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"Workers Resting: Reclaiming Rest and Idleness as Resistance in Modern Egyptian Art and Politics"
MIT Thresholds 53, eds. Mingjia Chen and Joshua Tan, Cambridge, MA, USA, 2025
Anchored in Hamed Owais’s 1975 canvas Workers Resting, this essay tracks how Egyptian art moved from Orientalist caricatures of Arab idleness to nationalist images that yoked leisure to state-led productivity, and finally to Owais’s quiet counter-gesture of collective sleep. By placing the painting beside colonial bathhouse fantasies, Nasser-era youth-camp photographs, and a century of strike histories, it shows how rest itself became a contested arena of anti-colonial and class politics. Owais’s intertwined labourers recast exhaustion as solidarity and subtle defiance, exposing the unfinished struggle for dignity that still shapes Egypt’s contemporary working conditions.
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Criticism & Academic Writing