Traversing Language, the Author, and the Word in Amira Hanafi’s a Dictionary of the Revolution

Abstract

Amira Hanafi’s A Dictionary of the Revolution (2017) is a work of electronic literature that documents the ‘rapid amplification of public political speech following the uprising of 25 January 2011 in Egypt’ (Hanafi, 2016). Material for Hanafi’s electronic literary work was collected through an engagement with 200 individuals in Egypt from March to August 2014 across six governates of Egypt: Alexandria, Aswan, Cairo, Mansoura, Sinai, and Suez. Hanafi created a vocabulary box containing 160 colloquial Egyptian words that were frequently used in public political conversation from 2011 to 2013. These words were put into four categories: concepts, characters, objects, and places and events. This paper seeks to analyse the traversing of language, author, and word in Hanafi’s work, using Landow’s hypertext theory, Koenitz’s theories of interactive digital narrative, and Marino’s critical code studies. From this analysis, this paper seeks to develop a theory for analysing and reviewing digital narratives using their own form.