British anti-slavery scrutiny silenced Egyptian nationalist claims on reconquering Sudan

Evidence

This sense of invaded privacy put on the defensive those nationalists who called for the reconquest of the Sudan, because the British authorities in Egypt and participants in the antislavery movement in England heard with suspicion the nationalists’ rhetoric that linked the Sudan corporeally to Egypt and interpreted such calls as defenses of slavery.And the issue of slavery and its intrinsic connectedness to the Sudan raised difficult questions for the nationalists about their own society and their own sense of communal unity. The expression of the corporeal connection between Egypt and the Sudan also reflected then-current debates and anxieties about more intimate customs, like marriage, and social notions about gender and race. With so much of the political and physical geography in question, literary constructions of the Sudan were often all that kept intact politically minded Egyptians’ sense of the borders of their own land and culture. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 661

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the reader’s Egypt-vs-Sudan colonial comparison; ties to the corporeal/imagined geography scholarship on nationalism (Anderson-like readings).