Colonized captives used ventriloquism in memoirs to preserve their lost social rank

Evidence

In the act of writing about it, however, Fawzï Pasha responded ingeniously to this indignity. With his customary habit of ventriloquism, Fawzï affirmed his cultural identity with greater subtlety; his assertion of himself as an Egyptian of high rank comes from the mouths of the Sudanese. In Fawzï’s frame of reference, black skin is closely associated with slavery. By making the black Sudanese paint him as foreign, linked with the white Europeans, he preserved his natural rank as master, for him and his readers. His connection to empire and imperial representatives, was, like Slatin Pasha’s and Neufeld’s, also maintained. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 626

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘ventriloquism’ as the author uses it — routing one’s own self-assertions through the voices of native others.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does Fawzï’s racial frame — black skin equals slavery — reveal an Egyptian viewing Sudanese through an Ottoman-Egyptian colonial lens that pre-dates European abolitionism?