Egyptian nationalists fictionalized Sudanese slaves to process Victorian racial ideas.

Evidence

These women were vortexes for Victorian conceptions of race, colonialism, and the “family of man.” This is one of the important reasons why fictionalized Sudanese slaves appeared so often in the writings of nationalists in Egypt throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 109

Categorization

• XREF: Cross-domain parallel: the woman-as-nation-metaphor echoes material in Achebe and postcolonial fiction; also resonates with the reader’s interest in imperial rhetoric.