Reading al-Tali‘a, the leftist Egyptian political-literary journal (1965-1977), I am struck by, among other things, the advertising. Started under Nasser's period of rapprochement with the USSR, al-Tali‘a was a platform for communist intellectuals who had just suffered under Nasser's attack on the Egyptian Communist Party (1959-1964). It is unclear what function advertising was supposed to play given the history and ideological orientation of its editors, like Lutfy al-Khouly.

Scholars have explored the paradoxes of consumer culture—and advertising—in other socialist states. In particularly, I am thinking ofJonathan Zatlin's work on East Germany. But the topic of Arab socialist consumer culture calls out for similar attention. In a way, the road map for such study is already there in some of the cinema and literature of the period. Sonallah Ibrahim's novels, in particular, pay extraordinary attention to the details of consumer culture. In Dhat, most famously, Ibrahim documents the radical changes in Egyptian material life that took place during Sadat's infitah (Open Door Policy), which was nothing less than a top-down social revolution that sought to undo the state socialism of the Nasserist era. Sadat's counter-revolution largely succeeded—and gave birth the neoliberal consumer culture that thrives in the country today.

Below is an unthorough survey of advertising in the pages of al-Tali‘a. The images and slogans show the linkages between Egyptian nationalist strategies of import substitution and pan-African developmentalist appeal. As to be expected, advertisements featuring trade with the Soviet bloc stop suddenly in 1972. In the mid-1970s, these are replaced with public sector ads from Algeria and Iraq. Finally, just before al-Tali‘a was shut down in the wake of the 1977 Bread Uprising, we see a flurry of full-color ads for Western luxury products.