I started this book with a scene of youth frantically cleaning slogans off fences on Tahrir Square in the immediate aftermath of President Husni Mubarak's resignation; I argued that, as it encapsulated the politics of erasure at work in the memory of the 2011 revolution, the scene could help us imagine how the traces of another revolution were lost and erased, decade after decade. It remained present in my mind while I was reading and watching the literary and cinematic narratives dealing with the 1919 anti-colonial revolution in Egypt that constitute the corpus of this book. I systematically tried to locate what exactly had been silenced, and why.

The answer to these two questions, however, is not straightforward. There are as many ways of narrating 1919 as there are authors, obviously, but also as there are changing political, economic and cultural contexts. One of the main postulates of this book is that ‘every present invents its own past’ (Spiropoulou 2015: 119). 1919 was articulated differently in 1924, 1964, and 2014; yet, a dominant imaginary about this revolutionary moment emerges beyond this diversity, shaped through processes of remembering and forgetting coined by successive political and cultural elites.

Canonical novels and films played a central role in this process, presenting 1919 as a key moment for the creation of a modern Egyptian nation and describing the male middle class as leading the revolution, thus marginalising the role of women and underprivileged actors from both urban and rural backgrounds.

This male middle class storyline, however, which has remained dominant until today, is challenged in a wide range of literary narratives about the 1919 revolution. Those novels, plays and short-stories, examined in this book, each question the dominant narrative configurations in which 1919 is enshrined by enlarging the restricted space and time frame beyond Cairo in Spring 1919 and challenging the characterisation of the effendi as the main actor of the revolution, either by turning him into an impotent figure, or by replacing him with underprivileged actors from rural or urban backgrounds. The tone used to celebrate the 1919 demonstrations demanding Saad Zaghlul's liberation is either railed at or used to describe the social dynamics of the revolution. Women from diverse class backgrounds are given a more strategic role than the one they are relegated to in the iconic photographs of the revolution.