Egyptian nationalism deployed caricatures of Sudanese people to forge class unity against the British

Evidence

My final chapter looks at the era of the 1919 revolution in Egypt, when demonstrations against the British grew widespread enough to win Egyptians a nominally independent parliament. It also analyzes the thinking of Huda Sharawï—the first Egyptian feminist, founder of the Egyptian Feminist Union, and a significant leader of the 1919 revolution—and how she treated the subject of the Sudan and the Sudanese, a subject she took seriously to heart. The chapter also examines how proponents of popular culture, such as the popular songwriter Sayyid Darwïsh and the vaudevillian star Alï al-Kassär, used the question of the Sudan and the Sudanese to direct Egyptians of different classes to the cause of Egyptian unity against the British. Looking at Darwïsh’s songs, which were intended to be sung in a variation of Sudanese Arabic dialect, and at Alï al-Kassär’s portrayal, in blackface, of the half-Nubian, half-Sudanese ne’er-do-well Osman abd al- Basit, this chapter considers the ways in which caricatures of the Sudanese became central to Egyptian articulations of national identity. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 120

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities and to postcolonial analyses of how internal colonial others are used to consolidate national identity; also resonates with the reader’s broader African-coloniality project.