Disappointed Hope: Reimagining Resistance in the Wake of the Egyptian Revolution

Ten years after the revolutionary upheaval, the Arab Spring in Egypt has come to signify a betrayed promise of liberation, repudiating the feasibility of resistance against oppression. Against the fatalist narratives of the uprising, I examine the politically transformative potential of disappointment. I draw on Ernst Bloch’s notion of educated hope and recent interventions in utopian studies to interrogate how resisters can reconfigure their horizon of hope in response to disappointment. I argue that the resisters’ grappling with their disappointment can redirect their hope toward a persistent striving for greater freedom and justice that is based on a concrete negotiation of the possibilities for action and willing to bear the risk of failure. I develop the political relevance of disappointed hope through a selected firsthand account of the Arab Spring uprising in Egypt, Cairo: Memoir of a City Transformed, written by a prominent Egyptian activist and writer Ahdaf Soueif.