ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to grasp the ways in which recent Anglophone writers from Egypt use the English language to tease out, and at times pathologize or even unlock, its uneasy encounter with all things local, vernacular, and national in the context of the Arab Spring uprisings. By proposing the concept of an Anglophone imaginary, the chapter argues that the English language and its associated Anglophonic cultural capital in the two texts selected for analysis – Saleem Haddad’s Guapa (2016), and Bassem Youssef’s Revolution for Dummies (2017) – manifest themselves as heuristic literary devices that lend deeper insights into the crimes committed in the name of local, vernacular, and national identities. By Anglophone imaginary, we refer not only to the signification of English at the lexical or metaphorical level but also to a certain cultural capital attached to such linguistic and symbolic heritage typically associated with, or pitted against, the local, the vernacular, and the national – Arabic. An Anglophone imaginary, in that sense, operates as an inside out perspective of the vernacular contexts in question, in which a certain detachment from the latter into a world of Anglophone metaphors, symbols, and structures of expression lends itself to a distanced perspective of the familiar and the fraternal.
