that privileges forms of history-telling that are “rich with emotional knowledges, of what pain and grief and hope meant or mean now in our pasts and futures,” (Million 2009, 54). Focusing on the First Nations in the settler colony of Canada and their claims to history, Million traces how feminists changed the possibilities of what could be said and how. She writes, “I explore here their sixth sense about the moral affective heart of capitalism and colonialism as an analysis. A felt analysis is one that creates a context for a more complex ‘telling’” (2009, 54). By insisting on their lived experiences to be included in narratives of history, Million centres forms of history-telling that are “rich with emotional knowledges” (2009). Because we “feel our histories as well as think them,” the text pushes us to expand our understanding of what matters in stories about political, economic and social life. Moreover, these are culturally mediated forms of knowledge and are thus never solely individual. This relates to a provocation by Orkideh Behrouzan urging us to think about how people feel through “ruptures and wounds,” shifting attention away from the individual and instead focusing on how traumatic events require certain forms of memory work that connect us to historical and political contexts (Behrouzan 2015, 51). These forms of memory work include working through, breaking free from, or navigating complex traumatic events in collective ways, including with and among friends, comrades, strangers, and in spaces as varied as classrooms, house parties, or therapy rooms.

4The affective registers within the revolutionary archive range from disappointment and hopelessness to nostalgia and longing. Whether through memoirs that are written in times of defeat, such as Arwa Salih’s, or prison writing composed in times of counter-revolution, disappointment has the power to mould political landscapes in particular ways that are important to explore and unpack. Similarly, nostalgia is an equally powerful affective force that moulds how we remember the past and experience the present. Nostalgia and disappointment, to me, are particularly crucial in any attempt to make sense of revolution and the way it is remembered. This becomes especially important in tracing what the affective state of nostalgia erases, as Menna Agha writes (2019). Equally importantly, affective registers such as hope, joy, pleasure, care, elation, and breathlessness are also part of a felt archive of revolution, colouring moments in ways that stay with us for the rest of our lives.

5This felt archive is not simply a response to revolutionary events and their aftermath, but also productive of political, economic, and social realities. How might affective experiences be connected to acts of remembering, acts of forgetting, and the limits of the imagination around political struggles? (See for example: Ahmed 2010; Cvetkovich 2003; Halberstam 2011; Gould 2009; Stewart 2007; Navaro-Yashin 2002.) A felt archive might be one way of parsing through the feelings that are part and parcel of revolutionary struggle, whether anticolonial revolution or revolution in the present. I want to note that a felt archive need not be seen as a separate archive from other anticolonial or revolutionary archives, but rather an invitation to reframe how we think about radical archives more broadly. We might already accept that anticolonial archives make space for more transgressive and fleeting forms of remembering and recording revolution; these do not always take feelings as part of these stories, however. This piece, then, is an attempt to attend to how thinking through the idea of a felt archive and taking a multitude of affective registers seriously might gesture towards more expansive understandings of both anticolonialism and archives. In other words, revolutionary archives are always and already felt archives.

6What is promising about the invitation a felt archive extends to us is that we might capture the contradictions, impossibilities, hopes, defeats, and other feelings otherwise difficult to express; a whole range of feelings, states, and moments that might otherwise slip through. For Yael Navaro-Yashin this means studying affect in the “gaps, creaks and crevices,” working through intimacy and tension (2009). It disrupts linear narratives, which so often dominate understandings of politics in Africa and West Asia, and instead takes what Derek Gregory calls the “colonial present” seriously (2004). A felt archive allows for us to move to a form of vulnerable reading rather than to search for “hard facts” and allows us to refuse to restrict our knowledge to vaunted sources and acclaimed schools of thought and instead work to blur time and place, rather than reaffirm them. I will begin with this idea of blurring time.

I

7I find it difficult to separate revolutionary time. So much of my work has been about the revolution of 1952, and yet the revolution I lived through – 2011 – was always there in the shadows, haunting every thought or feeling I had about the past. One might imagine that it is always the past that haunts the present, but is it possible that the present can haunt the past? When I think about 1952 and what came just before and just after, I am always – consciously or unconsciously – thinking about it through 2011. What was different, and what was the same? Are there patterns, songs, images, feelings that we might see in both events, collapsing the time in between them?

8What is odd is that I can’t even remember 2011 that well. It’s blurry, clouded up. If you ask me to write down a timeline of what happened, I’m not sure I’ll be able to. I know that I remember how it felt – the hope, the fear, the disappointment, the shock, the pure joy. The academic sense-making around 2011 that happened almost as soon as the revolution began was often around political and economic questions: what did this mean for Egypt? Was it really a revolution? Had it gone far enough? I wonder if these are questions we would be able to answer even twenty years after an event.

9Elsewhere, sense-making took on a different form. Whether consciously or unconsciously, there was a lot of feeling around what happened. Each year after 2011 took on a different texture, or structure of feeling (Williams 2015). From pain and grief to exhaustion, with threads of hope in between, there was a remembering of 2011 at a visceral level.

10In 2016, my friend Noor and I went to an exhibition at the Cairo Contemporary Image Collective, Chronic. I remember this exhibition mostly through its haunting depiction of emotions. The focus of the exhibit was exhaustion as a psychological state; how to represent it, and how to make sense of it (Fayed 2016).

11I remember being struck by its focus on the psychological and the emotional, and its subtitle, exhaustion as a public state.

12In the description that I include below, the curators write that the exhibition was interested in the accumulated layers of suffering that were absent from larger historical narratives. This is what interests me, both in the past and in the present: how are accumulated layers of suffering made absent? How can archiving account for them? And should emotional states be archived?

13Chronic is the second instalment of a larger CIC project, If Not For That Wall, on different forms of imprisonment. On the Facebook event page, CIC write:

The title chronic refers to a continuous state that lasts beyond an exceptional moment in time and is complex and severe in nature. Chronic considers emotional states ranging from a diffuse sense of fatigue or sadness to the trauma of people with experience of imprisonment and the history of the struggle to open mental institutions.

Chronic tries to adopt psychological exhaustion as an entry point to read the current political and social reality and to engage with the trauma and haunting caused by conflict and forced exclusion. These accumulated layers of suffering, often absent from the larger historical narratives, echo in the psychological state of those most closely exposed to it. With Chronic we would like to propose a turn to psychology and emotions as a possibility to acknowledge what lies within and is alienated from our vision and language. (Chronic 2016).

14This exhibition is an attempt at archiving, but not in the traditional sense. It follows what Dian Million calls a felt archive or felt theory. The exhibition documents a particular feeling, exhaustion, while also theorising it. Thinking about the exhibition now and remembering how intensely I felt leaving the building four years ago, I am struck by how certain modes of capturing feelings are better able to speak to the complexity of revolutionary aftermaths.

II

15Returning to 1952, I have increasingly found it compelling to think through the particular feelings embedded within revolutionary changes. Perhaps this is unsurprising, given the collapse in time between different revolutionary events, and my own inability to separate one from the other. Here I have thought a lot with Arwa Salih’s memoir, which is haunted by its own ghosts. She makes these ghosts visible through her invocation of ghostly absences to make sense of the immediate afterlife of Egypt’s anticolonial moment. A socialist active in Egypt during the 1960s and 1970s, Salih embodied feminist, socialist and nationalist politics, particularly within Egypt’s prominent student movement. Here I attend to some of the themes of affective anticolonial politics that come up in the memoir.

16Egypt’s student movement in the 1970s was animated by the defeat of 1967 and the need to hold the government to account. Salih, a student at Cairo University, led sit-ins and was involved in various aspects of student organising. Salih’s memoir is valuable for many reasons, not least the scarcity of material we have from the 1970s student movement; indeed, Samah Selim describes it as a “secret history,” fragmented because it was underground as well as because it was what she terms “unfinished history,” (2017, ix). Salih lived her life with clinical depression and schizophrenia, and committed suicide in 1997, just after the memoir was published. Although I refer to this book as a memoir, it has been noted that it is quite difficult to classify – neither fully a memoir, nor a historical text, nor a political or sociological one, as noted by Samah Selim (2017, x); to me, it sits in between all of these. Samah Selim, who translated the memoir into English and wrote the introduction, describes the book as a “kind of haunted house” in which Salih explores the question of failure (2017, viii).

17Salih evocatively charts an affective history of Egyptian leftist politics after what she calls the historic defeat of 1967. What is notable about the ways in which she remembers the past is the recurrence of feelings in what is otherwise a text very much focused on a telling of political and economic transformation. This produces a kind of affective history of that moment, tinged with nostalgia, bitterness, tragedy, and failure.

18Nationalism is at the root of many of these meditations, as for Salih haunting is intimately and irrevocably tied to nationalism and what she calls the national struggle. The national liberation struggle, or the anticolonial movement turned postcolonial state project, is almost a character in the text, a character that is constantly present and whose presence produces a question Salih returns to again and again: what happened to the national liberation project?

19Nationalism was “the language through which we chose to read our world, our historical consciousness,” she writes (2017, 4). When Salih discusses ghosts, she refers to them as “ghosts of the nation,” underlining how central this frame was to her understanding of postcolonial Egypt. The ghost of the nation and the centrality of nationalism was often juxtaposed to class consciousness. Here we see a critique towards the left, one that claimed to be speaking for “the people” and yet that was more invested in a nationalist project that turned out to be repressive. This tension between nationalism and class politics is one that could be said to haunt the Egyptian left at other times, too.

20Much of Salih’s discussion of Nasser himself is structured by nostalgia as an affective relationship to the past. The contradiction within this is clear, given his role in imprisoning many leftists of her generation and the one before. Nostalgia is described as a coping mechanism in the text, a way of making sense of the “dark times” that came after the defeat of 1967, a time where none of their revolutionary prophecies became reality. My sense is that nostalgia is also a way of dealing with the wound created by the defeat of the left and the defeat of the nation – this way be an example of memory work as a means of responding to a painful rupture, as Behrouzan suggests (2015, 51).

21Through a focus on defeat and failure, Salih is able to evoke a visceral landscape of anticolonialism and resistance that centres the contradictions of these moments rather than produce a clear narrative of either vindication or defeat (Khanna 2020). This is despite the fact that defeat and failure loom large throughout the text, even when they are not explicitly referenced. The historic defeats of the left during both the Nasser years as well as post-1967 are central to the spectres haunting Salih, her comrades, and the text – a “rupture and a wound,” as Behrouzan might name it (2015). Tragedy similarly crops up throughout, particularly the tragedy embedded within the national liberation struggle (see: Scott 2004). Salih frames the book as one that returns to a time of defeat; this is also, however, a time when speaking of the “dreams of a nation” led to serious and passionate discussions in homes across Egypt, rather than ridicule.

The tragedy of a generation that lived the experience of rebellion is that no matter where each individual ended up, whether they took the safe path or the path of remorse, they can never go back to being the person they were before the rapture took them. They can never be free of the memory of that magnificent moment of transgression, of freedom; of a lightness whose beauty is almost unbearable (Salih 2017, 142).

22Here we see echoes of what Behrouzan sees in her work on Iran, where the Iranians she spoke with understood their individual memories and feelings as “anchored in the shared experiences of a collective ‘we’” (Behrouzan 2015, 45). This in turn did the political work of creating a sense of generation brought together through “ruptures and wounds” that are created through traumatic events (Behrouzan 2015, 51). Personal tragedy is not exempt from this; as Selim notes, “the ghosts of Salih’s own experience as a woman militant are visible,” and there is a strong critique of love, the family, and marriage in leftist circles (2017, xxii).

23Although defeat is a recurrent word in the text, and although sections of it read as defeated, I would argue that the text as a whole complicates the idea of defeat and failure precisely because emotions such as hope, collectivity and promise are present as well, not to mention light, beauty, and dreaming. There are also powerful ruminations on communism, important to note in the wake of the neoliberal era which was just beginning after 1967. Salih writes:

Communism gave order and intelligibility to a world that never appeared to me to be just or logical, a place of boundless suffering…I’m still not one of those so-called ‘disillusioned’ Marxists. They never felt it or tried to live the truth of it. For them – those dogmatic friends with whom we wasted the most important years of our lives – Marxism was just an easy key to conquest. I still believe deeply in the truth of Marxism (2017, 116).

24Here we see a conviction that Marxism is something to be felt and lived, not simply understood theoretically or textually. This feeling produces suffering, produces failure, maybe even hopelessness, but for her, it is a truth that remains, regardless of what happens politically. These fragments in the text bring to the centre experiences of feelings, moments of hopefulness. Perhaps this is most clear when she calls her generation “the dreamers,” dedicating the book to them and their hopes and dreams (2017, 141). “Their [the seventies generation] dream of changing the world was a luxury denied to later generations,” she writes, unaware of what was to come in 2011 (2017, 141).

III

25Lisa Lowe has noted the importance of imagining what could have been, as it pushes us to begin from a different starting point: “A thinking with a twofold attention that seeks to encompass at once the positive objects and methods of history and social science, and also the matters absent, entangled and unavailable by its methods,” (2015, 40-41 emphasis in original). There has been much work that has explored what is absent when we use only the positive objects and methods of history and social science, and the entanglements and realities this erases. In reading Arwa Salih, I was reminded of this invitation from Lisa Lowe to think about what could have been as similarly something that is absent, unavailable. I am also reminded of Chronic’s invitation to think about the accumulated layers of suffering that are absent from larger historical narratives.

26Affective fragments such as Salih’s memoir are part of our inheritance, even as they grapple with the heaviness of that inheritance. Inheritance is a difficult frame to escape from when it comes to the left. Samah Selim touches on the ambivalence of inheritance, the heaviness of it as it passes down from one generation to the next:

Legacies are ambivalent things. The hundreds of thousands of young men and women who took the streets in 2011 were also haunted by the ghosts of the past; their language, their songs and symbols, their remembering of bygone battles all drew on a history rich with the struggle for freedom. And yet that moment of unbearable lightness was also followed by utter ruin on a new and perhaps unprecedented scale. And so the same questions will surely return to haunt this generation as it did the ones before: Who were we? What was our experience? How do we assess the truth of who we used to be? (2017, xxvii)

27This inheritance, however, is not just a story about the past and a warning about the future. These fragments produce a form of politics in and of themselves, a politics of both hope and hopelessness, exhaustion, a politics of questioning. In Chronic, we see an attempt to archive exhaustion while simultaneously questioning what archiving does. In the end, we are left with powerful fragments that speak to fleeting yet heavy emotional states.

28These fragments, in both the memoir and exhibition, also point to something else: the urgency of bearing witness. Stefania Pandolfo asks: “What does it mean to tell the truth? To bear witness to the lives and deaths of others, to struggle, to pain, to revolution? To bear witness to the dead, the disappeared, including them in one’s address, in the name of the living?” (Pandolfo 2018, 27) In contemporary Egypt, we see the upheaval of witnessing a revolution and its violent aftermath; to the pain caused by incessant political and economic violence that have left few unscathed. Bearing witness to violence, especially when it is directed at those closest to you, is a costly act, and yet one that remains important in the face of attempts to rewrite the history of the revolution. This is what the memoir and exhibition do, too: they bear witness to this violence, leaving us unsettled.

IV

29In a beautiful piece published to mark the ten-year anniversary of the January 25 revolution, Alia Mossallam writes about the “permanent temporariness” that has come to mark the years since, gifting us with yet another way of thinking about revolutionary time. “Comrades became friends, friends became family. The bond between us is one that is cemented by a dream of a possible world. A world so beautiful, perhaps, that we couldn’t have achieved it,” (2021).

30Reading for fragments of feeling lays bare the limits of the possible at a time of extreme and excessive violence. The fragments raise questions around what it means to do any type of political work during moments of emotional exhaustion. The affective states of hopelessness or an inability to make sense of events are not simply responses to what is perceived as a failed revolution, nor simply ethereal emotions that have no bearing on material politics. For Salih’s generation – the generation of dreamers who experienced defeat – there was a clear form of withdrawal that we see throughout the early 1980s and 1990s. For us today, the urgency of bearing witness seems to clash with the quietness of withdrawing, of abandoning politics and all the dreams that came with 2011. And yet, always below the surface, we hear the call of “the dream of a possible world.”