ABSTRACT
An ambiguous nostalgia for a bygone cosmopolitan era is shared by many Arabic-speaking inhabitants of Alexandria today, a time when the city is undergoing a rapid transformation in a sweeping movement of demolition and expansion. Living in a city that is marked by erasures of its own past and constant conflicts about where and what kind of a city it is, many Alexandrian writers of poetry and prose are debating and disagreeing which neighbourhoods of the city are suited to telling the story of Alexandria. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with contemporary Alexandrian writers and literary circles, this chapter argues that different myths of the city, and especially the way they often single out specific neighbourhoods as the real city and exclude others as an anti-city, are worth taking seriously as ethnographic theories of Alexandria, in particular, and 21st-century urbanity in general.
