Shared margins : an ethnography with writers in Alexandria after the revolution Frontmatter Contents Acknowledgments On names pronouns and spelling List of illustrations Map of Alexandria Introduction: Where is Literature Part I: About writing 1 Why write and why not stop 2 Infrastructures of imagination 3 The writing of lives Part II: Writing about 4 Can poetry change the world 5 Where is Alexandria 6 Writing on walls 7 Is prose poetry a conspiracy against the Noble Qurʾan 8 The search for a clear vision Afterword: On exiles and alternatives Bibliography Shared Margins tells of writers writing and literary milieus in Alexandria Egypts second city. It de centres cosmopolitan avant gardes and secular revolutionary aesthetics that have been intensively documented and studied since 2011. Instead it offers a fieldwork based account of various milieus and styles and their common grounds and lines of division. Structured in two parts Shared Margins gives an account of literature as a social practice embedded in milieus that at once enable and limit literary imagination and of a life worldly experience of plurality in absence of pluralism that marks literary engagements with the intimate and social realities of Alexandria after 2011. Literary writing this book argues has marginality as an at once enabling and limiting condition. It provides shared spaces of imaginary excess that may go beyond the taken for granted of a societal milieu and yet are never unlimited. Literary imagination is part and parcel of such social conflicts and transformations its role being neither one of resistance against power nor of guidance towards norms but rather one of open ended complicity