Scholars overlooked the political racial content in Sanua’s plays

Evidence

Given the repeated, and now even stronger, references to race that Sanua’s characters make in both these plays, it is startling that so many analysts of these texts ignore the allusions completely. While I accept the thesis of Jacob Landau, who traced in Studies in Arab Theater and Cinema the tradition of caricaturing the accents of the Sudanese in Arabic, I notice that little if anything has been said about Sanua’s political uses of this tradition and the identification of racial or ethnic difference among his characters. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 1112

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: how a ‘minor’ dramatic tradition of accent caricature carried weighty political claims about Egyptian versus Sudanese identity that critics erased.