Under these pressures, Egyptians tried to identify what they valued in their cultural and political lives, as well as what had to be reformed. This required naming Egyptian culture: what was indigenous and what was for- eign, what was “national” and what was alien. As Benedict Anderson describes it, Egyptians in the 1870s were beginning the process of imagin- ing their community, and they were using newspapers, short stories, and plays to do it. These became tools with which to create identifiably Egyp- tian characters, whose accents, expressions, and circumstances—though usually rendered in symbolic, almost stereotypic, terms—became emblems of Egyptian social and cultural unity. … But differing somewhat from writers of other cultures included in Anderson’s brilliant presentation of the birth of literature among colonized peoples of the nineteenth century, Egyptian writers existed in a greater colonialist limbo: not yet independent from the Ottoman Empire, but not quite colonized by Great Britain. Furthermore, Anderson posits that this adoption of print media was an expression of cul- tural revolution and anti-imperialism among the colonized. In Egypt, how- ever, the artists and writers who were helping to fashion this imagined com- munity were themselves parading Egyptian society along a very traditional stage. Their characters were locked into a recognizable series of linguistic, stereotypical tics. Perhaps this made it easier for them to be imagined.

Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Coloni…, loc. 351