Atef Shahat Said’s forthcoming book, Revolution Squared: Tahrir, Political Possibilities, and Counterrevolution in Egypt, will be published next month (December 2023) and is the thirty-second Duke University Press title that Southwest Humanities has copy-edited and indexed. Said’s careful examination of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution draws on both historical analysis and his own participation in the events, highlighting the significance of Tahrir Square and other spaces around Egypt, as well as the role of social media in the revolution. Central to the book’s argument is the notion of lived contingency, which describes how “revolutionary actors experience the revolution in terms of the actions they do or do not take,” allowing the author to show how Egyptians made sense of what was possible during the upheaval. “Contrary to retrospective accounts and counterrevolutionary thought, Said argues that the Egyptian Revolution was not doomed to defeat. Rather, he demonstrates that Egyptians did not fully grasp their immense clout and that limited reformist demands reduced the revolution’s potential for transformation.” For more information about this title, please see the publisher’s website here.
SOUTHWEST HUMANITIES 