Egypt was the dominant player in the Arab cultural field for most of the 20th century. Buoyed by its demographics and the intellectual vigor of its elites, Cairo produced since the first half of the 20th century modern literature and critical discourse, pictorial arts, music, theater, Arab radio and cinema. Egypt exported its cultural  model and its language to the Arabic-speaking world. This hegemony has now partly faded: a major challenge for a nation located in a region already marginalized on the global cultural scene is now to maintain or save what can be saved from a former regional dominance. The third decade of the 21st century confirms political, social and cultural disenchantment in the Arab world’s most populous country. But to study the ideological, religious, cultural and artistic discourses produced by Egypt is not to take an interest in a has-been whose regional influence, centrality and inescapability are memories of the past.
The Mother of the World remains one of the main places of production and consumption of post-modern and post-colonial Arab culture.
This line of research combines cultural and literary studies, sociolinguistics and musicology, and approaches Egypt through its rich discursive productions of all kinds. 

It is within this framework that CEDEJ’s music studies are pursued, with the Music & Sound Webinar and the Aswat concerts. 

Also linked to this research axis is CEDEJ’s participation in the SELICMA seminar on contemporary Arab literature.