Ferraris-Besso on Kamal (2024)

To many French dix-neuviémistes, the first images brought to mind by the phrase “department store” will undoubtedly come from Émile Zola’s 1883 Au Bonheur des Dames: Denise Baudu and her brothers admiring the devanture of the titular store in the opening sequence; vivid descriptions of the merchandise; or Octave Mouret, smitten with Denise and unable to see his commercial “empire.” But even though Au Bonheur des Dames is perhaps the best-known example of department store fiction, it is far from the only one. In Emporialism, Amr Kamal considers French and Egyptian texts to argue that together, the emporium—the department store as it emerged in the nineteenth century—and the modern empire shaped “new hierarchies of gender, races, classes, and objects” (2). Ultimately, “emporialism,” Kamal writes, is that meeting point of “the spaces and imaginaries of empires and emporia in the context of a modern Mediterranean divided among the British, French, and Ottoman Empires” (2). 

In his first chapter, “Emporialism in the Footsteps of Empire,” Kamal examines promotional materials from French department stores to demonstrate that they showed a world neatly divided along gender, race, and class lines, and with a clear demarcation between Orient and Occident. In doing so, such materials served to both reflect imperial ambitions and assuage “middle-class anxieties” (64) about the blurring of class barriers, in part by exerting strict control over the bodies of working-class women. In chapter two, “Emporialism at the Crossroads of Empires,” Kamal turns to Egyptian department stores that emerged amidst the “new imagined geography of the Suez Canal” (80), in a country situated on the African continent and at the junction of the Ottoman and British empires. This diversity of cultures was mirrored in advertising and in the stores themselves, where a variety of languages could be heard. Here, Kamal points to another difference between French (and other European) and Egyptian department stores: whereas the bourgeois woman was a central figure of emporialism, “the domesticator of the nation and the greater empire through consumption” in Europe, images of “middle-class women […] did not crystallize simultaneously” in Egypt (87). Those representational iterations, including that of “new women” at the intersection “between national and European cultures” in the 1920s, were reflective of social and political changes (91). 

In chapter three, “An Empire of Values: The Emporium in Zola’s Au Bonheur des dames,” the author turns to Zola’s novel, which, he astutely argues, draws from The Thousand and One Nights. Both texts center on a “tyrant king” and their narratives rely on the death of women: “Mouret’s commercial odyssey unfolds as a modern Orientalist tale of horror and conquest relying on the extermination and mutilation of women” (123-24). Denise, who starts working at the Bonheur during the Oriental sale, lives in the dormitory, or Mouret’s “harem,” where she is imprisoned like Scheherazade. However, Denise is also the only character who does not end up enthralled by the emporialism orchestrated by Mouret. According to Kamal, she is very much like “the image of the Saint-Simonian Orientalized ‘priestess’ or ‘mother’” (138). Initially unable to fit in, she slowly starts to master the codes of her new environment, “[undergoing] a sort of civilizing mission that seeks to shape her in the image of the bourgeoisie” (140). The white sale at the end of the novel contrasts with the colorful Oriental salon from the beginning and forebodes that the marriage of Octave and Denise will fulfill “the Saint-Simonian ideal” of “the victory of European reason over an irrational Orient” (142). 

In chapter four, “Modeling Empire: Emporialism and Transnational Feminism,” Kamal turns to the memoirs of Egyptian feminist Huda Shaarawi, who was involved in her country’s political life and fought against colonization by the British. He shows how Shaarawi’s experience of the emporium as a space of both oppression and emancipation led her to articulate a transnational and intersectional feminism “that exceeded the Egyptian and Muslim contexts” (185). Chapter five examines Jacob’s Ladder, a 1951 semi-autobiographical novel by Jacqueline Kahanoff, “the granddaughter of the founders of the Chemla department store in Egypt” (186). The novel “deconstructs the rhetoric of emporialism and its complex ethno-classist promise of social ascension” (232). Through the household /department store dichotomy, Jacob’s Ladder reveals how colonial culture is constructed and how minorities are relegated into certain social classes. Kamal contends that for Kahanoff, Levantinism separates “an Egyptian urban lifestyle from a strictly Eurocentric vision of cosmopolitanism” (233). Whereas Levantinism can be perceived as “a failure of the civilizing mission” (233), she sees it as a way to acknowledge and remain true to Eastern Mediterranean and Middle Eastern roots. 

Chapter six, “Neo-Emporialism and the Politics of Memory,” serves as conclusion to the book. In it, Kamal examines texts in which “emporia appear as a fleeting reference” (238) to highlight the role of emporial nostalgia. Reading the writings of historian Ilios Yannakakis alongside Au Bonheur des Dames, the author concludes that together, the texts “give insight into the cultural memory of the larger Mediterranean” (243). The stores they describe in Alexandria and Paris are associated with the opposite shore of the Mediterranean through an “exogenous French culture” and “an exotic Orient” (243), respectively. Such “allotopic Mediterranean geographies” (244) constitute heterotopias, which open new avenues for dealing with the past and memory. 

Some may regret that Kamal did not include much information about the origins of emporialism, or about some of the theories he deploys in the book, most notably Levantinism. Similarly, while the role of Saint-Simonianism in the Mediterranean context is evoked throughout the book, the connections between this philosophy and the texts or phenomena studied by Kamal are at times not fully fleshed out. Ultimately, what distinguishes Amr Kamal’s ambitious study is its reliance on what he deems multiplanar, multiscalar readings: he alternates between the microscopic and the macroscopic and draws from literature, memoirs, urban studies, and visual studies. In doing so, he succeeds in what he set out to do: to show the interconnectedness of the Mediterranean and to situate it as a crucial agent in shaping “global middle-class culture,” rather than an inferior counterpart to an idealized Europe (7).