An early 1909 magic-show film linked Egyptian imagery with Blackness and monstrous metamorphosis

Evidence

The setting is an interior, with a pedestal, cupboard doors, and a painted backcloth decorated with a mummy case, statues, canopic jars, plinths, busts, and figurines—a veritable Victorian fantasy of the Egyptian burial chamber. An old curio dealer, leafing through his catalog, is startled by the sudden appearance of a disembodied hand with a wand (or a sword), and then of a skull wearing an Egyptian headdress. Cupboard doors fly open, and the skull flies off the table and leftward to a shelf, where it turns into a woman’s upper body and head. While the shopkeeper closes the cupboard, the woman’s lower body enters from the left and attaches itself to her waiting upper half. The woman dances, and as she turns she turns she becomes a black woman—or rather; a white woman in blackface—with black gloves. Horrified, the dealer shuts her in the cupboard, but as she closes it she turns white again, and then she appears as a ghost outside the cupboard. He opens the cupboard again to discover a mummy, which changes into a man in ancient Egyptian tunic and headdress. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 708

Categorization

• FICTION: The blackface metamorphosis in this magic trick is a vivid image of race itself as unstable costume — usable as a metaphor in writing about manufactured racial/monstrous identities.