Visualising Achievements

This chapter examines how the rhetoric of achievement books is crafted through images and numbers as well as words. I argue that these media have two purposes. On one hand, they act as symbolic fragments of the nation, constituted by a recognisable Nasser-era iconography. Peasants and workers, students and soldiers, factories and machines, land and buildings – all these elements are marshalled to depict a cohesive national mosaic. On the other hand, each photograph and statistic acts as an index of the state’s achievements; the picture and the number become, on their own, an inarguable demonstration of the state’s ability to achieve. After describing the typical content of Nasserist iconography, the chapter moves to analyse it in relation to the master narratives of industrial modernisation and revolutionary responsibility. The chapter concludes with an analysis of what images exclude, what lies beyond their frame, and how these exclusions are telling about what constitutes ‘the state’ under Nasser. Governmental images and numbers are not a peripheral epiphenomenon to Nasser-era politics, but they are symbolically and indexically central to the state’s construction.