“Where is the cosmopolitan life we led?”: The Alexandria Quartet, Beer in the Snooker Club , and the contradictions of cosmopolitan nostalgia

This article argues that cosmopolitan nostalgia functions as a politically ambivalent mode of engaging Egypt’s colonial past. Focusing on Waguih Ghali’s Beer in the Snooker Club and Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet, it examines how contrasting portrayals of Egypt and their subsequent receptions illuminate the ongoing cultural work of nostalgic representation. While Ghali’s Beer offers a reflexive critique of nostalgic literary production and its entanglement with colonial and cosmopolitan legacies, Durrell’s Quartet has been alternately celebrated for its idealized vision of Alexandria and criticized for marginalizing its Arabic-speaking population. The article shows how these texts mediate between past and present in ways that shape contemporary understandings of Egypt’s cultural and political identity. In doing so, it demonstrates that cosmopolitan nostalgia is not merely retrospective, but an active literary strategy significant to postcolonial debates around memory, representation, and historical responsibility.