Book ID: CBB001450221

On Time: Technology and Temporality in Modern Egypt (2013)

unapi

Barak, On (Author)


University of California Press


Publication Date: 2013
Physical Details: xiii + 341 pp.; ill.
Language: English

In this pioneering history of transportation and communication in the modern Middle East, On Barak argues that contrary to accepted wisdom technological modernity in Egypt did not drive a sense of time focused on standardization only. Surprisingly, the introduction of the steamer, railway, telegraph, tramway, and telephone in colonial Egypt actually triggered the development of unique timekeeping practices that resignified and subverted the typical modernist infatuation with expediency and promptness. These countertempos, predicated on uneasiness over dehumanizing European standards of efficiency, sprang from and contributed to non-linear modes of arranging time. Barak shows how these countertempos formed and developed with each new technological innovation during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, contributing to a particularly Egyptian sense of time that extends into the present day, exerting influence over contemporary political language in the Arab world. The universal notion of a modern mechanical standard time and the deviations supposedly characterizing non-Western settings from time immemorial, On Time provocatively argues, were in fact mutually constitutive and mutually reinforcing.

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Reviewed By

Review Arnold, David (2014) Review of "On Time: Technology and Temporality in Modern Egypt". Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences (pp. 447-448). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001450221/

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Authors & Contributors
Skeehan, Danielle C.
Davids, Karel
Shibusawa, Naoko
Peterson, Maya Karin
Mitchell, Michele
Miescher, Stephan F.
Concepts
Cross-cultural interaction; cultural influence
Colonialism
Imperialism
Cross-cultural comparison
Technology and culture
Medicine
Time Periods
19th century
20th century
18th century
17th century
16th century
Early modern
Places
Egypt
India
Vietnam
Southeast Asia
Africa
Atlantic world
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