[Images collected of a lantern produced in the likeness of president SISI. The lantern is a traditional object of Ramadan religious celebration, often made of stained glass and tin. This made in china version was commissioned by an Egyptian businessman who saw an opportunity to create a toy that he could profit from under the current political climate.]

Nasser’s utopian vision of victory and power was eventually shattered and his successor, Sadat, facilitated an open-market or infitah that introduced foreign and local private investment and eventually led the way to liberal-capitalism during the Mubarak era. The disintegration of socialism challenged the mass-democratic myth of industrial modernity, which caused both marketing strategies and political rhetoric to be shaped by appealing to differences and distinctions between people. Today’s world has transformed from the precise definitions and binaries of modernism into a “rhizomatic” or “horizontal globalized latticework of cybernetic information transfer and economic connectivity”. This “deterritorialization” or the “fluid and dissipated schizophrenic nature of human subjectivity” in contemporary capitalist cultures was the price of post-modernism permitting the distinctions between high art and mass/popular culture to fade.

Representations of nationalism can also be viewed from this lens beginning with the traditional territorial nationalism of the 1920s, moving to a modernist era of industrialization in the 1950s and progressing into the deterritorialized, hyper-real world of commodification. In this stage, value is derived from symbolic and often irrational associations where simulacra of nationalism are no longer accurate or consistent representations of history. These expired, overused and tattered symbols of glory and patriotism become monumental fragments of collective memory, appropriated and reformulated by the mass media and popular culture.