In about half an hour, I’ll be going to hear a long-time Egyptian feminist, activist, sociologist, medical doctor, Nawal El-Saadawi, speak at the Graduate Center. She was present at the recent uprising in Tahrir Square and will share her reflections on women, Egypt and the revolution.

I wanted to make available the readings that were distributed to prepare for her talk today which can be found HERE on the website of the Center for Place, Culture and Politics (CPCP) at the Grad Center. I’d especially like to flag the piece by Omnia El Shakry, “Egypt’s Three Revolutions” in light of the refreshingly awake conversation we had at the Labor, Crisis, Protest seminar today about the relationships between the inspiring and sometimes surprising eruptions of mass protest from the Gaza Flotilla to the French General Strike to the Tahrir Square and now Wisconsin and Milwaukee.

We talked a bit about how we, really, are in a moment were there are these eruptions of mass resistance. And trying to understand how, why and under what conditions they are happening is sort of crucial, both politically and intellectually. Do the changing sets of relations in these revolutionary instances have anything to do with one another? Is asking the question about how they might hold something in common, irrelevant? Should we see each protest as their own, particular, discontinuous phenomena?

El Shakry argues that instead of viewing the 2011 revolution in Egypt as “new” and “spontaneous,” we should see it as a continuation of the revolutions in Egyptian history and the intensification of political contradictions and complex economic conditions.

In the seminar earlier (we had just finished listening to Paul Mason and reading his book), some of the fellows were remarking about how many of revolutions that had erupted in their lifetimes (1968, in particular) really galvanized masses of people from around the world, because it made claims to a universal humanity. People were fighting for humanity, dignity and respect. And they were all coincidentally doing it at the same time. Or were they? Is it about humanity or is it about what El Shakry is talking about, a movement-induced, crisis-embedded eruption? Or are those two sides, really on one coin?