Sudanese slaves’ self-identification as Arab disrupted imperial courtroom categorization

Evidence

Here is another example of the inherent volatility of words connoting the Sudan and the Sudanese that Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia explains so well: “free-floating classificatory labels” to describe actual places and people took on entirely new significance within the environment of a colonial military courtroom. This conflict of meaning created an even larger silence during the trial when the slaves asserted that they were from biläd al-`arab (land of the Arabs; Islamic territory) and not biläd al-südän (land of the blacks). Until that assertion, they had been six tabula rasa: innocents from unknown Africa who could be adopted into the Egyptian family on many levels; orphans from Africa who could be saved by the British abolitionists and the imperial administrators who maintained the Slave Trade Bureau. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 107

Categorization

• XREF: The claim that colonial classification is disrupted by subjects’ self-identification parallels the sticky ethnic categories found in Thompson’s work on Algeria and elsewhere on colonial identity formation.