From Cairo, Jonathan focused on examining connections between cultural currents and political change across the region. He has been living and working in Egypt since 2012, where he is a contributing editor of the Cairo Review of Global Affairs, a policy journal published by the American University in Cairo. From 2012 to 2013, he was a Fulbright fellow researching political cartoons in Egypt. He previously served as a program associate for the New America Foundation’s Middle East Task Force in Washington, DC, and as assistant editor of Foreign Policy’s Middle East Channel. A frequent analyst on Public Radio International, he has contributed to Guernica, Harper’s, Modern Painters, The New York Review Daily, The New Yorker, The Paris Review Daily, New York Magazine, Nieman Reports, and others. His research on Egyptian satire has been cited by the Associated Press, CNN, The Economist, The Nation, New Statesman, Reuters, and TIME, as well a variety of international news outlets. A cartoonist himself, he blogs about Arabic comics and caricature at oumcartoon.tumblr.com.
Nationalism for Kids: How Egyptian Comics Teach Conflict
I presented a version of this paper in February at “Framing War and Conflict in Comics,” the second annual Symposium on Arab Comics at the American University of Beirut. When General Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi ran for the Egyptian presidency in the spring of 2014, the children’s magazine Samir published a stoic caricature of him its cover. This ...
Remembering Alexandria’s Visionary
In my first piece for the New York Times, I write an homage to the great Alexandrian scholar Mostafa el-Abbadi, who passed away in February. Several obituaries of el-Abbadi appeared in Egyptian newspapers, but most merely consisted of his curriculum vitae. No remembrance captured his colorful disposition and feisty erudition, let alone his ambivalent relationship ...
Jonathan Guyer Published in Rolling Stone
Drawing on research from his ICWA Fellowship, Fellow Jonathan Guyer’s current feature in Rolling Stone explains how a young Egyptian writer ended up on the wrong side of the law. “Inside the Strange Saga of a Cairo Novelist Imprisoned for Obscenity” investigates the case of Ahmed Naji, a thirty-year-old writer whose struggle reveals the state of culture, law ...
At the Cairo Book Fair
“Cairo writes, Beirut publishes, and Baghdad reads,” goes the adage. At the Cairo International Book Fair, where hundreds of publishers and thousands of readers gather each winter, everybody writes, publishes, and reads. While the sclerotic institutions of state-funded culture remain conservative forces with an outsized role in Egyptian letters, independent publishers continue to push the limits ...
At Last, Alexandria
One “is either a Cairo person—Arab, Islamic, serious, international, intellectual—or an Alexandria amateur—Levantine, cosmopolitan, devious, and capricious,” the scholar Edward Said once wrote. I must be both. Over the past decade, I have had a love affair with Alexandria. Exit from the train station, and pop into a little toy taxi, a Russian-made Lada, that bounces ...