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Egypt: Military Society - Anouar Abdel-Malek - Shelfwright Shelfwright - Commonwealth of Virginia Egypt: Military Society The Army Regime, the Left, and Social Change Under Nasser Anouar Abdel-Malek · translated by Charles Lam Markmann - Vintage Books, September 1968 First Vintage Edition, 1968 Published in French 1962 Nasser-Era Egypt from the Egyptian Left Softcover
Anouar Abdel-Malek was an Egyptian Marxist who studied at the Sorbonne, joined the Democratic Movement for National Liberation, and then found himself on the wrong side of the Free Officers. The regime that came out of the 1952 revolution had no use for the independent Egyptian left, and Abdel-Malek spent the rest of his life in France, eventually at the national research council in Paris. Égypte, société militaire appeared there in 1962: an analysis of the Nasser state written by an Egyptian who had been pushed out of it, examining how an army seized a country, what it did with the land and the factories once it had, and where the left fit in a revolution that did not especially want one.
Vintage brought it into English in September 1968, which is the interesting part of the publishing history. Fifteen months earlier the Egyptian army had been destroyed in six days. American readers who had spent a decade watching Nasser as the face of Arab nationalism suddenly wanted to know what the machinery actually looked like from the inside, and here was a book that had been explaining it since 1962, by a man with no reason to flatter anyone. Charles Lam Markmann did the translation; the year before, he had put Frantz Fanon\'s Black Skin, White Masks into English.
Worth Knowing
In 1963, one year after this book appeared in French, Abdel-Malek published an essay in Diogenes called \"Orientalism in Crisis,\" arguing that the whole Western apparatus for studying the East had been built on colonial foundations and could not survive the independence of the countries it studied. That is the argument Edward Said made famous in Orientalism fifteen years later, and Said quoted Abdel-Malek directly in his opening chapter, naming him alongside Fanon and Césaire. The critique everyone associates with 1978 was in print, in French, in 1963, by the author of this book.
Condition
- Softcover. First Vintage Books edition, September 1968. Originally published in French as Égypte, société militaire, 1962
- Translated by Charles Lam Markmann
- Great shape overall; some wear to the covers
- Binding sound, text block clean
- Overall: Very Good
Shipping
Shipped via USPS Media Mail in a protective mailer. Ships from the Commonwealth of Virginia within 2 business days of payment.
All sales final. No returns accepted. Shelfwright.com The copy pictured is the exact copy you will receive
