Alexandria’s Colonial Cosmopolitanism

Alexandria is a colonial cosmopolitan city whose colonial status sets it apart from the cosmopolitanism of European and American cities. Since its inception in the 3rd century, BCE, Alexandria’s cosmopolitanism emerged from and was shaped by colonial practices, institutions, and influences, a long history that produced three major cosmopolitan subjects – colonial, settler, and native – whose different subjectivities and interactions demonstrate the complementary and entangled relationship between nationalism and cosmopolitanism. This project focuses on two British and two Egyptian novels set in Alexandria between 1930 and 1955 during the heyday of the city’s 20th-century colonial cosmopolitanism and examines the different ways each novel presents the interplay of cosmopolitanism, colonialism, and nationalism.