Urban Melodrama

This visual research workshop explores how Egyptian television, particularly the 1980s-1990s dramas, shaped an urban imaginary that imbues nostalgia with questions of national identity and middle-class morality. It analyzes popular television dramas using theories from cultural studies and methodically reconstructs them through Critical Fabulations. It interrogates how melodrama transformed the materialist neoliberal crises of the city into cautionary tales about reform, belonging, and public morals, thereby displacing questions of political representation and class struggle with identity politics. The workshop combines media analysis with co- watching and rescripting exercises that aim at reimaging the city from the vantage point of the forgotten.

Instructor