Fixed colonial stereotypes functioned as defenses against feared change in Sudan

Evidence

But such fixed images do not disguise the important changes in the relationship between Egypt and the Sudan after World War I; in fact, the images defended against the feared impact of change. This picture, for example, appeared less than a year after the imprisonment of Alï abd al-Latïf and the assassination of Sir Lee Stack.Although from Cairo or Alexandria they may have been difficult to hear, the voices of more and more Sudanese entered the debate over the political shape of the Nile Valley. The persistent rendering of the Sudan as this type of feminized figure shows that it was “a privileged site for a larger ideological project.” — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 1059

Categorization

• XREF: The insight that stable stereotypes intensify precisely as the reality they misrepresent changes connects to the reader’s work on moral panics over immodest dress and to theories of stereotype rigidity under threat.