Egyptian nationalists put words in Sudanese mouths to argue for Egyptian sovereignty

Evidence

When addressing the issue of the Sudan, nationalist writers often created characters who spoke with a certain kind of Sudanese voice or accent and who discussed important themes of the time, like companionate marriage or slavery or the unity of the Nile Valley.This type of heteroglossia, according to Bakhtin, “is another’s speech in another’s language, serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted way.” Bakhtin calls this “doublevoiced discourse,” in which the intentions of the character are expressed at the same time as the “refracted intention of the author.” These two voices, although written by one, seem to “actually hold a conversation with each other.” But this conversation occurs within a specific historical context of struggle: “it deals with discourse that is still warm from that struggle and hostility, as yet unresolved and still fraught with hostile intentions and accents.” For Egyptian nationalists, the argument with the British remained heated in such dialogues, as did the effort to convince the Sudanese of Egyptian rights to sovereignty over them. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 105

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to theories of colonial representation and subaltern speech (Said, Spivak on who speaks for the colonized), and to the reader’s comparative Egypt-Sudan coloniality project. Bakhtin’s heteroglossia framework also surfaces one of few theoretical tools for reading colonial ventriloquism.