1 - Hegemony in the Postcolony?

Summary

The chapter returns to travelling theory on the one hand and stretching Marxism on the other, unpacking them and connecting them to threads and concepts in Gramsci and Fanon’s work. The main focus of the chapter is on debates around hegemony by producing a genealogy of the concept both in Marxism and as in debates on its application to the postcolonial world. On the one hand, I engage with the Subaltern School and Frantz Fanon and the ways in which they articulate the question of hegemony and colonial rule. Following the Subaltern School and Fanon, I show why hegemony in postcolonial contexts, in contrast to Western contexts, is dependent on the transnational and why an international lens is thus central to understanding political change in countries such as Egypt. It is for this reason that a change in Egypt’s – and other postcolonial nations’ – positions vis-à-vis the international and capitalist development is necessary for meaningful independence. To contextualize this debate, I look specifically at the founding of Bank Misr in the 1920s, revisiting a debate about foreign capital and national capitalists in Egypt.