ABSTRACT
Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of the field of cultural production provides a useful model for looking at the dialectical relationship between the literary margin and mainstream in 1960s Egypt. 1 The field consists of a network of objective relations between positions of occupants, agents and institutions. These positions are defined by their present and potential situation in the structure of the distribution of power (capital, in this case literary recognition and success), the possession of which governs access to the specific profits at stake in the field. Field is a more inclusive concept than market and therefore better suited to the mapping of Egypt’s avant-gardists, for it suggests hierarchy and status as well as the commercial relations between buyers and sellers and therefore becomes the arena of a struggle for legitimation. It is an open concept emphasizing the social, rather than the merely intellectual, conditions of struggle that shape cultural production. Positions in the field are defined by their relation to other positions: domination in the case of the literary establishment (the Ministry of Culture, its journals and publishing houses and its Writers’ Union: ‘the curators of culture’), and subordination in the case of avant-garde 1960s writers (‘the creators of culture’).
