ruminations on the art of domestic glass display: the...

Ruminations on the Art of Domestic Glass Display: The Commodity Capture of Two Grandmothers

by Karem Said

The domestic glass and mirror display case or vitrine – a furniture item that can be traced to the

early 20th century – brought a commercial element of display, sale and purchase to the domestic

environment. I came to wonder about this furniture item in gazing into those cases that exist in both

my Egyptian and American grandmothers’ homes. In this paper, I attempt to explain the emergence

of the domestic glass display case not in terms of a rupture of domestic privacy and inviolability, but

as a set of practices constructed by women who filled and arranged these cases according to

different aesthetically-mediated choices, necessarily premised upon a fetishization of commodities. I

will consider the relationship between consumption and the fetishization of material objects and

wartime experiences of objects and materiality – specifically the interwar period during which new

forms of sale and purchase emerged. To contextualize processes of fetishization, I will draw upon

insights from works by Timothy Mitchell, Walter Benjamin and Arjun Appadurai on materiality, its

circulation, history and reception.

This paper is written in a speculative mode as it attempts to explore polyvalence at the

intersections of gender, consumption, property, and fetishization, as invoked by the domestic glass

display case. By fetishization, I refer to the complex process in which commodities are granted use-

value by various actors in ways that are often commonly recognized, and that facilitate and are

facilitated by circulation. Marx writes of the mystification involved in this process, whereby the

“perceived action of objects” (1978[1867], 323) obscures the labor-value inherent in any commodity.

Objects may appear to act independently of actors, to demand admiration in and of themselves,

enabling their own circulation. The apparent autonomy of objects granted by fetishization obscures

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not only labor power but also the role of human actors in designating the use-value that both

completes the commodity and calls it forth into existence. I elaborate upon processes of

fetishization that surround glass display cases left by my two grandmothers – material artifacts that

perplex the (extra)geographical division between East and West. One case is located in Cairo, Egypt,

in the apartment I currently live in, and the other two are in Montgomery, Texas, a small lake town

about an hour north of Houston, where my parents currently live. I consider the incorporation of

the glass display case as a technology of commerce within the domestic environment. Allowing that

wartime crisis and periods of dearth inform a desire to capture the commodity, I suggest that the

fetishization processes surrounding the glass cases are mediated by three fields of influence: the

historically contingent proliferation of glass and reflection in display; diversionary

decontextualization of objects within display; and the power of the aesthetic subject to illuminate the

secret life of objects via gaze and misuse.

Photographs of glass display cases can only heighten the valorization of the objects therein.

The flash catches, reflects and ricochets off the facets of glass objects, the glass shelving and the

mirrored walls of the case. Ordinary objects, once placed in a glass display case, are instantly

transformed for the viewer. They settle into their place within a constellation of objects that

communicate to the viewer against each other. The objects are replicated in the mirrors, creating a

feeling of boundlessness and expanse that promotes imagistic multiplicity. The play of light upon the

objects lends them an aura of exclusivity: they become hallowed things. In fact, the insinuated

coherence and interconnection of the objects – intensified by their reflected reproductions and in

spite of their concrete physicality – overwhelms and denies the casual glance. One can only really see

the objects by concentrating on them individually, visually isolating and dividing them from the

larger constellation. It is an exercise in assimilation, to consider the objects individually and then in

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their various relationships to each other – the possible themes and patterns that lie in texture,

material, form and function.

I have taken pictures of the case here in Cairo, which is much older than those in

Montgomery. My Egyptian grandfather asked his carpenter to build it for Nani1 as a wedding

present more than 70 years ago, along with an entire set of dining room furniture. They brought this

Art Deco-styled set with them when they moved to the upscale neighborhood of Zamalek from

Shoubra 50 years ago. Although I’ve spent time gazing into and at Nani’s case, photographs of its

contents offer further dimensions of visuality and prompt the poetics complicit with gaze. My

parents have provided me with digital photos of the cases in Montgomery, which I have used to

trigger memories of the many times I peered past the glass cabinet doors to consider the objects

within. These mirrored cases were built into the walls of my grandparents’ retirement home, on

either side of a fireplace in a somewhat formal family room.

Furniture and display

When considered as a circulating form, a piece of furniture that manages to bridge what

appears as a temporal and geographic disjuncture, the glass display case can be understood as both

buttress and suture to larger historical narratives and “public-making” (Gaonkar and Povinelli 2003,

385) entities such as The Market. What interests me is less a social history of how and when the

glass display case circulated around the globe but more the practices and meanings that surround

new ways of organizing domestic space. It is a concern for what occurred when a particular method

for displaying commercial goods entered the domestic domain in apparently disparate places.

Timothy Mitchell (1988) has written about commercial glass display in European department stores,

which emerged in the second half of the 19th Century (Russell 2004, 50): 1 Nani is what I called my Egyptian grandmother, Akram El-Nabarawi. Honey is the name I gave my American grandmother, Bonnie Grace Stanley.

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Non-European visitors would remark especially on the panes of glass, inside the stores and along the gas-lit arcades, which separated the observer from the goods on display. ‘The merchandise is all arranged behind sheets of clear glass, in the most remarkable order… Its dazzling appearance draws thousands of onlookers.’ The glass panes inserted themselves between the visitors and the goods on display, making the former into mere onlookers and endowing the goods with the distance that is the source of their objectness. Just as exhibitions were becoming more commercialized, the machinery of commerce was becoming a means of creating an effect of reality, indistinguishable from that of the exhibition. (Mitchell 1988,11)

Egyptians came into contact with large department stores in Europe as early as 1882. A story printed

in Arabic that year features two Egyptian characters in a French store arranged as a labyrinth of

mirrored corridors. The manager of the store must rescue the Egyptians, who get lost running into

their own reflections (Mitchell 1988, 11). By the time of Khedive Ismail’s reign (1863-1879), Cairo’s

Azbakiyya neighborhood boasted several European-style stores (Russell 2004, 55) that likely made

use of glass display.2

The domestication of commercialized cases, once part of a “machinery of commerce,”

should be understood in relation to the effects of industrialism and other forces upon the home.

That being said, the household display of commodities long precedes 19th century industrialism. The

display of objects in the domestic environment can be traced along at least one trajectory to the

libraries of medieval European monasteries, where specialized furniture such as lecterns and

cupboards were developed for the storage and display of books (Lucie-Smith1979, 51). While display

was important in the medieval European home, emphasis was placed on tapestries, since rooms at

this time were usually multi-purpose and furniture was not specialized or fixed (Lucie-Smith 1979,

49). The medieval English display dresser would exhibit plates, silver cups and tankards.3 “Objects

of virtú would later be displayed in 16th and 17th century Flemish cabinets; curios, trinkets and

dishware would also be displayed in Italian Renaissance cabinets, 17th century Dutch cabinets,

2 Omar Effendi, which has become the largest department store in Egypt, was established in 1859, according to Business Today Egypt magazine (Hassan 2008, 40). 3 After tying ancient Greek examples to those of medieval Europe, Louise Ade Boger’s book Furniture Styles focuses on European developments in furniture design, including American manifestations, offering a thorough analysis of furniture types covering the period before the 19th century. She gives only cursory attention to furniture from the 19th century to the present due to an apparent explosion of complex furniture forms during the 19th century (Boger 1959, 399).


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Elizabethan cupboards and on 18th century English display shelves (Boger 1959, 17, 69, 36, 77, 207-

208, 250, 261). These furniture items, especially in their display of objects other than chinaware or

the books found in libraries or masculine workrooms, represent a step towards the modern glass

display case. Yet, none of the examples of furniture above makes use of glass and/or mirrors. Wall

mirrors were first introduced to the home during the Italian Renaissance (Boger 1959, 40) and

became more common during the 17th century when they were placed over matching side tables,

magnifying the amount of light in a room and reflecting furniture in a way that increased a sense of

continuity in furniture design and placement (Lucie-Smith 1979, 80). It wasn’t until the 19th century

that mirrors were regularly incorporated into furniture design. Boger writes that several 18th century

furniture types, such as the armoire, glazed china cabinets and bibliothèques, were in 19th century

France “frequently designed with mirror panels, a practice which is never considered to be in good

taste” (1959, 180).4 The only pictured example of mirrored backing in Boger’s book is a French

desserte, a tiered shelving unit used in the dining room as a buffet and for the display of vases and

other objects, dating between 1830 and 1848 (Boger 1959, 157-158, 175). The guide American

Furniture pictures shelving units with mirrors, called étagère, designed for the display of objects

(Comstock 1962, 294-295). This furniture item was previously built in 1810 without the mirror

panels and termed a “whatnot” (Comstock 1962, 283)5, probably in reference to the assortment of

objects that could acceptably be displayed on its shelves. A mid-nineteenth century development, the

étagère “marks the final evolution of the whatnot from an incidental accessory to a major form”

(Comstock 1962, 294). Yet, the objects d’arts of the desserte and étagère did not sit encased in glass or

on glass shelving, as found in the later form of those glass and mirror display cases that most clearly

mimic the commercial display found in department stores and other shops. These furniture guides

4 It’s unclear if this is Boger’s opinion or one prevalent in 19th century Europe. 5 Boger writes that “what-nots… were indispensable” to the Victorian home along with an “infinite variety of knick-knacks” (1959, 399), which suggests a growing interest in the accumulation-for-display of sentimental or lower-cost items.

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never mention domestic glass and mirror display cases, suggesting that the furniture item was more

of a 20th century phenomenon.

Over the course of the 19th century, the Egyptian upper-class household undertook major

transformation, moving from a Mamluk style where spaces could be used for different activities by

moving pillows and furniture, to a European style wherein rooms were designated a certain function

(Russell 2004, 36-37). This shift can be understood as a disciplining of domestic space that reflects

those spatial disciplinary techniques of prisons, factories, hospitals and schools that emerged in 18th

century Europe and America (Foucault 1995[1977], 141-9, 211). 19th century industrialism is

commonly described as having separated work from home, and by the turn of the century, the

Egyptian home was demoted from its function as a central site of power and was reconceptualized

as a kind of seedbed from which women were charged with competently raising the youth that

would rise to form a new nation (Russell 2004, 80-87). Nationalist calls to educate the woman-cum-

mother went beyond highly detailed treatises on how she should raise her children (El-Shakry 1998)

and included textbooks specifying commercial products that would allow the mother to create a

hygienic and healthy environment in the home. Women were expected to be arbiters of household

management and budgeting of anything from grocery items and clothing to furniture and decor

(Russell 2004, 144, 84-86). By the 1920s, home economic textbooks instructed Egyptian women in

home decorating techniques, and detailed desirable furniture items such as “Louis XIV-style

furniture, Western-style lighting fixtures, English tea services, statuettes, and even a bearskin rug”

(Russell 2004, 148).

Reading about the nationalist prognostications issued to Egyptian women in the early 20th

century, especially those regarding hygiene and the cleanliness of the home environment, helps

explain the systematic manner in which Nani approached not only the cleaning of her home but also


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her various daily routines within the apartment. The upheaval of repositioned couches, chairs in

The top two of three shelves in Nani’s glass display case in Cairo.

precise rows, rolled up rugs, lamps and television on the floor, framed pictures facedown: what

some might qualify as a seasonal or even yearly spring-cleaning was for her a weekly, compulsory

ritual. While the dust of the khamiseen’s springtime dust storms may have howled down the streets

below, the apartment remained defiantly tranquil and immaculate. Nani’s vitrine surely bore a place

in her systematic cleaning schedule, although I don’t know exactly how often she slid the glass walls

apart to wipe away the dust that inevitably collected on the objects and their glass shelving.

Interestingly, the spatial discipline she imposed upon her case is noticeably more regimented than in

Honey’s, which is far more haphazard in the grouping and interspersing of objects as well as the

breadth of their variety. It is difficult to separate the heightened discipline in Nani’s case from the

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Egyptian nationalist focus on the education of women for a more modern, i.e. scientific way of

managing the home, raising children and living life – one coupled with an anxiety of failing to meet

European colonial standards. Aside from social and historical forces, the more personal

circumstances of their lives also serve to distinguish the cases and the objects therein.

Objects d’arts and the architects of display

Who did my grandmothers imagine would appreciate their artful arrangements? Who would

engage in the complex exercise of gazing – a kind of visual grazing – and who would discern the

choices these women had made? My grandmothers hardly spoke to each other and led markedly

different lives. My Egyptian grandmother, Nani, was born into an affluent Cairene family and lived

her entire life in the city, eventually traveling to the United States several times to visit her son – my

father and our family. My American grandmother, Honey, was born into a farming family in Eastern

Texas. Her marriage to my grandfather, who was hired by Exxon, led to extensive traveling across

the United States and the world. They lived in Australia for several years and then spent close to 15

years in Egypt, where my grandfather worked as the general manager of Esso. In the mid-1980s,

they built their dream home in Montgomery, Texas, designing two glass display cases, with mirrors

and backlighting, as insets on both sides of their fireplace.

Honey was a highly meticulous woman with an eye for poor stitching, stained fabric, and

loose ends – that is, as much for imperfection as perfection. A combination of various aesthetic

styles reflected her lifetime trajectory from a childhood in rural Eastern Texas, to various places in

the United States, Australia and Egypt. Her home contained paintings of countryside windmills and

embroidered bible verses as well as portraits of Bedouin women and the geometric cascades of

Egyptian mother-of-pearl inlay. She adored pastels: especially shades of rose, and decorated her


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salon with salmon-colored upholstery and a centerpiece of large, assorted seashells. Honey’s glass

Two of three shelves in the glass display to the left of the fireplace, in Conroe, Texas.

display cases were not placed in the salon, however. Situated on either side of the fireplace, the cases

were built into the wall of the adjacent family room, literally reflecting family objects back to the

family as we would gather in this space to visit, play games or sit around her Christmas tree. Nani’s

case, likewise, is not located in the salon but in her dining room – a space almost exclusively

reserved for family. In the final years of her life, Nani, in order to minimize the amount of cleaning

she had to do, tended to eat her meals at a small table outside of the kitchen. When family came to

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visit, she generally fed them in the living room or at this table, and it was only when my father

visited from the United States that she would open the dining room for breakfasts and lunches.

While the room was characterized by some degree of ceremony and special use, it was resolutely a

family room, and hence, the Egyptian glass display case also reflected family objects back toward the

family.

Nani’s glass display case actually carried more gifts overall than objects she had selected

herself for encasement. Much of the crystal, the various teacups and the silver tea set were wedding

presents from family members. On the left-hand side, on the middle shelf, she had arranged several

of those ceramic boxes, usually filled with candied almonds and chocolates, which are offered in

celebration of births amongst family and friends. Another gift has a miniature ceramic plate propped

up behind a miniature teacup and teapot, arranged in descending order. There is no Arabic in this

case; the plate and teapot read, in English, “I Love You Grandmother,” framed by blue birds and

blue roses. On the middle shelf, a small, ceramic bell with a heart-shaped handle reads, in cursive

font, “I Love Mother,” above a loose pile of roses. Near the teapot sits another gift, from my uncle,

the pilot: Elfin salt- and pepper-shakers in a copper-colored metal. A thin post rises up from their

infantile casing and bears the head of an eagle, the Egypt Air motto. The shakers work to inscribe

my uncle’s position as a pilot within the larger story of the case, which includes objects

memorializing marriage, birth and the thoughtfulness of children and grandchildren. Thus, Nani’s

glass display case in particular also memorializes the family as a sphere of exchange, albeit a

somewhat terminal exchange, depending on the life of the display case and its architect(s).

In his essay “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process,” Igor

Kopytoff describes singularization as a process by which commodities are in essence de-

commodified by various practices, including the demarcation of a limited sphere of exchange, such

as the family. He writes “commodities are singularized by being pulled out of their usual commodity


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sphere” (1986, 74). I would take issue with the idea that commodities can be de-commodified as well

as the notion of a “usual commodity sphere.” First, it is not the event of exchange that grants an

object the status of commodity, but its productive emergence as an object of capital, axiomatically

endowed with use-value and exchange-value, within our current mode of production. To display an

object in a glass case is to fetishize the object in a way that valorizes it; far from negating the use-

value of the object, the valorization of commodities by display multiplies its use-value in the eyes of

anyone who might stop to take note of it. Second, what is a “usual commodity sphere”? Where

would we find these usual spheres? In department stores, before the items have finally been

separated from their mass-produced clones? As this paper hopefully shows, privileging the point of

production or distribution over realms of consumption severely limits any attempt to understand the

power of the commodity in various social configurations. Are the objects of Nani’s glass display case

not, in a sense, just as primed for display as for any other purpose? Even the salt-and-pepper shakers

had been crafted for admiration beyond the realm of food and dining. Yet, the desire to singularize

objects, or to highlight their singularity, is certainly present in the construction of the domestic glass

display case and should be considered in relation to desires for authenticity.

In Nani’s display case, a few objects – the silver teapot set and glass teacups in the Easter

colors of pink, baby blue and pale yellow – directly reference a British aesthetic circulated within the

province of colonialism. Nani’s display case captures these items within a photogenic prism,

imprisoning them while also granting them authenticity. This process of capturing commodities in a

glass display case – somehow informed by metaphors of hunted game or scientism’s specimens –

reflects in part a desire to distance possessions and property from a mass market aesthetic. Elizabeth

Outka writes in her article “Crossing the Great Divides: Selfridges, Modernity and the Commodified

Authentic” that the British department store Selfridges irreparably altered the strategy of British

marketing. Opening in 1909, Selfridges ushered in a new trend of uncluttered displays that

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spotlighted objects – objects that were seemingly priceless in that price tags were intentionally left

off displayed items. Outka writes that such displays offered the illusion of a “non-commercial

purity” that promised an escape from homogenous mass consumption (2005, 312). Goods at

Selfridges were thus rendered “authentic” by way of display that promised purity and hid from view

their mass-production. Outka provides a historical example of how class-based claims for distinction

may alter the very structure of commercial exchange and realms of visibility. The desire to

authenticate and to make singular an object overlap, yet the former desire is premised on satisfying

the requisites of some other, perhaps earlier form or setting – one that approves or disapproves.

This authenticating form or setting helps to set the standards for what is correct and incorrect

accumulation and display. With Nani’s glass display case, the authenticating forms lie partially in a

European design formation with British and French aesthetics (tea sets, ceramic plates and crystal),

granted a point of entry into the Egyptian home by way of European colonialism. Nani’s glass

display case, originally built in the1930s in Egypt, assimilates the class status of her family with

further claims to European authenticity and colonial power by way of aesthetic manipulation.

Authenticity is granted not only by the objects themselves or by the selection of the objects by the

actor, but also by the artful placement of the objects within the case. Thus, it is the display case in

sum that is scrutinized for authenticity: the total combination of singularized objects and their

interrelationship within the arranged space.

Although Nani’s case enjoys the allure of authenticity, the singularization of certain items

valued by Selfridges customers – cottage industry products and hand crafted goods made by

peasants, mythologized by the department store (Outka 2005, 317) – would actually devalorize

Nani’s case within the Egyptian context. Almost all the items in her case are made of ceramic,

glass/crystal or metal. The handmade object cannot be found here, as it can in Honey’s cases. In


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fact, a kind of substitution of materials is evident in two small “baskets” made of colorful ceramics

that suggest a woven property. The elision of actual basket weavings, clays or carved woods may be

Detail of Nani’s glass display case in Cairo.

seen as a significant difference between the cases of the two women. Walter Benjamin has argued

that the artful use of iron for decorative purposes, as opposed to its structural purpose, represents a

desire to “return” to a future that references a distant past (Brown 1999, 6). In contrast, the

symbolic substitution of basket weavings with ceramic material, or the more important elision of

handmade goods, reveals a desire simply to abscond from the past and the villager’s present. This

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present continues to haunt the Egyptian post-colonial subject; the rural element constitutes a fact to

be diminished if not denied. Thus, while 18th century romps are nostalgically figured on miniature

boxes in Nani’s case, nostalgia for an Egyptian past prior to the French invasion in 1798 is absent.

Upper-class Egyptians are, in a sense, burdened by a past ubiquitously invoked by the village

migrant, if only fleetingly by the attire of the galabiyya in the streets of Cairo, that must actively be

denied in the present. It is not that 18th century romps play no part in Egyptian history or that they

do not belong to Egyptians, because a colonial legacy has assured that they do, but that the

handmade object is necessarily incompatible with Egyptian bourgeois display. Within the confines of

contemporary habits and modes of accumulation, upper-class living denies material evidence of

peasant life; objects and habits of such life are axiomatically interpolated as artifacts that may bear

witness against the bourgeois, urban family.

A denial of handmade objects in Egyptian bourgeois display reveals how postcoloniality may

structure the accumulation of symbolic capital and help mediate class divisions; postcoloniality

thereby incites and delimits everyday practices. Viewing the construction of the vitrine through this

postcolonial lens acknowledges the bourgeois Egyptian woman’s uni-directional line of sight, so that

the mistake of citing peasant materiality is mere subtext to a concern for constructing the display

case in accordance with colonial norms.

Yet, to view the practice of building and filling glass display cases as simply a way of

complying with convention or obeying the dictums of home economics textbooks would offer a

very narrow reading. For both of my grandmothers, these glass cases are also filled with gifts from

children and grandchildren; these mementos hold their own amidst glass, mirrors and crystal, so that

the cases both celebrate and pay tribute to the roles these women played in our families. The

construction of these cases has to be read as a creative act, although not necessarily as an

individualistic one.


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Furthermore, while the compulsion to display objects in a case of glass and mirrors

structures authentic space in one’s home, this practice also goes beyond issues of authenticity. In

domesticating the presentation style of large department stores and foreign shops, two compulsions

are revealed: one is a desire to appropriate the techniques and therefore selling power of, not a

single, personable merchant, but the anonymous, spatial domain of a large store. The cases carry an

element of exclusivity that extrapolates that selling power to the realm of the home. One can look,

but not touch; in domestic display cases, objects are not even for sale, and possession is thus denied.

Secondly, if the careful placement of objects (so that they never touch) could be said to represent

“order” as modernity’s disciplining force and expression, a woman’s arrangement of mementos in

domestic glass display cases can be viewed as an appropriation of male modernist techniques applied

in the built environment.6

Nani placed glass objects (two lanterns, two crystal vases and rows of crystal wine glasses) in

the corners of all three shelves, against the mirrors, as if to capitalize on their reflective properties.

Symmetry is reproduced on each level so that taller objects occupy the middle of the shelves, flanked

by much shorter objects on either side. The artful arrangement thus betrays a knowledge of how to

discipline space within the specific and commodified terms of a glass display case. A woman’s

organization of objects in a glass case hence demonstrates an awareness of the techniques used to

beguile her in the marketplace and used to morph the built environment without her input, as well

as her ability to apply those techniques towards her own ends. She demonstrates her own potential

to structure production, creating a zone of commercial exclusivity within the domestic sphere that at

least symbolically retrieves what she loses as a consumer.

6 Timothy Mitchell has written about the disciplining aspects of widened roads and equidistant buildings during the mid-19th century, when the ‘disorder’ of Cairo suddenly became apparent and the need for organization became “a political matter” (Mitchell 1988, 68).

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That which motivates these artful arrangements also extends and resonates beyond the self,

implicating larger socialities. Honey’s cases likewise feature 18th century figures, such as a painted

plate of a man in tights politely kissing a woman’s hand. This image is reproduced on the back of

several miniature chairs and a matching table. Although Honey’s ancestors were British, the painting

is French Rococo in design. In any case, the gentility of the images bears no clear continuum with

Honey’s southern, rural upbringing. For both grandmothers, the images represent a desire for

bourgeois sentimentality rather than an actual nostalgia or a tribute to familial lineage, whereby

sentimentality reestablishes the rooted position of the family home by selectively referencing only

those homes in the urban/suburban environment that utilize similar decor and household habits.

The effect is to more firmly entrench the household and the actual family into schemes of bourgeois

establishment without engaging the larger urban fabric or polity. Certain household objects or

furniture items, such as the bed, allow for a greater sense of rootedness or establishment in a given

place.7 The bed is a place to return to night after night and quickly becomes foundational to any

spatial sense of routine or household ritual. The display case, in contrast, hardly constitutes an

implement of basic necessity. Yet, the display of objects symbolizes the ability to accumulate capital

and references larger networks of circulation. By signaling correct accumulation – a style approved of

within both local and global commodity collection – the objects in the glass display cases

paradoxically suggest other places and times while forging a stronger embeddedness within local

schemes of bourgeois terrain.8

7 I owe this thought to Valentina Napolitano Quayson who has mentioned the bed as a possession that works to “embed memory and ties to places and human relations” (2005, 346) in an article on homelessness and changing masculinity amongst Latino migrants in San Francisco. 8 I’m thinking here of the potential for commodities to help generate those aborescent metaphors and assumptions about the fixity of people to land and space, as highlighted by Liisa Malkki (1992) and Arjun Appadurai (1988). Yet, the spatial register in this context is mediated by class and its exclusionary space-selective networks within the greater landscape.


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Both grandmothers displayed items from elsewhere. As mentioned earlier, one of Nani’s

sons, my uncle, was a pilot for Egypt Air, and he most likely brought her the two ceramic boxes that

feature Japanese paintings. The case also bears a couple of glass items from the United States.

Although these are the only ostensibly “foreign” objects in the case, most of the objects extend from

a foreign lineage. Likewise, Honey’s cases are dominated by mementos from her time spent abroad,

most of them from Egypt. These include Pharaonic-style teacups; miniature, brass replicas of fool

and tamaya carts; wooden, comically painted and shaped Egyptian figures; a ukulele; a doll from

Holland; and WWII bullets.

The objects mentioned above become valorized not only via the medium of display or

spheres of exchange, but by virtue of the contexts the objects came from. According to Arjun

Appadurai’s discussion on “diversion” in The Social Life of Things, removing items from systems of

exchange constitutes a diversion from their social routes that is typically afforded by the politically

and economically powerful. Appadurai contextualizes this statement within a broader framework of

“tourist art” and the “aesthetics of decontextualization”:

Of course, the best examples of the diversion of commodities from their original nexus is to be found in the domain of fashion, domestic display, and collecting in the modern West. In the high-tech look… the functionality of factories, warehouses, and workplaces is diverted to household aesthetics. The uniforms of various occupations are turned into the vocabulary of costume. In the logic of found art, the everyday commodity is framed and aestheticized. These are all examples of what we might call commoditization by diversion, where value… is enhanced by placing objects and things in unlikely contexts. It is the aesthetics of decontextualization (itself driven by the quest for novelty) that is at the heart of the display, in highbrow Western homes, of the tools and artifacts of the “other”: the Turkmen saddlebag, Masai spear, Dinka basket. In these objects, we see not only the equation of the authentic with the exotic everyday object, but also the aesthetics of diversion. (Appadurai 1986, 28)

Appadurai argues here that everyday objects that are entirely ordinary within, for example, the

context of the Masai, become extraordinary in a collector’s home. It is by plucking the unusual from

their “specified paths” that we are able to grant additional value to objects. However, this concept of

diversion does not adequately explain objects created exclusively for the tourist. With the exception

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of actual vendors, Egyptians do not make use of miniature fool and tamaya carts in their daily lives.

Such an object is only decontextualized in terms of place – not in terms of function. Furthermore,

the foreign items in Nani’s case upset Appadurai’s easy conclusions about collectors being

“Western.” Appadurai’s general point is salient for understanding the processes surrounding the

more mundane items in all three glass display cases. Teacups turned upside down, plates propped up

for view, a silver spoon sheathed in plastic, a mirror turned backwards to exhibit it’s decorative

backing, empty boxes, and unused tea sets: all of these represent mundane objects deprived of their

function and decontextualized in a manner that disturbs their objectification in everyday life.

Appadurai argues that diversion is “always a sign of creativity or crises,” the latter being

commonly realized in warfare (Appadurai 1986, 26). Although both of my grandmothers exercised

creativity in the assemblage of their glass display cases, it must also be considered that both were old

enough to remember the effects of World War II on their families and larger communities. Nani

additionally experienced Egyptian wars in 1956, 1967 and 1973. Honey had childhood memories

from the American Great Depression and both women lived through periods of rationing and

general lack. Such periods may be said to have encouraged fetishization of objects, since times of

dearth resist processes of objectification that render objects part of a normalized schema.

Furthermore, both were children of the 1920s, a period between two World Wars and “the decade

when ‘things’ emerge as the object of profound theoretical engagement in the work of Georg

Lukacs, Heidegger and Walter Benjamin…” (Brown 1999, 2). Such theoretical concern can be

attributed to economic shifts that privileged commodity consumption over production along with

advanced levels of both production and consumption across the globe. By the time my

grandmothers were born, the interruption of consumption patterns by recession or warfare would

have been keenly felt. Thus, a dialogic interrelation between crises and historically specific forms of

fetishization is literally crystallized in my grandmothers’ cases. We must also consider ramped up


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American production during World War II and, more generally, the wartime government-sponsored

directives to buy national products as a patriotic duty toward the economy. This historical nexus of

war-time production, consumerism and a consequent burgeoning of commercial modes of living

surely permeated and even administrated the lives of these two women, producing visible effects and

material artifacts, partly evidenced in the domestic realm by glass and mirror display. Nani’s case

more definitively reflects this nexus, as it was built in the 1930s in an Art Deco style that emerged

toward the end of World War I (Lucie-Smith 1979, 170) and became an established trend during the

1930s (Lucie-Smith 1979, 172).

In his essay, “The Secret Life of Things (Virginia Woolf and the Matter of Modernism),” Bill

Brown recognizes the impact of World War I on Virginia Woolf’s treatment of objects in a short

story called “Solid Objects,” published in 1920. The main character becomes obsessed with

collecting found pieces of china, glass and other solid detritus until he eventually gives up his career

as a rising politician. Brown writes that the `man is enraptured by the secret lives of objects, which

render them as things that slide between the poles of subjectivity and objectivity (Brown 1999:2). He

writes that it is the “misuse value” – produced when, for example, one uses a knife as a screwdriver

– that brings the knife’s thing-ness to our attention. To use Appadurai’s term, the knife is

decontextualized by improper or alternative use; thus, it is not only in display that we are able to

deobjectify objects but in action as well.

The object may in fact beg for diversion in times of crises – not only because of a dearth of

objects or possessions but because its solidity may both distract one from hardship and signal

stability and thus security. Yet, even outside of display cases, objects must await their

(de)objectification by an actor. Brown implies that what is hidden in an object is more than its labor

value; what is hidden is a secret life only granted to the object by the aesthetic subject. In this case,

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the aesthetic subject grows out of moments of crises into periods of symbolic accumulation and

display.

There is much less crystal in Honey’s cases than in Nani’s. In looking at just one shelf, the

center shelf in the left hand case, one finds instead an assortment of figurines, most of them

Egyptians in galabiyyas, crafted from wood or plaster. The lives granted these anthropomorphic

objects need not be coaxed forth as they would with saucers and little boxes. The features on their

painted and carved faces are in several cases expressionless, one with wide, luminous eyes, another

with slanted, black dashes. Quaint shapes and colors ensure that the aspects of such working class

men that foreigners might find threatening are rendered diminutive and therefore manageable. Aside

from one wooden figure, the only woman on this shelf is a larger doll in a back corner, swathed in

translucent, black cloth, covering her face and hair. During her years in Egypt, Honey was close

friends with at least one Egyptian couple, and they certainly looked and dressed nothing like these

figurines. Nor did she spend much time on the streets of downtown, amidst tameya carts and juice

stands. Yet, these caricatured objects became one way to remember the country and her time there.

Whereas Nani’s case is primarily filled with gifts, Honey approached her case as a way to represent

the far-flung trajectories of her life experience, often choosing objects created to commoditize the

experience of a visitor or tourist. Although she did visit many countries as a tourist, she lived in

Egypt for more than a decade. In her glass cases, camels of various sizes and materials crowd the

same shelf, yet I’m sure Honey saw camels only when taking visitors to see the pyramids. She and

my grandfather lived in a spacious villa in Maadi – an upscale neighborhood filled with Americans

and other foreigners – where one would be more likely to see a poodle than a camel. The selection

of these objects may figure as exotification, but not with a pernicious intent to limit the possibilities

for the representation of Egypt to an Orientalist mode so much as to manifest the extravagance of


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her own life experience – to substantiate that experience so that by looking into her case, she could

look back at her life as one well lived.

Conclusion

The fetishization involved in the transnational display of objects within domestic glass

display cases is too differently accomplished and motivated by their architects to suggest a singular

practice or approach. The action (and potential for action) of the aforementioned objects would

have been differently perceived by my two grandmothers and subsequent visitors to the display

cases.

In Nani’s case, the objects were more likely to hold promises of authenticity and admittance

to the realm of modernity, somehow satisfying national duty while evincing the domestic merits of a

brighter national future. The action of these objects would have been perceived as designating a kind

of universal standard.

The objects in Honey’s case, when placed within the larger contexts of Montgomery, Texas

and the United States, could only communicate the specificity of Honey’s experience, which we, as

her family, somehow understood as our experience too. Far from deceptively universal standards,

her memorabilia suggested only very specific routes and modes of circulation, narrowed even further

by the particular combination of styles that comprised her taste.

Despite these differences, the fetishization processes found in my grandmothers’ display

cases are generated by three common fields of influence: the historically contingent medium of glass

display; the decontextualization and disjunctive recontextualization of objects; and finally the life-

granting perception of the aesthetic subject who acts upon the objects via placement, misuse and

gaze.

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In closing, I would like to tease out the secret life of one particular object in Nani’s glass

display case in order to suggest directions for understanding other effects of fetishization and the

attribution of use-value to commodities. On the bottom shelf, in the very center, sits a frosted glass,

circular box, crowned by a brass woman wearing only a scant stretch of cloth, her hands clasped

above her head. My grandfather gave this to Nani two years before they were married in 1938. This

is probably the oldest item in the case and can be said to represent a kind of beginning, for the case

and for their marriage. If subject and object are interdependent, meaning that objects never

completely control the subject or relinquish control, the two may also accelerate/accumulate in

tandem during different life phases such as marriage and career. The frosted glass box, and the glass

display case that followed two years later, thus signify passage into adulthood. Yet, at the same time,

these items allowed for Nani’s adulthood and maturity within agreed upon customs in Egypt at the

time. In a sense, commonplace fetishization of objects redefined what it meant to progress through

life as a human being, asking us to reconsider notions of poverty. Daniel Miller very importantly

counters the notion that only middle-class or wealthy consumers care about symbolic consumption:

“It was those living in the worst slums of England that kept the best room of the house as a

‘parlour’ reserved almost exclusively for show. Peasant villagers in India often get into debt not for

basic land rights but by funding wedding feasts” (2001:230). In another example, a low-income

Egyptian family may begin purchasing items for a daughter’s future wedding trousseau years in

advance of an actual engagement. A “typical” trousseau might include several sets of glasses, plates,

trays, cookware, clothes, cutlery, incidentals and linen (Singerman 1995, 114-116) – far more objects

than are required by the bare necessities of life. Poverty cannot be understood as merely a lack of

food and clean water but also as a lack of possessions and access to modes of display. Further

research might explore just how central objects and their fetishization are to notions of maturity,


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human value, personal growth and societal advancement. We should also ask the attendant question

of how such object and display-centered poverty may in fact be a gendered experience.

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References

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Quayson, Valentina Napolitano. “Suffering and Embodied States of Male Transnational Migrancy in San Francisco, California.” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 12: 335-362. (2005) Russell, Mona L. Creating the New Egyptian Woman: Consumerism, Education and National Identity 1863-1922. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. (2003) Singerman, Diane. Avenues of Participation: Family, Politics, and Networks in Urban Quarters of Cairo. Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press. (1995)

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