Salwa El-Shawan Castelo-Branco, founder and President Emeritus of INET-md, authors the chapter “Performing Soviet Cultural Diplomacy: ‘Western Art Music’ and Musicians in Cairo 1955-1970“, included in the book Music and Cultural Diplomacy in the Middle East: Geopolitical Re-Configurations for the 21st Century (Palgrave MacMillan, 2024), edited by Maria M. Rijo Lopes da Cunha, Jonathan Shannon, Søren Møller Sørensen and Virginia Danielson.
Abstract:
This chapter discusses Soviet cultural diplomacy in postcolonial Egypt between 1955 and 1970 as a discursive field of action in which “soft power” was deployed through an assemblage of cultural activities carried out through Soviet and Egyptian state institutions. Taking into account the agentive power of individuals and of cultural exchange, it focuses on Soviet cultural diplomacy as it played out in two institutional sites: the Soviet Cultural Center in Cairo, and the Cairo National Conservatory. The author argues that the strategies implemented by Soviet cultural diplomacy configured a new cosmopolitan dynamic, where the agentive power of cultural exchange, and new artistic networks developed, largely replacing the European cosmopolitan formation that had thrived in Cairo and Alexandria within a colonial framework from the late-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. The author also contends that this new dynamic enabled the accomplishment of some of the goals of the state’s cultural policy, transforming the lives of leading musical institutions and the careers of many musicians, and configuring a legacy that has endured through cultural practices and collective memory well beyond the formal severing of the Soviet-Egyptian alliance in 1972.