Wilson Chacko Jacob Working Out Egypt sku-218375684

Working Out Egypt: Effendi Masculinity and Subject Formation in Colonial Modernity, 1870–1940 is a hardcover Middle Eastern History Books title by Wilson Chacko Jacob. The book examines the formation of an Egyptian national subject in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and critiques accounts of modern Middle Eastern history.

Jacob describes how effendiyya men responded to colonial depictions of the East as degenerate, feminine, and behind Europe. He argues that under British colonial rule from 1882 to 1936, efforts to define a modern Egyptian self produced what he calls "effendi masculinity."

He traces it through interwar scouting, competitive sports, discussions of sex, and fashion, relating it to British ideas of masculinity and empire and to Egyptian nationalist discourse. Jacob describes effendi masculinity as at once local and global, national and international, particular and universal, challenging histories that treat Egyptian modernity as separate from Western modernity.

SKU sku-218375684.