Egyptian theater used a sanitized Nubian character to reflect Egypt’s self-image, not Sudan’s.

Evidence

But the fact of an Egyptian acting out the words of a Nubian who was in turn imitating Egyptians and foreigners adds yet another level of self-conscious irony to this portrayal: the character of the Nubian becomes a mouthpiece through which a native son could reflect on his own country. Through this manipulated and sanitized figure of the Sudan, the closeness and unity of the Nile Valley could be left unchallenged while the attention of the audience was turned toward their own society, and themselves. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 934

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The layered irony — Egyptian actor imitating a Nubian imitating Egyptians — is a dense, subtle observation about how a subaltern figure gets instrumentalized to consolidate the dominant group’s self-understanding rather than represent the subaltern.
• XREF: Contrasts usefully with how the reader’s adjacent sources treat African coloniality: here cultural representation substitutes for recognizing Sudan as its own national project, a parallel worth tracking to Farah Nuruddin’s Maps on identity construction.