{"word_count": 221, "character_count": 1540}
Working Out Egypt: Effendi Masculinity and Subject Formation in Colonial Modernity, 1870–1940Working Out Egypt is both a rich cultural history of the  formation of an Egyptian national subject in the late nineteenth century  and early twentieth and a compelling critique of modern Middle Eastern  historiography. Wilson Chacko Jacob describes how Egyptian men of a  class akin to the cultural bourgeoisie (the effendiyya) struggled to  escape from the long shadow cast by colonial depictions of the East as  degenerate, feminine, and temporally behind an active and virile Europe.  He argues that during British colonial rule (1882–1936), attempts to  create a distinctively modern and Egyptian self free from the colonial  gaze led to the formation of an ambivalent, performative subjectivity  that he calls “effendi masculinity.” Jacob traces effendi masculinity as  it took hold during the interwar years, in realms from scouting and  competitive sports to sex talk and fashion, considering its gendered  performativity in relation to a late-nineteenth-century British  discourse on masculinity and empire and an explicitly nationalist  discourse on Egyptian masculinity. He contends that as an assemblage of  colonial modernity, effendi masculinity was simultaneously local and  global, national and international, and particular and universal. Until  recently, modern Egyptian history has not allowed for such paradoxes;  instead, Egyptian modernity has been narrated in the temporal and  spatial terms of a separate Western modernity.