Gazing at Egypt's museums: toward a new internationalism

Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to examine the transformation of the concept of cultural tourism within the sociopolitical empowerments, changes of visual realms and normative contexts, which is embedded within museums as institutions.

Design/methodology/approach

These discussions will be conceptualized through investigating the shifts in the metamorphosis of the architectural vocabulary of Egypt's museums between nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This analysis will be highlighted through connecting both the notion of the “tourist reflexivity” of John Urry and Jonas Larsen in The Tourist Gaze 3.0 (2011) and the notion of the “interstitial spaces” and “new internationalism” of Homi Bhabha in The Location of Culture (1994). The analysis expands to interrogate these two notions as prelude for reflecting on representations of colonial and postcolonial museums in Egypt, starting from the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities, Cairo (c. 1863) to the most recent, the Egyptian Grand Museum, Cairo (c. 2002).

Findings

The analysis revealed that while colonial museums endeavored to stage external cultural authority and postcolonial ones staged traditions' liminality through “New internationalism”, they created spatiotemporal interstices. This finding, while is a timely example with the rising global cultural encounters that emerged during this transformative age, it challenges the collective imaginations of architects to liberate from traditional nationalism.

Originality/value

The paper offers novel theoretical and architectural analysis of Egypt's museums through the exigency of nationalism and “new internationalism”. The encounter between both notions is a timely example given the recent involvements by the “Modern State” and the recent pandemic upheaval that revealed the inevitability of globalism and the discursivity of such notions.

Citation

El-Ashmouni, M.M. (2021), "Gazing at Egypt's museums: toward a new internationalism", Archnet-IJAR, Vol. 15 No. 3, pp. 823-838. https://doi.org/10.1108/ARCH-10-2020-0214