Modern Pharaonism and the Deconstruction of Egyptian National Identity

Egyptians presently find themselves at a critical geographic, economic, and sociopolitical juncture that is played out discursively in responses to border politics, migration, dispossession, and economic crisis. Studies of Egyptian nationalism across decades and in recent years have emphasized the impact of national identity formation through militarism, popular revolution, and anti-colonialism on the production of modern citizenship narratives. At the same time, recent decades have seen different configurations of Egyptian nationalism through the multi-dimensional discourse of Pharaonism, an ideology that draws from European Egyptology, Egyptian militarism, and the various conflicts that arise from frictions between culture, religion, and regional politics. These arguments can be recalled and modified to describe more recent narratives of citizenship and belonging that center ancient and historic claims to land, especially in the context of nationalist responses to refugees and migrants arriving in Egypt from neighboring countries (Sudan, Palestine, Somalia, Syria, and Eritrea as main examples). Such narratives come at a point of great material and political uncertainty in Egypt, and wherein claims to land are repeatedly and often violently contested by the Egyptian state. A question arises: how is the Egyptian media and state's framing of the so-called refugee crisis co-constitutive of modern Egyptian nationalist citizenship, and how is it linked with Pharaonism as a nationalist ideology that pulls from a complicated collective memory of the land and its imagined histories? I explore this by analyzing data from news articles, online posts, and interviews with individuals who work with migrants and refugees in Egypt, applying frame analysis as the primary framework for understanding how fraught histories and their associated memories can lead to discursive battlefields where modern citizens of an "ancient land" play out their existential uncertainties, which may lead to scapegoating vulnerable populations to manage these conflicts.