


































Sounds of Counter/Revolution

Review by Jessica Winegar.

Malmström, Maria Frederika. 2019. The Streets Are Talking to Me: Affective Fragments in Sisi’s 
Egypt. Oakland, California: University of California Press. 

One of my most powerful memories of being in Egypt during the 2011 uprisings is of hearing 
street battles outside my apartment building, sticking my head out the window, and feeling and 
hearing what I could have sworn was a bullet fly past my head. Until reading The Streets Are 
Talking to Me by Maria Malmström, it was difficult to understand this moment, and more 
importantly its embodied memory, other than through the lens of fear. In its focus on affect, 
embodiment, and materialities, Maria Malmström’s book offers a relatively unique perspective 
on the uprisings and their aftermath—much different than the recent spate of articles which try to 
take stock of the decade since the so-called Arab spring by trying to ascertain “what went wrong” 
in terms of formal politics. This focus allows her to show how dramatic political transformations 
are created and managed through a complex relationship between the senses, the body, and the 
material world. Her focus is Egypt, where millions of people forced the overthrow of President 
Hosni Mubarak only to, just a couple years later, embrace the rise of a new military strongman: 
Abd al-Fattah al-Sisi. Malmström shows the critical role played by affect and materialities in this 
transition and its aftermath. Through a sensitive methodology of affect and keen attention to how 
it becomes both embodied and embedded in materialities, she is able to grasp how people are 
able to build intimacy during moments of political transition. But she also provides unique 
insight into how other cleavages get built precisely through the senses and materialities. The 
book excels in its aim to show “how materialities and affect have contributed to an exaggerated 
sense of displacement, uncertainty, and tension in Egypt, as well as to a collective and individual 
loss of hope for an imagined new national home” (p. 6). This is a brave and unconventional book 
that opens pathways for understanding political dramas that shape personal senses of belonging.

Malmström primarily engages the literatures on affect and new materialisms, along with theories 
of gender/sexuality and nationhood, to explore various aspects of the uprising and its aftermath. 
These are gathered under the theme of “fragments,” as the title of the book indicates. The author 
adopts this approach due to the fact that security threats in Egypt prevented researchers from 
doing more “structured kind[s] of inquiry” (p. 4). In a mode that we might consider as allied with 
the new methodological and theoretical approach of “patchwork ethnography,”1 Malmström 
examines “fragments of events and attempts to understand the sensory experiences that are 
bound together in them” (p. 4).



 
In Chapter 1, she explores the fragments of events that caused injury to the bodies of protestors, 
revealing how the injured body produces emotional responses that track with the rhythm of 
political life in Egypt. She focuses on the story of an interlocutor who was one of the many 
Egyptians who lost an eye as a result of birdshot from state security to argue that “bodily 
memories of trauma” are still present and can be activated and deactivated, acting in a way like 
an “embodied archive” (p. 34). Future researchers could further explore what might cause such 
activation—for example a particular smell, sound, or sight while moving through urban space. 
Chapter 2 mainly focuses on violent events in the 2011 uprisings as connected to passionate love, 
but also shame, grief, fear, and rage. We encounter how desire (even sexual) between 
revolutionaries ebbs and flows with violent events, how people make sense of the violence done 
to bodies, and how love for each other and love for a homeland can suddenly disappear due to 
events and feel like the ultimate loss. Chapters 3 through 5 present a compelling account of the 
vibrational intensities caused by sounds and silences in the intense summer of 2013, marked as it 
was by mass protests to overthrow then-president Muhammad Morsy, curfews that emptied the 
streets, and then the state’s massacre of the opposing protestors in Rabaa and Nahda Squares. 
These chapters powerfully show how public intimacies are created through sensory engagement 
with events, and how the project of re-establishing regime power after 2011 was also an affective 
one that mobilized fear (e.g., through the smell of teargas and the sound of military jets) as well 
as love (e.g., through sensory apprehensions of Sisi as a sexy, handsome and benevolent ruler). 
Chapter 4 in particular is a poetic reading of the Rabaa massacre through the things forcibly left 
behind and images of them.

The weakest aspect of the book is not necessarily the fault of the author. That is, affect itself can 
be hard to ascertain, particularly for an anthropologist trying to locate it somewhere in a 
particular person or in a social phenomenon. Putting such non-discursive senses and energies 
into the discourse of a text, or the structure of analysis, is an additional challenge. Malmström’s 
creative writing style and clear sensitivity as an ethnographer help to address these challenges, as 
does her insistence on studying the “forces of affect through their effects” (p. 9), but at times one 
is left wondering if her interlocutors really felt the affect she attributes to them. Also, the analysis 
is often in separate sections from the ethnography, which can allow the ethnography to breathe 
on its own but also occasionally makes for a disjointed text and reproduce distinctions between 
analysis and ethnography that might be productive to challenge.

This book will appeal to anthropologists working on affective materiality, as well as to those 
seeking to bring such a lens onto dramatic political transformation. The book is written in an 
engaging style, rich with affect. The book contains fascinating ethnographic anecdotes, felt 
reflections on events and exchanges by the author, long stretches of elicited testimony from 
interlocutors, and compelling photographs that highlight different materialities. Thus, it might 
interest those seeking to explore less formal modes of ethnographic writing and presentation. 
Malmström also frequently reflects on the relationship between the researcher and interlocutors, 
and advocates “collaborative research as a tool” (p. 11). These reflections on and attempts to 
reshape fieldwork could be interesting to students of anthropology as well as those looking to 
shift their methodologies. 



The main takeaway from this book is that the Egyptian revolution (and perhaps all dramatic 
uprisings) live on in embodied memories and sensory affects. Therefore, the book actually gives 
lie to its title: perhaps Egypt is not Sisi’s after all. 

Jessica Winegar is the author of Creative Reckonings: The Politics of Art and Culture in 
Contemporary Egypt (Stanford, 2006), and co-author, with Lara Deeb, of Anthropology’s 
Politics: Discipline and Region through the Lens of the Middle East (Stanford, 2015).

 © 2021 Jessica Winegar



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� https://www.patchworkethnography.com/


