Decolonizing Emotions: Egyptian Anticolonial Protests and the Battle for the Suez Canal

Following World War II and the 1951 British evacuation of the Abadan oil refinery in Iran, Egyptian anti-colonial activists rallied together to demand British evacuation from the Suez Canal Zone. Celebrating their movement as the “1951 Revolution,” a diverse array of Egyptian students from clubs like the Muslim Brotherhood, Daughters of the Nile, and the Worker’s Vanguard took to the streets of Cairo to protest. This paper explores the emotional politics of this decolonizing moment, along with British attempts to shape the decolonization process and retain control of the Suez Canal. British officials first dismissed protesters as “over-emotional students” and pressured the Egyptian government to pursue a policy of emotional containment—but as students formed liberation battalions and traveled to Suez to fight, British containment efforts expanded to direct military force. What can scholars learn from the Egyptian experience? Sara Ahmed has explored emotional geographies, and how protests of racial or political “others” are often dismissed in foreign policy as zones of emotional radicalism. Similarly, Neetu Khanna notes that emotions were an integral part of decolonization “precisely because empire [had] already monopolized them.” Building on these conversations, this paper debates the framework of “decolonizing emotions,” recovering surprising internal Egyptian debates about “emotional liberation.” Comparing evidence from British and American diplomatic records with Egyptian communist and Islamist club newsletters and tracts, the paper shows how Egyptian anti-colonial activists battled the British on the emotional front, working to undercut British charges of fanaticism and tailoring emotional appeals to local and international audiences.